The commodity days of the cloud are over. It’s time to get strategic. That’s the message of today’s leading cloud strategies, as forward-thinking CIOs are no longer turning to the public cloud to cut costs. Instead, the public cloud is viewed as an opportunity to get out of the business of managing data centers and…
DetailsIn an age where most companies have a social media presence on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram, it’s somewhat surprising that many still haven’t figured out how to turn the data gathered from company-owned properties and broader social media listening tools into automated and actionable intelligence. “Social intelligence is just making…
DetailsCustomer relationship management is the lifeblood of many businesses. But not every company has the in-house expertise necessary to configure and maintain a complex Salesforce implementation. Here’s where a Salesforce consultant comes in. Steeped with experience and know-how, a Salesforce consultant can pay significant dividends — assuming you choose the right one in the first…
DetailsThe more things stay the same, the more they change. That’s not exactly how the saying goes, but it is the phrase that should be engraved over every door leading to IT. It’s certainly better than “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Not a lot has changed since our early days, when IT was…
DetailsIn 2015, Mary Cecola, CIO of Antares Capital, was faced with a dilemma. At the time, the middle-market private equity firm was a unit of GE Capital. Then GE decided to sell Antares to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in a deal valued at about $12 billion. “There were some unique challenges with…
DetailsAs digital transformation threatens to alter everything we thought we knew about business, the C-suite is suddenly crowded with geeks, and companies scrambling to disrupt themselves or die trying are looking to technology for answers, but not necessarily to the office of the CIO. The need to spin customer data into gold has led to…
DetailsIn 2007, Michael Spears became CIO of the National Council on Compensation Insurance. It wasn’t the usual promotion. Spears had spent two years as the NCCI’s chief data officer, and he kept that role when be became CIO. In his dual capacity, he oversees both the IT department and the data resources division, though they…
DetailsAs IT organizations become more strategic, so too do their partnerships with IT outsourcing providers. Digital transformation, automation, and the data revolution are not just shaking up how IT operates, they are greatly impacting the kind — and quality — of services under contract with IT outsourcing firms. Here is a look at the technologies,…
DetailsWe rarely get advance notice that a disaster is ready to strike. Even with some lead time, though, multiple things can go wrong; every incident is unique and unfolds in unexpected ways. This is where a business continuity plan comes into play. To give your organization the best shot at success during a disaster, you…
DetailsA big part of the CIO role today entails hashing out a cloud computing strategy. Deciding whether to build a private cloud or to offload some workloads to a public cloud system while keeping others on-premises is just a start. Then there is the often painful haggling over service-level agreements (SLAs), those crucial contracts regarding…
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