Cio Talk Network Podcast

By centralizing the computing assets, we are expecting thin client computing technologies to provide higher uptime, more end-user workspace, better security, and better manageability. Are these tall claims? Is thin-client computing for everyone? Guest 1: Robert Israel Title: Chief Information Officer, John C. Lincoln Hospitals, Phoenix, Arizona Guest 2: Brian Chee Title: Senior Contributing Editor, InfoWorld For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/thin-client-computing-is-it-for-everyone

Middle management plays an important part in the way IT is delivered. They are the lieutenants who help realize the strategies created by the IT leaders while dealing with demanding technology workers. They also have an invaluable knowledge of business as well as how things get done. What are organizations doing to get the most out of the IT middle management? Guest 1: Dawn C. Meyerriecks Title: Senior Vice President, Strategic Technology & Development Operations, AOL Guest 2: Richard B. Thompson Title: Chief Information Officer, Maine State Government For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/fine-tuning-it-middle-management-why-and-how

We always advocate employee retention and attempt to reduce employee turnover since there are significant costs attached to it. However, employee turnover may not be all that bad. Continuous infusion of fresh blood, great talent, and employees who hit the ground running may be a better idea vs. continuous training of your “loyal” employees. What can IT leadership do to foster an environment that attracts best talent and discourages or even forces non-performers to leave? Guest 1: Michael B. Koval Title: Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Long and Foster Guest 2: Peter Cappelli Title: George W. Taylor Professor of Management, The Wharton School and Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/right-turnover-rate-for-an-it-organization

IT chargebacks promise better control of IT spending by making users more conscious about their IT resource requests since it means they will end up paying for those resources. But what works, in theory, has turned out to be a nightmare in practice. Given that the idea has real merit, how can chargebacks be best implemented to get a real handle on IT costs? Guest 1: B. Lee Jones Title: Chief Information Officer, Stratex Networks Guest 2: Carmi Levy Title: Senior Research Analyst, Info-Tech Research Group For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/dealing-with-it-chargebacks

IT can be used to make an organization more competitive which requires redesign of existing business processes as well as design new processes. However, we need people to buy into these ideas. Thus, as IT leaders, we need to be change agents. Guest 1: John F. Schindler Title: Chief Information Officer, L.D. Kichler Co. Guest 2: Dave Kamath Title: Chief Information Officer, IDEX Corporation For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/cio-as-a-change-agent

Delivering IT faster, cheaper, and better may have become the mantra for most organizations. However, this may not be the best choice in all cases. What if the executive management gives you a free hand to spend the required amount of money and take the necessary amount of time to deliver the right solution? Guest: Andres Carvallo Title: Chief Information Officer, Austin Energy For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/no-cost-cutting-no-deadlines-it-delivered

Sizing an IT Project in terms scope, effort, and cost is usually done using templates following a few ground rules. Do we factor in complexity? Is it the same for every project or for that matter every organization? Can we attribute the high failure rate of IT projects to this oversight? Guest 1: Paul C. Tinnirello Title: Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Information Services Division, A.M. Best Company Guest 2: Capers Jones Title: Founder and chief scientist emeritus, Software Productivity, Research, LLC For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/sizing-an-it-project-complexity

IT Leaders today are inundated with research data promising an unprecedented insight into trends and issues and help them manage their goals better. How much of this data is actually useful? How do research firms decide on the research initiatives? How well are IT leaders able to leverage the available date to formulate effective strategies? Guest 1: Alex Adamopoulos Title: Senior Analyst, Data Management Technology Practice, Aberdeen Group Guest 2: Patrick E. Moroney Title: Senior Vice President/Chief Information Officer HealthCare Service Corporation, BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois, Texas, New Mexico For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/making-the-best-use-of-it-research

Project success requires a combination of product success and project management success. We usually ask "was your project a success?" Instead we should be asking "how successful was your project?". With different stakeholders using different measures, achieving complete satisfaction becomes a nearly impossible task. While we put a lot of effort in ensuring successful delivery of end product, what needs to be done so as to receive the medal of delivering a “successful” project. Guest 1: Dennis P. L'Heureux Title: Senior Vice President, Planning and CIO, Rockford Health System Guest 2: R. Ryan Nelson Title: Director, Center for the Management of Information Technology, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/measuring-it-project-success

Software companies now release thousands of patches every year. To make the process efficient, organizations using the software are deploying patch management software as an efficient and automated way to manage and deploy these patches. However, this alone won't provide a complete solution. Organizations need to combine automation with an effort to get a better handle on their rather chaotic computing environments. Guest 1: Allwyn Sequeira Title: Vice President of Engineering and Operations, Blue Lane Technologies Guest 2: Andreas Antonopoulos Title: Senior Vice President and Founding Partner, Nemertes Research For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/effective-patch-management

Enterprise portals are rapidly being adopted to address the information and application access requirements of an organization. A large percentage of such deployments are not delivering results or are facing adoption issues. What is going wrong here? Guest 1: Lac Tran Title: Chief Information Officer, Rush University Medical Center Guest 2: Mike Gotta Title: Principal Analyst, Burton Group For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/making-enterprise-portals-work

Having been burnt by high failure rates using outsourcing, IT leaders are looking for options. Root cause analysis has determined that beyond money there needs to be a little more skin in the game, for an alliance to be successful. Is this highly collaborative, risk-sharing approach, also known as IT Co-sourcing, going to help increase the success rate? Guest 1: Mark Griesbaum Title: Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, Cardean Learning Group Guest 2: Dr. Wendell Jones Title: Chief Executive at SIM, and Former Vice President, Worldwide Service Delivery, Compaq Computer Corporation and Analyst, Cutter Consortium Guest 3: Jason Corsello Title: Program Manager and Analyst, The Yankee Group For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/it-co-sourcing-a-new-promise

President Bush recently announced The American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to encourage American innovation and strengthen this nation's ability To compete In the global economy. This is an ambitious and multifaceted initiative. How is it going to impact the business and community in United States and other parts of the world? Guest 1: Ed Lazowska Title: Bill and Melinda Gates Chair, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Former Co-chair, President Bush's Information Technology Advisory Committee Guest 2: Dr. Alfred Z. Spector Title: Chief Technology Officer and VP of Strategy and Technology, IBM Software Group Guest 3: Amy Wohl Title: Renowned Technology Editor, Columnist, and Futurist For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/the-american-competitiveness-initiative-why-it-matters-to-you

What if we had a complete visibility to customer’s values, their key issues, their thought process, their decision making approach, and their overall buying behaviors? Can we safely say “deploy Business Intelligence and CRM systems” is the answer? Guest 1: Michael J. Carlson Title: Vice President of Business Transformation and Customer Value, Xcel Energy Guest 2: Kimberly Collins Title: Research Vice President, Gartner CRM For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/360o-customer-view-through-it

A well defined IT delivery process minimizes risk and increases rate of success and requires appropriate time and effort for checks and balances. Meanwhile, IT is also supposed to facilitate quick business change thus help develop an “agile” enterprise. How do we eat the cake and have it too? Guest: Mike Kistner Title: Chief Information Officer, Pegasus Solutions (Ex-CIO, Best Western) For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/it-delivery-process-vs-agility-a-balancing-act

Today’s CIO needs to deal with more than just IT. Ideal CIO is one who leverages his/her resources and skills to get the job done while dealing with ever-increasing pressure of delivering more with less. Are resourceful CIOs born with the talent or is it an acquired skill? Guest 1: Kevin Molloy Title: Chief Information Officer, Vancouver Airport Guest 2: Bruce Reirden Title: Chief Information Officer, Care New England For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/a-resourceful-cio

Whether it is related to reporting regulatory compliance, agreeing to hide or delete digital information that may divulge a mis-conduct, blowing whistle against an IT system that may be causing damage to your organization or its customers; it is the duty of IT leadership and the team to maintain and demonstrate a high level of ethics. Is that truly happening? Guest 1: Peter Madsen Title: Executive Director, Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Guest 2: Keith Darcy Title: Executive Director, Ethics Officer Association (EOA) For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/ethical-issues-in-an-it-organization

How well can you prepare for the worst and deal with the aftermath? From normalcy, to chaos, to revival; the unfortunate event in New Orleans will have lessons to teach to the IT leaders of the world. Guest 1: Ray Johnson Title: Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Entergy Guest 2: Richard Morrey Title: Chief Technology Officer, ACCELA For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/new-orleans-disaster-the-it-management-story

Legacy systems play such a critical role in IT infrastructure; yet seem to drain precious resources. Today’s CIO is challenged with achieving a balance between managing short-term issues of cost and complexity, while at the same time investing in the future. Whether legacy systems should be replaced or should have their life extended? Guest 1: Will Weider Title: Chief Information Officer, Affinity Health System Guest 2: Sean Gallagher Title: Executive Editor, The Vertical/Enterprise group of Ziff-Davis Internet For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/legacy-turnover-rate-for-an-it-organization

Today’s IT environment is a mixed bag of legacy systems, hosted applications, and enterprise software with their own authentication and authorization mechanisms. What if there was one logon id and password per user for all applications. Even better, what if the management of user privileges are centralized and automated. It sure is possible but comes with a hefty price tag and inherent complexity. Guest 1: Christopher Crowhurst Title: Vice President Architecture & Business Systems Infrastructure, Thomson Reuters Guest 2: Jamie Lewis Title: Chief Executive Officer, Burton Group For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/the-identity-management-challenge