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Patrick Gray: How CIOs Can Supercharge Organizational Growth
This is from the May 8th update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Patrick Gray
Author and president
Prevoyance Group
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Today's CIOs come from many disciplines outside of IT, but they all face a similar challenge -- how to take their IT organization from being a cost-centric services provider to being perceived as a valuable business partner. That's the question Patrick Gray answers in his new book, Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. His book provides a necessary roadmap for shifting IT from an operational entity that simply manages technology, to a powerhouse that combines strategy and technology to deliver measurable business results and long-term value.
As principal and president of the Prevoyance Group, a strategic IT consulting firm, Gray has worked on this issue with clients ranging from OfficeMax to SAP. Prevoyance Group's strategic IT consulting combines applied strategy and process improvement to ensure large IT organizations measurable monetary returns.
In this podcast, Patrick Gray talks about why CIOs don't belong to the business strategy circle, how the CIO role has to change to accommodate breakthrough IT, and what CIOs should do to accelerate that change.
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Tony Velleca: The Best Practices for Making Good on a Customer-centric Engagement Model
This is from the May 2nd update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Tony Velleca
CIO of UST Global
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To provide end-to-end IT services and business processing outsourcing solutions for Global 2000 companies, UST Global uses a customer-centric global engagement model that combines local and off-sites resources with the cost, scale, and quality advantages of off-shore operations. This customer-centric model forms the core of the company's values of how it operates and how it serves customers.
Tony Velleca, UST Global's CIO says that the company strives to build a long-lasting strategic relationship with each customer. "We empower our employees to provide value beyond what's outlined in a customer contract."
A project portfolio management system provides the technology underpinning for the customer engagement model. Velleca says, "We can have as many as 660 projects going at the same time." The system Velleca deployed enables UST Global's personnel to prioritize company projects, and to improve the performance of those projects while reducing their costs.
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Future Thinking in Social Media Strategies
Let's start simple.When I'm working with a client, one of the key questions I ask is Where do you want to be 12 months from now?
It's a critical question to consider before embarking on all the effort and money that will be set in play. Remember, in a social media/marketing strategy you're not just paying Google for click-through ads each month. You're directly involving yourself, your time and your money by building an ongoing relationship with your web traffic.
For a very small business, it's usually more than enough to say we'll start blogging consistently, build an audience and focus on all the tasks necessary to build a workflow of content and enroll others in the company to help. The goal being to build traffic and learn the ropes of blogging and engaging in conversation with other bloggers and your audience. I've seen this process work so well that many smaller businesses, typically in the services area, no longer need to worry every month about expensive SEO efforts. Blogging done right (content, connections and conversation) brings about a change in the way you interact with your customers versus buying advertisement to throw at them, hoping something will stick.
Of course, this is a simple strategy for smaller businesses that everyone seems to be climbing on board with these days - as well they should, in my opinion. People expect more than 'billboard'-looking websites that haven't been updated in months (or years, in some cases).
But what about a larger business, especially in the enterprise class? How do you develop social media/marketing strategies that leverage your efforts into business growth and keep you ahead of the competition?
Or, what if you have an idea for a start-up business that is social media/community-related? How would you go about doing that in a way that is not simply 'yet another social network' site?
How do you keep your social media effort alive and encourage those you bring along to stay with your business?
We'll talk about these ideas in the next article. Stay tuned ...
Tom
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Dr. Robert Miles: A Successful Business Transformation Initiative Requires aSolid Framework
This is from the April 25th update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Dr. Robert Miles
Author and president of Corporate Transformation Resources
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To overcome stagnant revenues, Symantec embarked on a corporate transformation integrating disconnected business subsidiaries into one cohesive business, focused on customer needs. Symantec couldn't have done this initiative without the help of Dr. Robert H. Miles, who developed the accelerate corporate transformation, or ACT, framework to enable change. He has written many books on the subject and heads up a corporate transformation consulting practice and serves as chairman of two other consulting firms that use his ACT framework.
Dr. Miles developed the ACT framework for business transformation while he was carrying out executive leadership programs for CEOs at Harvard Business School. The first version of ACT emphasized focus and execution. After spending time in Silicon Valley, Dr. Miles expanded the ACT framework to include speed and engagement. He says, "These four competencies become the bedrock of an organization's management process."
In this podcast, Dr. Miles talks about how the ACT framework can help C-level executives to plan, to launch, and to refocus corporate transformation efforts, how companies have benefited from this framework, and why speed, not necessarily agility, is the new management discipline.
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Jim Buckmaster: The Lure of Craigslist -- Open Source Technology, a Simple Business Model, and Lots of Customer Feedback
This is from the April 22nd update at Enterprise Leadership.
Jim Buckmaster
CEO of Craigslist
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When it comes to looking for a job, an apartment, or even a good garage sale, more than 26 million unique visitors each month turn to a Craigslist.com site in one of 450 cities in 50 countries. No one can dispute the cult-like reputation that Craigslist, founded by Craig Newmark, has earned. As a company, Craigslist runs frugal with 25 employees working out of an old Victorian building in San Francisco. However, Craigslist has proven that even a well-meaning, grassroots bunch of nerds can put a big dent in the advertising profits earmarked for thousands of newspapers. Let's not forget how Craigslist, which is 25-percent owned by eBay, has changed the way many of us live and work.
So how did Craigslist, which started as Newmark's idea for a San Francisco events list 12 years, come this far? Why would a company that could be making hundreds of millions of dollars each year continue to offer a primarily free service? What drives Craigslist's quirky form of innovation and culture? These are some of the things enterpriseleadership.org asked Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO. Since 2000, Buckmaster has led Craigslist to be the most-used classifieds in any medium, and one of the world's most popular Web sites.
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Jim Swartz: Greening the Enterprise Keeps Unnecessary IT Costs from Sprouting at Sybase
This is the April 4th update from EnterpriseLeadership.
Jim Swartz
CIO and vice president of Sybase
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Like many large companies, Sybase, with $1 billion in revenues, has eliminated millions of dollars of unnecessary IT costs in the past few years. This data company has gone from 30 global centers down to three consolidated data centers. Jim Swartz, Sybase's CIO and vice president, says, "Our mantra is to simplify, to standardize, and to consolidate." The primary data center now resides at the corporate headquarters.
However, Sybase has an aggressive plan to keep IT costs down by going green. In fact, Jim Swartz, CIO of Sybase, says that initiatives, such as server virtualization, service-oriented architecture, retiring and redeploying servers, temporary storage of the OS, and improved cooling could postpone the building of a new data center until 2017. Swartz says, "About a year ago, we realized that we were going to run out of power and cooling in the near future unless we did something. We looked for clever ways to solve the problem rather than to spend upwards of $10 million to retrofit or to build a brand new data center."
In this podcast, Jim Swartz, CIO and vice president of Sybase, describes his company's green program for the entire enterprise.
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Nicholas (Nick) Horney: In Search of IT Agility
This is the March 30th update from EnterpriseLeadership.
Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Horney
Founder and principal of Agility Consulting and Training
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Terrorist threats. Shareholder expectations. Shaky economy. Organizations have to be ready to move fast if they expect to survive disruptions such as these. In other words, they need to maintain agility throughout the organization.
No one knows more about strategic and organizational agility than Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Horney. Since 2001, his company, Agility Consulting and Training, has been helping organizations build the capability to create and execute adaptable strategies that respond to a continuously turbulent business environment.
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Mark Dixon: Perfecting Instant Office Space for Virtual Workers
This is from the March 19th update on EnterpriseLeadership.
Mark Dixon
Founder and CEO, The Regus Group
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Airport terminal. High-rise office building. Hotel room. As more and more mobile devices enable people to work efficiently wherever they are, companies of all sizes have started to rethink their need for pricey office space, or even if they need office space at all. However, many companies do need to maintain some sort of a physical office for customer visits or to attract venture capital. Employees, such as auditors working out of state, might need fully equipped, temporary office space for several weeks.
Enter instant office space brought to you by Mark Dixon, one of Europe's best-known innovative entrepreneurs. He has a knack for combining technology, people, and physical office space to give customers flexible options for working in the virtual world.
In this podcast, Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of The Regus Group, talks about how he drives leadership and innovation at Regus, what technology his instant office space offers customers, and what lessons he learned after spending time with Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric.
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Bernard (Bud) Mathaisel: Achievo's Outsourcing Model Offers the Best of Emerging Technology from China
This is from the March 12th update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Bernard (Bud) Mathaisel
CIO and Sr. Vice President
Achievo
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Bangalore, India has become the heart of IT outsourcing in Asia, especially for large ERP systems based on SAP and Oracle. China, however, has rapidly become the place to go for outsourcing requirements based on emerging technologies, such as Web services, service-oriented architecture, and business intelligence. In this podcast, Bud Mathaisel, chief information officer of Achievo, talks about the business model his IT services company has developed with a backend tie to China. He also provides an overview of the growth of IT outsourcing in China.
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SXSW: Meebo Users Plot Revolt during "Dull" Panels
Take a look at this blog article from Wired. It's all about a rather fascinating event that occured while I was moderating my SXSW panel on Saturday. All in all the panel went well. We had a huge room with roughly 400 people (my estimate). Afterwards we had a small crowd surround the panelists and ask tons of questions.I want to write more about this (including the Meebo/Twitter back channel going on during the panel), but for now I'm just going to post the picture and the blog article in Wired. Two more days to go at SXSW, and it's proving to be yet another eventful conference, for sure.
Tom
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Tim Sanders: The State of WiMAX as of Late 2007
This is from the March 6 update at ITConversations.
Tim Sanders
WiMAX Evangelist and Podcaster
Tim Sanders, who heads up the consulting group The Final Mile, has been an active participant in the development of wireless broadband technology since its early days. In this interview with Tom Parish, Sanders gives us a comprehensive overview of what WiMAX is and where it is going. from both an industry and a consumer point of view.
Beginning with a summary of the evolution of WiMAX, short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, Sanders describes how indoor WiFi technology was adapted for outdoor use to the point that operators saw the need for interoperability standards. He also explains how the WiMAX standard is now developing into two branches, one for fixed wireless and one for mobile wireless use.
How WiMAX is likely to be adopted depends on the level of existing hardwire infrastructure, and Sanders explains the implications of this for more mature markets like North America and western Europe as well as for developing markets. He discusses the economic drivers for WiMAX and the extent to which WiMAX and existing 3G technology will be both complementary and competitive.
Finally, Sanders discusses the next steps in WiMAX development and how big industry players like Sprint and AT&T are using WiMAX, and he describes the opportunities for further WiMAX development in newly opening spectrum ranges.
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Conversation with Ynema Mangum on Social Media Metrics
Ynema Mangum of TalkBMC is excutive producer of this social media site with 26 bloggers and a weekly podcast show where she is the host. Ynema is part of our panel for SXSW: Social Marketing Strategies - Metrics: Where Are They? It's at 5pm on Saturday.
Hope to see you there.
Tom
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Conversation with Dave Evans on Social Media Metrics - Video Podcast
As I prepare for my panel at SXSW 2008, I decided to do some short video interviews with other professionals in Austin who are involved with social marketing strategies.
Dave Evans from www.Digital-VooDoo.com makes some excellent points about how you can use what you know from traditional marketing metrics as a starting point for capturing and understanding metrics related to your social media efforts.
It’s all about the conversation, and that’s a great place to start.
Tom
P.S. The SXSW Panel I’m moderating is Saturday at 5pm.
So here’s Dave …
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Vaughan Merlyn: Building the Next-Generation Enterprise
This is from the Feb. 28 update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Vaughan Merlyn
Executive Vice President, BSG Concours
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Some CIOs complain that business executives don't understand the value IT can bring to an organization. To overcome this conversation gap, CIOs need to first understand where they rank on the Business IT Maturity model, and how they can create a construct to describe the next-generation enterprise. It's one with an appetite for innovation and growth, and a desire to help the entire organization become more agile and collaborative.
In this podcast, Vaughan Merlyn, executive vice president of BSG Concours, provides a colorful explanation of this model.
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Tom Trainer: How to Weather an IT Transformation
This is from the Feb. 21 update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Tom Trainer
Executive Chairman, BTM Global 2000
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During his 40-year career in information technology, Tom Trainer, the former corporate CIO of PepsiCo, has seen IT evolve from the back-office shop to the critical cornerstone of most organizations, regardless of their size. At PepsiCo, he was responsible for all technology decisions and IT operations. His well-honed leadership skills enabled him to work in close collaboration with the company's division leaders to leverage IT as a driver of business growth and competitive advantage. Transforming IT organizations in Fortune 1000 companies has played a major role in shaping Trainer's career as a corporate CIO.
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Simon Crosby: How to Get Server Virtualization Right the First Time
This is from the Feb. 14th update on Enterprise Leadership.
Simon Crosby
CTO at Citrix XenSource
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The power of an X86 server with four array cores has increased dramatically, according to Moore's Law. At the same time, enterprises, through the success of scale-out, now realize that they have more physical servers than they can deal with. This situation has resulted from the IT scalability best practice of installing a single instance of an application per OS on a single scale. Many organizations now find themselves with 1,000 of servers, with increasingly high energy bills, and with no data center space to house these devices.
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Dr. Ellen Kitzis: Becoming the New CIO Leader
This is from the Feb. 5 update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Dr. Ellen Kitzis
Group Vice President, Gartner, Inc.
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These are the best of times and the worst of times for CIOs. On the one hand, the CIO role has gone from keeping the lights on and the data flowing, to aligning IT with their company's business strategy. For all those CIOs who aren't "born leaders," Dr. Ellen Kitzis, a group vice president for Gartner's CIO Executive Programs, has done extensive research about how the role of CIO is changing and how the CIO should perform in their organization.
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Social Marketing Strategies: Metrics, Where Are They ?
By now you probably have heard that I'm going to moderate a panel at SXSW 2008 on the topic of social marketing strategies and the related controversal topic of metrics.
The title for the Session is Social Marketing Strategies: Metrics, Where Are They?
I have the following talented and experienced people on the panel:
Brian Magierski - Chief Development Officer, BSG Alliance Corporation
Michael Smith - Executive Director, E-Business at USAA
Ynema Mangum - Executive Producer and Host for BMC Software's TalkBMC Community
Rohit Bhargava - Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing Olgivy Public Relations
Why are CMOs so scared of social media and social networking? Let's look at the success of vendors and businesses who have employed these new systems to explore their lessons learned and discover how to leverage social media maketing strategies that will increase business growth for small-, medium- and enterprise-scale businesses.
Attendees will learn ...
- What social media marketing strategies are working
- How to define metrics for social media marketing strategies and talk with your CMO
- Why you should be thinking about social media and social networking-based marketing strategies for business growth
Some Questions we are reviewing - What are yours ?
From Tom Parish
- What is social marketing and how is it different from traditional marketing?
- What defines success in social marketing?
- Why is management so leary of incorporating social marketing strategies and how can that be changed?
From Ynema Mangum
Where does social media fit within your organizational structure?
- What is some of the best advice you can give to a manager with no social media experience?
- What is the impact of the introduction of social media on office politics?
From Rohit Bhargava
- Is it better to grow a social media effort from within or hire a "ringer" to be part of the team?
- How do you deal with the essential truth that in social media sometimes everyone won't love you and say positive stuff about you?
- What is the best metric to focus on to gauge success of a social media effort? (and broad answers like "engagement" don't count - get specific!)
From Michael Smith
- Does social media contribute to lead generation and revenue contribution directly or indirectly? If so, how do you measure it?
- What specific metrics tools are available to quantify the impact of social media as part of an enterprises marketing & communications plans? How much should an enterprise invest in social media and metrics as a percent of the total marketing investment?
- CMO’s are continually pressured today to define the “economic value contribution” of the marketing organization. Other then brand impacts what tangible economic business value can social media bring to the table?
From Brian Magierski
1. What is the primary value driver behind social media marketing? (i.e. is SMM best suited to drive leads, commerce/transactions, customer innovation, other). Is there more than one?
2. What media are channels for social media marketing? Social Networks, blogs, microblogs, others? What are the benefits / drawbacks of each?
3. For the primary driver or drivers identified in #1 above, what are the metrics which would measure success and potentially ROI for each? Be specific.
Bonus1: Is social media marketing better suited for certain industries and not others? If so, which ones are best suited for SMM?
Bonus2: What edge am I getting on my competitors by starting with SMM now rather than waiting?
Tom Parish
Host: www.EnterpriseLeadership.org
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Hugh Forrest: SXSW Past, Present and Future
This is from the most recent ITConversations.Hugh Forrest
Director of Events, SXSW Interactive
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The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Hugh Forrest, Director of Events for the festival, joins Tom to discuss the event.
Forrest talks about the history of the festival and reviews the problems involved in programming the event, as well as how the process has evolved over the years. He also discusses the importance of the community to the success of the event.
Hugh Forrest has served as the Event Director for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival since 1995. Under his guidance, SXSW Interactive has emerged as a mecca, attracting many of the industry's most creative thinkers to discuss cutting-edge developments in new media and digital convergence. Forrest was a 1984 graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio, where he received a BA in English.
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