Enterprise Leadership
Mar 10 2010
Despite the downturn in the economic, this is a great time to be a CIO or CTO. That’s the conclusion from C.K, Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy. He also wrote best-selling management books such as The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit. In this podcast, Prahalad talks about how CIOs can use innovative technology to reshape their company’s business model, as well as drive new opportunities for poverty-stricken areas. (He calls the latter the bottom of the pyramid.) 
Mar 5 2010
In this podcast, Hank Leingang, the former global CIO for the Bechtel Group and the former CIO for Viacom, talks about the leadership qualities global CIOs need in order to be effective across the enterprise.
Within the last five years, the qualities needed by global CIOs of Fortune 2500 companies have changed radically. The CIO role has become more pervasive, touching just about aspect of the enterprise, as well as every constituency the organization has. As a result, CIOs have to be more than technologists. Of course, they need to understand how different technologies relate to one another to drive business processes.
Feb 19 2010
Many
business gurus consider relentless innovation to be the United States'
only remaining edge in a global marketplace marked by labor arbitrage
and the competitive threats posed by exploding economies in China and
elsewhere.
Tom
Koulopoulos, the author of a new book, The Innovation Zone, and the
founder of the Delphi Group, says, "While some progress is being made on
the innovation front, too many U.S. companies still under perform when
it comes to driving the type of sustained innovation needed to meet this
competitive threat. On the other hand, many corporations are looking at
operational innovation as a way to cope with the complexity technology
brings."
In
his book, Koulopoulos demonstrates how organizations can create and
sustain a culture of innovation. Koulopoulos, who writes a blog called
The Innovation Zone (http://www.tomkoulopoulos.com)
says that if public and private organizations are serious about taking
the lead in innovation and re-invigorating the marketplace and U.S.
economy, they must move behind the hype of innovation and apply proven
techniques and processes. His book provides a how-to-do blueprint for
innovation process methods that organizations can put into practice. He
says, "We need to stop singing innovation kumbaya and start delving into
the practice and science of innovation."
Koulopoulos' insights about
innovation have received wide praise from luminaries such as Peter
Drucker, dee Hock, and Tom Peters who called Tom Koulopoulos' writing,
"a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and
thrive." According to Peter Drucker, Tom's writing "makes you question
not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself." He
is also editor of the Delphi Report, a quarterly journal for business
and technology leaders.
He sees signs that organizations are embedding
innovation in their business practices, and that they have devoted both
financial and staff resources to innovation. He says, "It's surprising
to me that more companies actually are putting people in positions of
authority with respect to innovation. They are not necessarily new
people; they are folks that are already on staff, but they also are
carrying that [innovation] badge."
In this second Enterpriseleadership.org
podcast, Koulopoulos talks about the following:
the status of
technology efforts in the U.S. corporations; the challenges of
IT innovations in global corporations; the ways companies have
used IT in innovative ways; the need for corporate education
programs in innovation; the things CIOs and CTOs need to do to
get involved in corporate innovation; and the way his
organization works with clients to drive corporate innovation.
Feb 10 2010
In this
podcast, Steve Cakebread, the former president of Salesforce.com, takes
the mystery out of cloud computing by explaining the complementary
relationship of Salesforce.com, Google's Apps Engine, and Amazon's Web
Services.
When
Steve Cakebread joined Salesforce.com in 1999, the company had not even
introduced its first product. That event happened two years later with
the introduction of the single CRM product called Singular Edition
people. Today, Salesforce.com has moved beyond CRM to become a
diversified company in platforms such as knowledge management and
service support. Cakebread says that these new platforms will help to
spur the growth of the cloud computing industry.
Meanwhile,
cloud computing has got a shot of adrenalin with the likes of
Amazon.com's Web Services and Google.com's Apps Engine. Amazon.com built
its business around store fronts and logistics, while Google.com's
built its business around a consumer's ability to search. Cakebread
says, "Amazon's Web services help businesses create those storage fronts
on the fly through collaboration or cloud computing, as well as to
provide businesses with additional storage and computing power. If you
look at Google.com's Apps Engine, it is now creating developer platforms
that make it easier to add information for consumers to share in
businesses network."
Cakebread says that these three entities have a
complementary relationship with each other through various relationships
and partnerships. "Each of these technologies, even through they are
considered cloud computing, all have different strengths. Salesforce.com
is the business platform provider. Google.com focuses on search, while
Amazon.com focuses on store fronts, logistics, storage, and computing
power. All of these technologies are internally designed on the same
technology platform as Oracle Solutions and blade services. The reality
is that their architectures are very different, but they can be used by
platform developers to achieve service and reliability."
In this
podcast, Cakebread also discusses the key technologies that will benefit
from cloud computing, the other areas in which both cloud computing and
Web 2.0 will enable innovative enterprise applications, and the issues
that need to be resolved before companies can deploy cloud computing
widely.
Feb 3 2010
In this podcast, Dr. Joel West, an associate professor at San Jose
State University's College of Business, talks about the open innovation
paradigm for technology development. His teaching and research focus on
innovation and entrepreneurship. Along with Henry Chesborough and Wim
Vandaverbeke, West is editor of the book, Open Innovation: Researching a
New Paradigm, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
Working and
living in the heart of Silicon Valley, Dr. Joel West cannot get away
from technology innovation. In fact, his course offerings and research
at the San Jose State University's College of Business focus on
technology innovation and strategic management in technology companies.
San Jose State University ranks at one of the top 25 research business
schools in the U.S.
Dr. West's interest goes beyond traditional innovation to
the concept of open innovation. He defines it as the idea of using the
market rather than the internal hierarchy, both as a source of
innovation and a way to commercialize innovation. Open innovation also
means treating innovation like anything else -- something that can be
bought and sold on the open market not something that happens within a
company. He says that a company can no longer depend on its internal
resources to drive its innovation efforts.
His research in open source
computing led him to looking at open innovation and a book on the
subject. He was one of the co-authors with Henry Chesborough and Wim
Vandaverbeke on the book, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm
(2006). He also writes several blogs about open innovation, including
openinnovation.net, which describes his research and provides comments
on other academicians' research projects.
In this podcast, Dr. West explores
what powers the concept of open innovation and how it differs from
traditional innovation efforts, such as research and development. He
says that open innovation raises the question about how those companies
that practice it differ from those organizations that have research and
development programs. Henry Chesborough explored this in first book on
open innovation published in 2003.
West says, "Companies that practice open
innovation will do the same things they did before they adopted it. They
might have a research and development department. Chesborough went one
step further by looking at the revolutionary nature of open innovation.
According to him, open innovation is a process that enables a company to
find the best sources of innovation, and to find the best paths to
commercialize that innovation. The company might accomplish these goals
looking within company and looking outside the company. They might take
other paths that they would not have considered if they did not know
about open innovation."
Dr. West has two important takeaways for chief
information officers, chief strategy officers, and chief technology
officers: look for external resources who know how to make your products
better or who have new products ideas, and find the best ways to bring
these resources into your organization. He says, "You might look at
university students, your suppliers and customers, or an open innovation
community. You might have to look at all of these possibilities to find
out which class of individuals or position in the value chain will
provide the best ideas you want. Money does not always motivate people
to share their ideas with you. Many people like the idea of a challenge
to compete for recognition. You might have a content to find the best
ideas."
Jan 27 2010
In this podcast, Michael Hugos provides insight from his CIO
experience and his latest book, Business Agility – Sustainable
Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.
Michael Hugos,
the former CIO for Network Services Company, took a different track
when he wrote his latest IT book. Business Agility – Sustainable
Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World provides business
executives with tools and tips on how they can help IT professionals
drive business revenue. He says that IT professionals tend to forget
that the business is where the money is. That's why IT exists." He adds
that technologies, such as cloud computing, open source and
virtualization, will provide great cost benefits to the business. "We
need to be in better position to guide these decisions."
Hugos has
first-hand experience working with business executives to drive revenue
at Network Services Company, an $8 billion cooperative of 86
distributors that market industrial products to major companies. Before
this company became agile, the profit margin on coffee cups was
practically nothing and getting smaller. Multiply this by Network
Services' distributors who sell to 5,000 stores across the country. He
says, "We banded together under this cooperative and worked closely with
sales. Interesting things started to happen and ideas for making more
money started to flow." The information-based, value-added services
Hugos helped to devise returned a two percent to three percent profit
margin. "If you do things right, you can earn more money or what he
calls the agility dividend"
Hugos thinking is nothing new. He refers to the
invisible hand theory which Adam Smith, the great British economist,
came up with 250 years ago. He says, "The invisible hand pushes the
price of all products to their cost of production. No amount of fast
talking sales people and ball game tickets will change this."
The end
result for Network Services was complete transparency for more products.
Hugos says, "Out of the 50 items we came up with, we carried out 25 for
them. For example, we could fill an order directly off a purchasing
system or via EDI or XML. We now had a customized solution that made our
paper cups more valuable."
In this podcast, Hugos provides some current IT
enablers that will help an organization achieve speed and agility, give
some examples of companies that have achieved both business and IT speed
and agility, and offers takeaways to help CIOs assess the business
impact of IT based on speed and agility.
Jan 20 2010
In this podcast Vid Byanna, executive director of Accenture's
internal IT infrastructure, talks about his company's and collaborative
computing, and cloud computing initiatives.
Each
day the 177,000 employees at Accenture, a $19 billion global IT
services company, must communicate effectively with 1,000 of customers
in more than 120 countries. In fact, Accenture executives often find
themselves looking for internal experts who can support specific
customer engagements. The traditional process has involved emailing
one's network of colleagues to help with the search. Now these
executives can use Accenture People, an internal version of LinkedIn,
to search the company's global network of employees.
Accenture
People comprises Accenture Collaboration 2.0, a global set of
technology initiatives to improve knowledge sharing, enhance
communication, and allow for dynamic collaboration within the
organization. Technologies in this collaboration platform include
social networking applications, greater search functionality,
telepresence, and unified communications.
Jan 13 2010
In this
podcast, Mark Lobel, a subject expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers,
discusses the pros and cons of the four facets of cloud computing. He
also touches on other cloud computing issues that should be of concern
to CIOs.
Cloud
computing has become an interesting and important subject on the minds
of most CIOs. Its complexity has forced CIOs to think about what
applications make sense to move to the cloud, what type of a cloud --
internal versus external, will work best for the organization, and how
does an organization know its data will be secure?
PricewaterhouseCoopers
recently published its quarterly Technology Forecast with an emphasis
on cloud computing. Based on material in the report, Mark Lobel, a
subject expert for PricewaterhouseCoopers, looks at cloud computing as
having four facets. If one were to draw a matrix with four boxes, the
top left box would include software as a service, and infrastructure as
a service would be below it. The top right side of the matrix would
include on-premises and off-premises or a combined public and private
cloud application capability, and cloud bursting would be below it.
Software as a ServiceOn-Premises/Off-Premises-Public Versus Private Cloud CapabilityInfrastructure as a ServiceCloud Bursting
In
this podcast, Lobel looks at the pros and cons for using each one of
these cloud computing facets. He also looks at the overall strengths
and weaknesses of the cloud computing industry; the way an
organization's culture affects its approach to cloud computing; the ROI
benefits of cloud computing; the way cloud computing will change
applications development; and some takeaways CIOs should consider
before deploying a cloud computing strategy.
Jan 8 2010
In this podcast, Mike Karp, VP and Principal Analyst at Ptak-Noel Associates and founder of Infrastructure Analytics, talks about how technology trends, such as cloud computing and virtualization, will continue to reshape enterprise storage, and what CIOs must know to take advantage of these trends.
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