Secrets of revenue-generating CIOs

Facing disruption on several fronts, companies are under pressure to build new digital products and services that generate top-line growth. Who better to build these capabilities than CIOs, who have an array of emerging technologies at their disposal? Welcome to the age of the revenue-generating CIO. According to IDG’s 2019 State of the CIO survey,…

7 keys to an effective IT automation strategy

When CIO Jason James decided to automate his company’s software deployment process, he tasked his DevOps team with learning everything it could about the process itself. He says he wanted his DevOps engineers to act like anthropologists, watching how the developers deployed software to the company’s clients, how they scheduled and loaded software updates, and…

Analytics gives HCSC the pulse of provider care

Evaluating the cost efficiency and quality of care is a running challenge for health insurance companies — a challenge that is exacerbated by the myriad physicians, specialists, hospitals, and other providers a patient might visit regarding an issue. Health Care Service Corp. (HCSC), a not-for-profit health insurance company that serves nearly 15 million members in…

6 hot IT leadership trends — and 6 going cold

IT leadership is changing nearly as rapidly as technology itself. Successful tech executives are shifting toward initiating strategic change rather than acting as trusted operators, as the CIO role sees greater emphasis on leadership skills related to digital transformation over keeping the lights on. While the spectrum for IT leadership success remains wide, the rules…

BoSox digital strategy covers all the bases

The Boston Red Sox have been among Major League Baseball’s most winning teams in recent years. The same couldn’t be said for the franchise’s technology systems when CIO Brian Shield joined the organization in 2013. Leaning on a new digital strategy that emphasizes improved operations and fan experiences, Shield has since overhauled everything from the…

IDG Contributor Network: Introducing the “lazy economy” business model and implications for CIOs

We’ve all heard of the sharing economy and the gig economy, but a new business model is quietly introducing itself across many consumer-facing industries. It’s an extreme form of the convenience economy that I like to term the “lazy economy.” The term is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but there’s some real implications in these nascent business models…

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on the rebellion against complexity

As enterprises transition from on-premises IT, Oracle is positioning itself as the premier, one-stop-shop provider for cloud computing. You may think this is a stretch, considering that, for example, Oracle has been lumped in with “Others” in Gartner’s ranking of top public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, far below leaders like Amazon, Microsoft and…

Jackson Health System taps data flows to improve care

In healthcare IT, data integration is often considered a back-end IT function, but the enterprise application integration team at Jackson Health System (JHS), one of the largest public health systems in the country, has turned data-as-a-service into a strategic differentiator that has improved patient care and saved millions of dollars in subsidy costs. JHS is…