Inside USPTO's IT overhaul

Several years ago, a database corruption issue at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) brought parts of the agency’s electronic filing system down for days. The IT platform it depended on was nearly two decades old, which spurred the agency to bring in a new CIO with a mandate to overhaul its IT systems…

Predictive analytics: 4 success stories

For years, companies have been striving to develop analytics capabilities, not just to understand past performance, but to anticipate trends and future events to improve agility. Increasingly, companies are deploying predictive analytics to make their services more efficient, develop products, find potential threats, optimize maintenance, and even save lives. Predictive analytics apply techniques such as…

Discover transforms data pipeline for AI success

If there’s one key component for AI success, it’s data. But even organizations steeped in data and well-versed in the use of analytics can struggle to establish reliable, automated data pipelines to fuel machine learning strategies. Discover Financial Services found itself at this crossroads in 2019, when its developers and data engineers were coping with…

IBM returnship helps restart IT careers

Anju Nair had taken 15 years off from her career in tech as an IT consultant. After working in India, Europe, and the US for over seven years, she found it difficult to strike a healthy work-life balance. And after having trouble conceiving, she decided to step back from her career and take time to…

Leading a hybrid IT workforce: 10 steps to ease the transition

It’s a mistake for IT leaders to believe that managing a hybrid team is like managing the full work-from-home teams of 2020 or the on-shore/offshore teams of the previous decades. Today’s emerging hybrid environment is different, more complex, and fraught with organizational risk. IT’s traditional organizational structure, culture, and processes for managing virtual resources around…

Podcast: CIO Leadership Live with Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP, Chief Technology & Operations Officer, Travelers

Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP and Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Travelers, joins Maryfran Johnson for this CIO Leadership Live interview, which is jointly produced by CIO.com and the CIO Executive Council. They will discuss AI in customer engagement, data culture, agile work, and more. This episode is sponsored by Cisco. Discover more at newsroom.cisco.com. To…

Changing the equation on LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion

Max Masure endures being called the wrong name, however unwillingly, because certain companies’ technologies don’t offer an option for customers to share anything other than their legal names. As an ethical UX researcher and a transgender nonbinary queer person, Masure (they/them) considers it an unacceptable practice that harms individuals, counters inclusion, and ultimately hurts business.…

4 tactics for getting SIs to bid on your project

Many companies are restarting their transformation projects as they transition from protecting their survivability in a volatile market, to actively accelerating their digital transformations to stay competitive in a digital-first world.  This has increased the demand for system integrators (SIs) who will be presented with many opportunities to have record-breaking quarters this year. SIs clearly…

L’Oréal supercharges ecommerce with digital tech

L’Oréal weathered the COVID-19 pandemic well in 2020, boasting a 62% lift in ecommerce revenue year-over-year as people purchased more cosmetics and beauty products online amid retail store closings. There is plenty of credit to pass around, but major credit goes to cloud software along with augmented reality (AR) and live-streaming technologies to better promote…