Want to decrease IT costs without increasing technical debt? Enterprise architecture is a good place to start. Want to improve business/IT integration? Enterprise architecture promises to be the tool of choice. How about establishing a more streamlined and effective business? One guess as to where you should look first. And therein lies a paradox: Improving…
If a significant customer relationship management (CRM) system project is on your agenda, here are checklist items that you need to look out for in vendor proposals. 10 things a CRM proposal should include 1. A project plan focused on user adoption. As I’ve written before, a CRM system without active users and a rich set of…
Companies are facing a digital imperative to revamp business operations to better serve customers. To accommodate these shifts, CIOs are making sweeping organizational changes, adding key roles, reskilling employees, setting up innovation labs and experimenting with emerging technologies to meet strategic mandates issued by their CEOs and boards. Social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) forms the…
When engineer Shannon Lubetich left Snap last fall, she didn’t go quietly. According to a recently released memo, Lubetich took aim at Snap’s culture and hinted that the company mirrors many others in Silicon Valley: sexist, racist, hetero- and cis-normative with halfhearted attempts to improve diversity and inclusion. Here’s her email, as published by Cheddar.…
Fewer technologies are hotter than artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and several enterprises are harnessing the technology, which mimics the behavior of the human mind, to woo customers and bolster business operations. And the trend will only gain more traction in the years ahead, as AI and ML will be a top five investment…
The days of workplaces located in a single office are done. Today’s workforce is distributed — across multiple small offices, embracing work-at-home-employees, and spread across continents — and IT has always been at the forefront of that change, eagerly embracing new communications technologies that make it possible. But we’re only a few years into this…
Milind Wagle, CIO, Equinix, has his own “customer-churn predictor.” It tells him why accounts are turning over and whether they are likely to do so in the future. That information gives the data center services provider a chance to improve its bookings accuracy by improving service and planning for likely occupancy rates to come. “We…
Last year, Aon Inpoint reported about 80 percent of buyers of stand-alone cyber premiums were medium-sized to large companies. However, smaller firms are increasingly assessing their cyber exposure risk as concerns about the potential impact of a cyber incident continue to rise. “The majority of breaches worldwide occur at companies with 1,000 employees or less…
When Mike Zahigian became CIO of Amgen in 2017, he realized that technologists at the $22 billion biotechnology company sat in a number of different organizations, not only in IT. Even though these people did not report into his own organization, Zahigian was concerned about their career path and what kind of development plan was…
IT managers are often responsible not just for overseeing the IT infrastructure in an organization but overseeing IT teams as well. To succeed as an IT manager, you will need to understand the fundamentals of security, data storage, hardware, software, networking and IT management frameworks — and how they all work within the business. Plus,…