In this podcast, Susan Cramm, author of, The Eight Things We Hate About IT, talks about how CIOs can improve their relationships with business partners to achieve a higher quality of business value. She also attacks some of the political issues that CIOs face on the job.Regardless of the company's size, CIOs have the on-going challenge of creating business value or business impact of IT. Executive management needs to realize that CIOs and their IT team can?t deliver business impact on their own. According to Susan Cramm, a former CIO and founder of Valuedance, an IT leadership coaching firm, says that CIOs don?t own the four P?s needed to realize business impact -- people, processes, products, and profit and loss. Business partners manage these four things. Cramm, the author of the forthcoming book, The Eight Things We Hate About IT (Harvard Business School Press, says that CIOs and their senior leadership team need to partner with their business counterparts in order to deliver value to the organization."If you have a good strong leader and a relationship across the business for delivery of IT services, then you have a chance to move up the value chain and set up an investment governance process. Such a governance process will ensure that you have a full cycle of investment management in place. You just aren?t looking at things like a business plan, but managing those targeted business impacts through the duration of the program and subsequent projects. Moreover,  you are holding business leaders and IT accountable for the realization of that value."In this podcast, Cramm, who writes and blogs for Harvard Business Review, talks about how CIOs can improve their relationships with business partners to achieve a higher quality of business value. She also attacks some of the political issues that CIOs face on the job.

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Soon, it will be 4G wireless. This technology will not only provide a staggering amount of bandwidth, but it will create new business models, as well as a new platform for innovation. As a result, CIOs to become 4G wireless savvy immediately. That's the advice of Dr. Scott Snyder, author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in 4G Revolution. Now let's meet Dr. Snyder, author, professor, and CEO of Decision Strategies International.Every now and then a disruptive technology comes along and dramatically changes the way we live and work. In the mid-1990s it was the Internet and TCP-IP, and in 2000, it was the iPhone. Soon, it will be 4G wireless. Consider, for example, how it could make healthcare more pervasive. A doctor in Africa doesn't need to make a dangerous trip to treat patients at a remote village. With 4G wireless technology, he can treat these patients remotely.Since the 1990s, 3G wireless has been in place, providing us with increasing amounts of bandwidth, speed, and the ability to download multi-media content in a more efficient way. Dr. Scott Snyder, author of the New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution, says that many people think of 4G wireless, which is the next logical step in the progression of the technology, as just more bandwidth. "Yes, 4G wireless will offer up to 100 megabits per second to mobile users and one gigabit per second to fixed users. You are talking about a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than what you get in your home broadband connection. This is only part of the story. 4G wireless will provide a new paradigm that will alter the network and the handset, by enabling users to have more control over what type of content they get, and what type of services they can get from any location they might be in around the globe."Snyder adds that user-centric capabilities will be the defining feature of 4G wireless. "Extremely intelligent handsets will have the ability to make decisions on your behalf, just like a remote control for your life. Because it is based on the cloud concept rather than a fixed network, 4G wireless has the capability to follow you around. You will have access to many networks without going back through a network. That's a scary proposition for wireless carriers that make money from people going through their network. This feature enables a whole variety of digital swarms or group behavior. Users can self-organize in this cloud without going through the structure of traditional networks."As CEO of a Decision Strategies, a technology consulting firm, Snyder came across many executives who lacked awareness of what 4G wireless technology could do, not only to their business, but to their industry as a disruptive force and an innovation platform. The need to educate these executives propelled Snyder to write The New World of Wireless. His book is not just about what's happening with the technology, but how this technology could have broader social and business interactions to create new business models, new industries, and transformational type events.Meanwhile, new standards for 4G wireless and experimental handsets loom on the horizon. Even aspects of the iPhone sheds light on what new business models might look like. Snyder says that because these weak signals will explode very fast, CIOs need to prepare for 4G wireless right now. "They need to start building wireless into their organization as a competency to be explored both as a communication platform, but also an innovation platform. They need to put the infrastructure in place to support both platforms and to leverage both to build an ecosystem with their customers, partners, vendors, and even your industry. They have to also start fostering wireless content, connectivity and allowing the digital swarm to take place both in your organization and in your ecosystem."In this podcast, CIOs will learn the following:The top three things they should be doing to prepare for 4G wireless Some of the ways they can innovate around 4G wireless to become more profitable and derive more marketplace, The new business models that 4G wireless will enable, and And the security issues that will confront this technology.

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How does a guy with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience wind up doing green IT initiatives at Microsoft? He also has co-authored a guidebook called Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line. I?m talking about Dr. Tony Velte. In this podcast, he offers a concise framework for how you can green everything from your data centers to desktops. He also has co-authored books about cloud computing and virtualization. How let?s meet Dr. Toby Velte, a member of a Microsoft team focused on helping large enterprise groups with their IT strategies. That includes going green. How does a guy with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience wind up doing green IT initiatives at Microsoft and also co-writing a guidebook called Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line and the upcoming? Dr. Toby J. Velte?s work in computational neuroscience focused on creating models that were very similar to the widespread enterprise networks found in most large companies and in government agencies. Contacts he made along the way helped him to secure a position at Microsoft helping large enterprise groups with their IT strategies, especially around green IT. Velte?s green IT book provides a roadmap for how you can create a company-wide green IT program starting with your data centers, moving down to desktops, and  empowering individual business units to develop their own IT strategies. He says that the number one problem companies have with moving forward with green IT isn?t the technology or having adequate funds. It?s the people situation.? He urges companies to get all of their stakeholders together to try to understand what the green initiatives are going to look like at the end of the day, and how do they plan to measure success. Next, companies need to measure everything starting with power consumption. ?Most companies don?t have the metrics in place. People need to understand what they have and what they are consuming. ? Once companies know what outcomes they want to achieve, then it?s time to execute the green IT program as if it were another IT initiative. In most companies, green IT begins in the data center. In fact, that?s where it began at Microsoft. When Microsoft built its new data center outside of Quincy, Washington, it supplemented reliance on the power grid by use of water power. Meanwhile, virtualization and cloud computing can also cut down on a data center?s power consumption. He says, ?By moving business process out to the cloud, you are really turning over the power consumption issue to the service provider. With virtualization, can you eliminate the servers with low utilization, say around 15 percent, by moving those applications to virtualized servers. You can achieve upwards of 80 percent utilization with fewer servers.? In this podcast, Velte talks about some of the practical measurements you can take to make sure your desktops and data centers are green, the ways you can translate those metrics into meaningful results, the steps you can take to reduce your reliance on the power grid, and a plan companies can follow to stay green.

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In this podcast Shields talks about how this roadmap closed the gap between a project?s initial budget and its real cost. Now let?s join Gerald Shield, senior vice president and CIO of Alfac. Who would think that TV commercial featuring the antics of a wisecracking duck could improve a company?s brand recognition by 90 percent?  That?s what a few quacks did for Aflac, a Fortune 500 disability insurance company.  Now, Aflac associates have no trouble getting accepted into new business accounts. The payoff has meant a double digit annual growth rate since 2003, and there?s no end in sight. For 2008, Aflac had revenue of about $16.5 billion and more than 8,000 employees. The company insured more than40 million people in North American and Japan.Of course, Aflac isn?t resting on Nielsen ratings from the TV commercials to stay competitive. Accelerating growth continue to drive IT to find ways key departments can provide better value and services to external customers. In fact, in 2008, Gerald Shields, Aflac?s senior vice president and CIO, received an InfoWorld CTO 25 for adding a future IT projects roadmap into the company?s existing IT governance process. Shields says that this roadmap has helped to close the gap between a project?s initial budget and its real cost.? During Shield?s tenure, both Computerworld and InformationWeek 500 have consistently named Aflac as one of the Best Places to Work in IT. Meanwhile, he was also selected as one of Computerworld?s 100 Premier CIOs for 2006.In this podcast, Shields talks about the following:  ·        How the future IT projects roadmap has helped to improve IT?s relationship with the CIO,·        What payoffs the company has received from doing this type of roadmap,·        How the future IT projects roadmap has changed the governance process,·        What other CIOs can learn from the Aflac experience,·        How Shield?s measures and communicates the business impact of IT to Aflac?s constituents.

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In this podcast, Andy Mulholland, Capgemini?s CTO, provides guidelines for how IT organizations can transition from monolithic applications to more flexible, granular technology architectures. He also talks about the Web services technologies in his books, Mashup Corporations, and Mesh Collaboration. Now let?s join Andy Mulholland, CTO of Capgemini, one of the world?s largest IT consulting firms.Andy Mulholland, the CTO of the Capgemini, one of the world?s largest IT consulting firms, will be the first to tell you that large, monolithic software applications are inflexible and demand conformity.  For years, he says that IT organizations wrote business applications to follow this departmental, monolithic model. ?Because of technical constraints, if a company did not think through everything it needed from the application and build it into this at the beginning, it became hard to do anything about it later. As a result, companies ended up with these monolithic applications that covered all possibilities.? Today, Mulholland says that we are starting to see enterprises return to their core businesses, and to spin off what doesn?t fit. Along with that, the evolution toward Web services is really about how every department in an organization can create its own flexible shared services. He says that companies have to move from monolithic applications to more granular services. ?The only way to do that quickly and efficiently is with nimble applications which operate flexibly off a data set and that provide a single version of a particular company?s truth.? Mulholland is not suggesting that companies abandon their monolithic applications. He says, ?Monolithic applications are great for capturing and protecting data about what companies do. But there is focus on how marketing can be better done, how to better understand customers, and how to build Webservices that drive revenue. He points to the ability of companies, such as DHL, FedEx, and UPS, to be service  oriented in the front office, but to have a consolidated architecture in the back office. . In this podcast, Mulholland, provides guidelines for how IT organizations can make the transition from building monolithic applications to more flexible, granular technology architectures. He also talks about the Web services technologies in his books, Mashup Corporations, and Mesh Collaboration.

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In this podcast, Ashwin Rangan, now the chief technology information for MarketShare Partners, talks about what it takes for a CIO to achieve business impact of IT.  Now let?s meet Ashwin Rangan.  He has capsulated his experience in a book called, Tomorrow?s CIO: Strategic Executive Conversations    After becoming CIO of Walmart.com in 2005, Rangan had the challenge of making sure that the online store stayed up and running around the clock. He said, ?It had experienced a number of unexpected outages. My challenge also included carrying out the value proposition of the Wal-Mart store brand ? Always Low prices, Always, and Save More, Live Better. When you shop at Wal-Mart, either in the stores or online, we guarantee that your purchases will cost less than if you bought the same goods from another source.?   Once Rangan?s team got through taking the necessary remedial steps, the online store just wasn?t opened all of the time, but it could also scale significantly to handle peak periods. In fact, on the day after Thanksgiving in 2005, Walmart.com surpassed amazon.com as the site with the highest traffic in the e-commerce space. Rangan says, ?We had more than 3.5 percent of the nation?s population shopping the store on that day. It was a proud day for all of us.?     The following year, the Arkansas team asked Rangan and his team to create a global dot.com format. The transformative nature of the project would position Wal-Mart has having both a bricks and mortar and online presence in 12 different countries, including Canada, Mexico, the five countries in Central America, Brazil, Japan, the UK, Germany and Korea. He says, ?The key question was how to institutionalize the largest brand in the brand world by turning the initial dot.com format into a global format. We had the challenge of ensuring a single format with multi-language, multi-fluencies, and multi-distribution capabilities. We also had to spearhead the global format from incubation to inception to proof of concept.?     In 2007, Rangan?s team proved that the online global format would work.  He said, ?We blueprinted the entire concept so that it would be carried out over the next couple of years. Like Walmart.com, our global online store was another transformative initiative for this major brand.?   Although Rangan officially retired from being a CIO in 2008, he is still creating business impact of IT, as well as communicating how other CIOs can achieve it. He is currently the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners, an industry leading analytics firm that makes marketing more measurable and accountable than never before. He says, ?We are enabling some of the largest brands in the world to determine how best to make their investment decisions, and how to measure these investments. In addition to his role at MarketShare Partners, Rangan has also written a book, called Tomorrow?s CIO: Strategic Executive Conversations. Rob Carter, the global CIO for Fedex, says that Rangan puts forth ?much sound advice around how to navigate this complex and continuously changing space [of IT].?

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Despite the economy, Austin, Texas, has seen a spike in major businesses, such as google.com and Hewlett-Packard, moving into the area, as well as more people relocating there to find jobs. Meanwhile, Austin Energy, the nation?s ninth largest community-owned electric utility, is making sure it can meet the power demands of its one million residential customers and 41,000 businesses, and continues to return more than $1.5 billion in profits back to the community. If all goes as planned, Austin Energy could become the country?s first electrical utility to deliver Smart Grid technology. A Smart Grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost, and increase reliability and transparency.      Perhaps, the credit for putting Austin Energy on its Smart Grid journey belongs to Andres Carvallo, the organization?s CIO. In fact, this year Computerworld Honors Program?s recognized the outstanding significance of Carvallo?s Smart Grid work in the energy field. Carvallo just could become the first CIO to deliver the country?s first Smart Grid for a public utility.   The genesis for the Smart Grid began in 2003 when Carvallo was working on automation and efficiency and optimization of the business. In 2004, after reading the Electric Power Research Institute?s white paper on the Intelligrid, Carvallo thought it would be possible to use similar technology for Austin Energy. In fact, not wanting to infringe on the Intelligrid trademark, he coined the term Smart Grid.   In 2007, he gave his first speech about the Smart Grid. With the support of executive management, Carvallo?s team began working on Austin Energy?s Smart Grid, which seamlessly integrates four disciplines: energy, communications, software, and hardware.   He says, ?Together these four disciplines help to redefine how we generate, distribute, and consume electricity. The project goes beyond how we collect data and move it, and how safely we do it. The decisions will be able to make about that data will affect production, distribution, and consumption of energy, from turning on and off devices, to managing plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in the house. ?   Of course, as a public utility Austin Energy must abide by the North American Electrical Reliability Council?s standards and regulations for infrastructure protection and cyber security. Carvallo says, ?We will become compliant this year.? Meanwhile, he has been one of eight people working on the National Institute of Standards and Technology?s cyber security standards for Smart Grids. He says, ?We are awaiting the publication of the interim Smart Grid standards.?

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Transforming the data center to provide better business value ranks as a high priority for CIOs this year, according to a survey done by Hewlett-Packard. John Bennett, HP?s worldwide director of data center transformation solutions, says that CIOs face two data center transformation challenges ? aging facilities, and refocusing of IT?s priorities away from just managing an infrastructure. He says, ?The average data center is more than 25 years old and was not designed to meet the needs of an infrastructure that needs to deploy applications on demand. Meanwhile, IT organizations need to provide an applications environment that more closely aligns with the business, and to spend more of the IT budget on business priorities, management, and maintenance. ? In this tutorial, Bennett helps CIOs to make the business case for a data center transformation based on the simple philosophy: ?spend to save to spend to grow.? He says that much of the infrastructure work can be self-funding as a result of cost savings.  ?However, to accomplish this, you need to do more than talk about return on investment or total cost of ownership. You also need to make sure this transformation is aligned, supported, or connected to the overall business strategy, as well as the stakeholders? plans that comprise the strategy. Because a transformation of this type can range in the tens of millions of dollars, CIOs also need to align the project with the internal financial measurements and the resources of the business. After all, you?re competing with other projects that want some of those dollars. Even if you get approval from the board or executive management, the project won?t go as intended unless you have done your homework.? HP has earned its bragging rights when it comes to how to handle a data center transformation. In early 2000, HP found itself with about 85 data centers around the world, along with a 1,000 server rooms, and more than 5,000 applications. Bennett says, ?Every time we acquired a company, such as Compaq, we inherited more data centers.?  When Randy Mott, the current CIO joined HP, he immediately got the board?s approval to undertake a three-year IT transformation project, which included consolidating the data centers and standardizing the infrastructure. The company put three data centers in place (each one tied to a backup site), doubled storage capacity, tripled network bandwidth, and improved disaster recovery and business continuity. Bennett says, ?We reduced our total IT spending from four percent to two percent of revenue. We reduced energy consumption by 60 percent, and networking costs by 50 percent. Overall, we improved our capability to execute on mergers and acquisitions. We now can assimilate or acquire an organization and make it part of HP very quickly.

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The Vanguard Group, one of the largest mutual funds companies in the country, has managed to live up to its name for the past 35 years. Today, Vanguard manages about $1.1 trillion in assets with roughly the same amount of employees it has had for the past decade. Vanguard also differs greatly from its publicly traded competitors, such as Fidelity Investments. Vanguard?s customers ? both retail and institutional -- literally own the company. Eighty percent of Vanguard?s business takes place through its various Web sites. The rest of the business occurs either via the telephone or mail. By leveraging its unique structure and technology prowess, Vanguard has some of the lowest management fees of any mutual fund company.  Paul Heller, Vanguard?s CIO, says that technology enables the company to focus on its core mission ? preserving and creating wealth for customers.   In 2007, Vanguard received an annual InformationWeek 500 award for being the third best and most innovative company in the country. At that time, the company unveiled its $10 million portal which gives employees better tools to facilitate communications with each other. Much has happened in the past two years. Heller says that the company has expanded its use of Web 2.0 tools both for employees and customers. He says, ?For years, we have been hosting e-meetings with our institutional customers. We are now doing this on the retail side where we will invite 25,000 people to a meeting on a specific topic. They can see each others? questions. ?

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Whether you are a chief information officer or a chief marketing officer, you need to know how to leverage technology, especially social media, to understand how customers perceive your brand both positively and negatively, and what changes you need to make to your products to get more positive responses. You have the challenge of influencing 1,000s of daily online conversations you can?t control. After all, these aren?t your conversations. Dave Evans, a social media strategist and author of Social Media Marketing ? an Hour a Day, says that you need to create an external social media experience that your customers will talk about in a way that invokes others to buy your products. He adds, ?This is a big change from asking your advertising agency to change the message because customers? aren?t getting it. ? Evans?s social media strategy firm, Digital Voodoo, has helped many well-known companies come to grips with the impact of social media, and to recommend changes to their brand, product, or service to position it for success using external social media. Take the work Evan?s firm did for Meredith Publishing, which produces well-known magazines such as Parents, Better Homes and Gardens, and More. His firm created a strong engagement between Meredith?s individual print and online subject subscribers via the content discussions which they engaged. He says, ?We gauged success in terms of page views ?the base line indicator for publishers? and the size of the community as it grew over time.? Evan?s following as a social media marketing strategist caught the eye of John Wiley & Sons. He was asked to write a book to fit into Wiley?s An Hour a Day series. Unlike other social media marketing books, Evans?  book provides a daily plan for how you can approach social media both strategically and tactically. For example, in one exercise, he tells you to go to IBM?s blog and read about the policies for selecting bloggers. He says, ?If you don?t have the right social media strategy, you?ll wander all over the place. On the other hand, having the strategy right doesn?t mean you can turn the job over to the operational side of your business and say, ?Now go to do this.? The book allows you to select the things you want to work on.? 

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Renaissance man best describes Lon Safko. He is an author, inventor, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and executive coach. He created the first computer to save a human life. The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. houses that computer, 17 of Safko?s other inventions, and his more than 30,000 papers. Safko?s latest endeavor is social media. In fact, he co-authored The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success. This 844-page tome became the largest and most comprehensive publishing effort in John Wiley & Sons? 202 year history.Safko says The Social Media Bible came about because the business community wanted something more comprehensive than just another vertical business book. He says, ?When we asked the business community what they wanted ? they told us ?a resource that explains all of this stuff that we've been hearing about, , , , , yeah, what are people talking about with their blogs and tweets anyway?? They just wanted to be part of the conversation, and have someone explain it in their terms.?Obviously with a topic as constantly moving as social media, no single person could be the expert on it all. Safko and his co-author David K. Brake determined the best way to become the definitive voice is to let others speak. Safko says, ?We spent the better part of a year researching, interviewing, connecting and having conversations with 100 of experts from all aspects of the social media movement. We began the task of aggregating and editing thousands of blog posts, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, emails, interviews, presentations, and more ? all with permission of course ? and all from real life residents of this realm we call social media.? As a result, the book offers vignettes and essays from luminaries such as Biz Stone, co-founder of www.twitter.com; Vinton Cerf, father of the Internet and futurist; and Peter Booth Wiley, chairman of the board of John Wiley & Sons.

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Every year, Accenture, the $19 billion technology service and outsourcing firm, does a thorough analysis to identify the major technology trends that will change the underlying business models and capabilities. In 2009, research conducted by Dr. Kishore Swaminathan, Accenture's chief scientist, identified four major trends that will define the technology landscape over the next five years: Internet computing, data management, mobility, and convergence of unified communications, collaboration, community, and content distribution. He says, "These technology trends will give businesses a new capability that we call elasticity. They will allow every aspect of a business -- from IT to businesses process to how a company innovates -- to be more flexible, and to expand, contract and change, depending on current market conditions."    To derive more revenue and business value from this elasticity, businesses must get all of these four technologies just right. Take Internet computing, For example. Swaminathan says that transformational technology trends often pose a dilemma for CIOs who now face a possible change to their applications, the enterprise architecture, or the business models. "You have several choices: You can commit to a major change that will take much time and money, and you won't see much business value right away. On the other hand, you can ignore the trend or put it aside, and then you can wait until you have no choice but to spend a lot of money and embrace the new trend. Many CIOs need to go experiment and get comfortable with things, such as how to source storage, or software as a service (SaaS). They have to understand the pros and cons."   Swaminathan says that many CIOs he has spoken with have a visceral reaction to SaaS, especially with security and data privacy issues. He adds that the visceral reaction is fine. "Ultimately, CIOs have to make a business decision based on solid empirical data. They have to get Internet computing right in the long run, but for the short term they need to experiment, gather as much data as possible, and learn about the model. Unless they are comfortable with a new technology, they shouldn't put in it on a critical path."   Accenture definitely practices what it preaches about technology trends. In fact, Accenture acquires as much first-experience with a technology before deploying it. Swaminathan says, "We try to determine if we have a successful model or not." Accenture's approach to collaboration mirrors this practice. The company has created a version of LinkedIn, called PeoplePages, where more than 100,000 Accenture employees have already posted their professional profiles. Swaminathan says the site enables employees to find communities or individuals with certain expertise. Meanwhile, the company has begun a project to put its collective knowledge into the Accenture Encyclopedia, modeled after Wikipedia. He says, "We're encouraged by the progress we have made to date." Accenture also has developed its own version of YouTube, where employees can use video to convey difficult concepts and then distribute those videos to colleagues.

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Every year Accenture identifies the major technology trends that will transform business. This year, Dr. Kishore Swaminathan, Accenture's chief scientist, has identified these four trends: Internet computing, data management, mobility, and convergence of different forms of communications. According to Swaminathan these trends will give businesses a new capability called elasticity. Every aspect of the business will be able to expand, contract, and change according to market conditions. In this podcast, Swaminathan talks about these four technology trends and how Accenture is carrying them out. Now let's join Dr. Kishore Swaminathan, chief scientist at Accenture.

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Consumer products companies such as Procter & Gamble aren?t the only ones reaping the benefit of social media. A world leader in networking, Cisco Systems isn?t resting on its laurel when it comes to Web 2.0 tools and technologies, especially social media. The company is integrating social media with customer and partner communications. This approach includes using Facebook to leverage the AXP developer Contest and other groups to grow new communities. For example, the company is also linking Cisco Twitter followers with Facebook, as well as communicating through blogs (Cisco Geeks), cross-promoting social media sites on invitation, banner ads, etc., outreach through YouTube for User/Partner/Sales submitted segments, communications through the LinkedIn Cisco professionals Group, and more. One of the more interesting things Cisco has recently done is launching The Realm, a multi-dimensional, animated webisode campaign that consists of super hero security characters and villains that Cisco developed with well-known Marvel Comics illustrator Mike Mayhew. The characters are linked to real-life Cisco engineers, as well as its products, but uses entertainment to appeal to the Web 2.0 crowd.

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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 are underperforming when it comes to driving the type of sustained innovation needed to meet this competitive threat. 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.?

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With more than $30 billion in annual revenue, Intel Corporation both innovates and invents microprocessor technologies that reside at the heart of most of the PCs and servers. Likewise, Intel also innovates and invents when it comes to deploying social media, both within the company and with external customers. In fact, in 2003, instant messaging became the company's first collaboration method outside of email and audio conferencing. Diane Bryant, Intel's vice president and CIO, says, "Within less than three years, we went from not using instant messaging to a 90 percent adoption rate." As a globally diverse company with more 83,000 employees, numerous suppliers, and millions of external customers, Intel has continued to keep pace with effective ways for all constituencies to collaborate effectively. In 2004, the company began internal blogging with the CEO leading the charge. Two years later, Intel opened up external blogging as a way to reach out and communicate directly with specific manufacturers that use Intel products, and with end users. Bryant says, "As the devices based on the Intel architecture have become more solutions-based and directed at end users around the world, we needed to have direct connection with these end users. Social media or social networking provided us access to this external community." In 2008, Intel launched Open Port, a series of external communities for end users. Bryant says that today more than 75 percent of all the content on these communities comes from end users, not Intel. "We have seen a strong viral pick up on solutions. We have examples of customers coming together to solve their real problems." Intel also uses social media for software development. Some of these software development communities allow people to collaborate about how they have optimized their software suite for the Intel architecture." While Intel has begun to reap the benefits of social media, this company knows that the pervasive nature of social media means that proper controls need to exist. Bryant says, "Most executives I talk to say that their social media initiatives tend to self-police themselves." Intel has adopted a code of conduct that defines how people must act when they engage in all forms of Intel electronic communications, both internally and externally. The code also has provisions for maintaining legal compliance.

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The Dr. Phil Show. The New York Times. Oprah. The media spotlight shines brightly on 1-800-Got-Junk? and its 1,000 big blue shiny trucks. Since it started in 1989, 1-800-Got-Junk? has hauled way more than one million truckloads of refuse from home and businesses. In fact, 1-800-Got-Junk? has become one of the North America?s fastest growing companies with 335 franchise locations in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The recipe for 1-800-Got-Junk??s success includes a touch of Horatio Alger, a dash of best practices from well-known companies much as McDonalds, a blue-ribbon workplace, and a blend of the right Web-based tools and technologies, including social media. Originally known as The Rubbish Boys, Brian Scudamore,1-800-Got-Junk??s founder and CEO, rebranded the company in 1998 to take advantage of its e-commerce business model, called JunkNet. All of the booking and dispatching task of franchisees? customer calls go through JunkNet, which acts as a central repository for customers? information and histories, and manages company accounting functions. A wireless interface built by 1-800-Got-Junk??s IT department enables franchisees? truck drivers to use their cell phones to view bookings in real time throughout the day. As a result, drivers can take on additional jobs. Now 1-800-Got-Junk? is extending its Web-based reach to use social media to get its marketing message to potential customers, and prospective franchisees, as well as to keep in touch with current franchisees. In this podcast, Brian Scudamore talks about the transition to Web-based marketing, and the business benefit of using social media.

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During his tenure as the senior enterprise architect for MetLife, Inc., Carlos Casanova realized that carrying out an enterprise configuration management database (CMDB) became one of the most influential actions an IT organization can take to improve service delivery, and to bridge the gap between technology and the business. Casanova has done two things to make it easier for large IT organizations to deal with what he calls the CMDB imperative. First, he is president of K2 Solutions Group. His firm offers professional services to support the delivery of IT service initiatives, such as the CMDB. Second, he is the co-author with Glenn O?Donnell of The CMDB Imperative: How to realize the dream and avoid the nightmares. He says with a well-designed CMDB in place, companies can better position themselves to manage and optimize IT infrastructure, applications, and services; automate more IT management tasks; and restrain burgeoning costs. His book presents a start-to-finish implementation methodology that works and describes how the CMDB is shifting to the superior configuration management system, the CMDB renamed and overhauled in ITIL v.3.

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During his tenure as the senior enterprise architect for MetLife, Inc., Carlos Casanova realized that carrying out an enterprise configuration management database (CMDB) became one of the most influential actions an IT organization can take to improve service delivery, and to bridge the gap between technology and the business. Casanova has done two things to make it easier for large IT organizations to deal with what he calls the CMDB imperative. First, he is president of K2 Solutions Group. His firm offers professional services to support the delivery of IT service initiatives, such as the CMDB. Second, he is the co-author with Glenn O?Donnell of The CMDB Imperative: How to realize the dream and avoid the nightmares. He says with a well-designed CMDB in place, companies can better position themselves to manage and optimize IT infrastructure, applications, and services; automate more IT management tasks; and restrain burgeoning costs. His book presents a start-to-finish implementation methodology that works and describes how the CMDB is shifting to the superior configuration management system, the CMDB renamed and overhauled in ITIL v.3.

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How to Castrate a Bull ? Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business might seem like an unlikely title for a business book. But Dave Hitz drew from his ranch hand experience to take NetApp from a startup to a $3.3 billion network storage company. Hitz, a then college dropout who liked to solve puzzles, co-founded NetApp in 1992, along with two other colleagues. His book covers the hard lessons learned during the company?s major business cycles, including the dot.com bust. It might be hard to believe that NetApp, one of the fastest growing technology companies, began as an idea scribbled on a napkin by Dave Hitz. Risk and ambition permeated the company in the early 1990s. NetApp gave birth to a new storage device category called the network filer. Revenues doubled every year until the company reached $1 billion in revenue in 2001. After the dot.com bust of 2001, NetApp?s revenues quickly declined to $800 million for fiscal 2002 and the stock fell from $150 a share to $6 a share. Hitz says, "We had designed NetApp for growth, and when the growth stopped, everything broke, but this time in a bad way.? He says the company survived the crash because it had diversified its customer base, adding banks, telecom providers, and other enterprises and the federal government. These organizations helped to leverage the impact from the dotcom and tech companies that had provided the bulk of the company's revenues. NetApp faced other challenges when it moved to direct sales from indirect sales, added support for Windows to a product line based on Unix, and embraced storage area networks when the company was totally focused on network-attached storage devices. What does Hitz have to say about the current economic downturn? ?The current downturn is creating a similar attitude change. There are some hints in today's tech world that it is going to happen again. We might hear CIOs saying they aren?t going to build another data center. This downturn will be the catalyst that leads to an even more heated market for data center virtualization and cloud computing. With that in mind, now is not the time for grandiose plans. Customers are not thinking about grandiose right now. They want to hear about saving some money." Today, NetApp ranks third in market capitalization in its industry, behind EMC and Seagate Technology and ahead of Western Digital, Brocade, and Quantum. In total revenue, NetApp ranks fourth behind EMC, Seagate, Western Digital. NetApp also has a long history of making ?Best Place to Work? lists. For seven years in a row, NetApp has appeared on Fortune?s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

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If you think your organization's security measures are bulletproof, then think again. Give Ira Winkler, along with his team of security expert from Internet Security Advisors, a few hours to simulate what it would take insurgents to bring down critical systems, or to electronically pilfer millions of dollars. A former intelligence and security analyst with the National Security Agency, Winkler's security consulting firm, Internet Security Advisors, acts as a trusted partner in helping Fortune 500, public utilities, and government agencies conduct penetration tests. His firm also mitigates the problems found in the simulation, and carries out awareness training. Winkler's penetration tests run the gamut from breaking into some of the world's largest corporations to breaking into the nation's largest power grid. As a result, the media has given Winkler the title of Modern James Bond. He has put his experience to work in his three books: Spies Among US, Zen and the Art of Information Security, and Corporate Espionage. Winkler says that he would give a poor rating to the security infrastructure of most Fortune 1000 companies. "Of course, the strength of security varies from company to company. In many cases, the security is so poor that I can walk out of the company with their crown jewels within a few hours. CIOs of these companies have something to worry about, especially now with the economic downturn with most companies."

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In 2005, Freescale Semiconductor, the $5.7 billion global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors, began rolling out an integrated manufacturing system. The company, however, acknowledged a lack of progress automating some of the key semiconductor manufacturing steps involving IT systems, such as process control. That year, Sam Coursen, the former CIO of NCR Corporation, stepped into the CIO role at Freescale Semiconductor. Armed with experience transforming NCR's IT organization, Coursen immediately launched a strategic program with manufacturing management. The business impact of IT for this program returned about $38 million to shareholders. He says, "We began a multi-year program to close those gaps, and to become equal to or better than the best-in-class practice for each of those manufacturing processes. That resulted in substantial savings." In this podcast, Coursen talks about the steps he has taken to ensure that his company continues to derive business impact from IT. He also provides the three things CIOs should do it they want to ensure that IT initiatives result in business impact, and the takeaways CIOs can use for working with their CFOs on capital IT investment decisions.

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If you're a CIO for a rapidly growing retail chain, you had better make sure you can deliver the business impact of IT to the organization. Bruce Ash has done just that repeatedly. He spent about 20 years developing IT infrastructures to support two major retailers --Talbots and Dollar General. During Ash's 10-year stint as CIO with Talbots, the company grew from 175 stores to 900 stores in four countries. On the other hand, Dollar General's explosive growth was like nothing Ash had ever experienced before at Talbots. Ash's nine-year tenure as CIO coincided with the company's expansion from 4,000 stores to 8,000 stores in 35 states. He said, "One year we opened 700 stores and three distribution centers to support the additional stores. Some retailers don't even have 700 stores." Some retail analysts say that Sam Walton's original vision for Wal-Mart resembled that of today's Dollar General. This modern version of the neighborhood general store sells everything from apparel to toys from electronics to household goods, all at prices most people can afford to pay. Each Dollar General stores carries more than 5,400 core products from America's most trust brands and manufacturers. As CIO of Dollar General, Ash became the linchpin between the business community, the corporate leadership team, the company's strategy, and the deployment of IT. He says, "The business impact of IT came from building the infrastructure to support the company's fast-paced growth strategy. It included bringing in a point of sale system that improved both our customer experience and our supply chain. We could process a variety of alternative payment methods. As a result, customers could get through the checkout line faster. The merchandise information this system captured enabled us to have perpetual inventory in the stores, including automatic stock replenishment."

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What do President Obama and Jack Welch have in common? They're both excellent communicators. Although they have different communications styles, they both know how to command attention and to get results. They also both know how to inspire and to motivate others. If you want to move up the IT ladder, you, undoubtedly, need to have good technical skills and solid business experience. On the other hand, if you want to earn that CIO seat at the executive table, your better hone your communications skills. You might start by going to amazon.com and ordering either Motivate like a CEO - Communicate Your Strategic Vision and Inspire People to Act! or Speak Like a CEO - Secrets to Commanding Attention and Getting Results. Suzanne Bates, the author, is CEO of Bates Communications, an executive communications consultancy, and a former award-winning television anchor and reporter. When Jose Alvarez, president and CEO of Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. wanted to improve his communications skills, he turned to Bates Communications, based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm offers everything from formal strategic communications consulting to executive presence seminars and workshops. Clients include Blue Cross Blue Shield, Dow Chemical, Fidelity, and Mellon/Bank of New York. Bates says that the company's mission is to transform leaders into powerful communicators who get business results. She says that many leaders get promoted because of their business and technical skills. "When you reach the leadership of a C-level position, your primary role is to communicate the organization's vision, strategy, and values. You need good communication skills if want to inspire, to motivate, and to align the organization with the vision and strategy. Even middle managers need good communications skills. In many cases, communications is the missing link that holds people back from reaching their full potential." During her 20-year year in television news reporting, Bates interviewed 1,000 of political leaders, CEOs, experts, authors, and celebrities. She says that some people were better speakers than others. After Suzanne started working with executives at Bates Communications, she realized that good communications skills aren't necessarily an innate ability. "It's something you can learn. Leaders, like Jack Welch and President Obama, have learned to develop their own compelling communications style. All writing and all speaking has to come from inside. Many executives struggle with bringing out their authentic voice. It takes practice."

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Some insurance companies, such as AIG, have put themselves in dire financial circumstances. The billion in these companies have received in federal bailout money has added fuel to the economic downturn. On the other hand, the $21 billion Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company doesn?t need one cent of taxpayers? dollars to preserve its customers? wealth. This 150-year old, highly profitable company has more than $1 trillion of life insurance protection in force. Products include life insurance, long-term care insurance, disability insurance, annuities, mutual funds, and employee benefit services. In fact, the company maintains the highest available ratings for insurance financial strength from all four major ratings agencies. Despite the economic downturn, Northwestern Mutual isn?t about to rest on its financial strength. In fact, this company has continued to invest in areas, such as information technology, that can provide great value in terms of productivity, improved businesses processes, and revenues. Tim Schaefer, Northwestern Mutual?s chief information officer, says, ?We can?t loose sight of the fact that we are in a downturn, but we don?t want to completely give away our opportunity to pursue some strategic projects for the business.? As CIO for Northwestern Mutual, Schaefer leads 1,300 employees and 1,000 contractors in advancing the company?s strategy, for which relationships among customers, representatives, and executives drive the business forward. One of his key responsibilities is to carry out a strategic IT plan to bring the IT organization to a higher level of solutions and systems delivery maturity and business process enablement. His other priorities include helping the company remain customer-centric, making better use of analytics, and integrating product lines to strengthen financial offerings.

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TalkAway -- The award-winning author of Leading Geeks and an IT management consultant provides tips for managing the people side of IT during this economic downturn. General Motors. Motorola. Panasonic. These companies began 2009 by announcing massive layoffs. The economic downturn has just about everyone questioning their job security. What will it take to find another one? While IT plays a key role in running the systems that power organizations, IT people aren't immune from layoffs, as CIOs struggle to cut costs and to do more with less. To get some answers on how CIOs and their staff can cope with this situation, enterpriseleadership.org turned to Paul Glen, the author of the award-winning book, Leading Geeks -- How to Lead and Manage People Who Drive Technology, and a management columnist for Computerworld. He has more than 10 years of experience delivering and managing IT products and services. He has taught at MBA programs at the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University. In fact, many graduate programs often cite his book in courses about managing technical professionals.

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It?s hard to avoid all of the news stories about the economic downturn, company layoffs, or employees being asked to take drastic pay cuts. Most employees understand that businesses have no choice but to reduce their costs. On the other hand, those disgruntle employees or former employees in dire financial straits could find themselves doing things they wouldn?t normally do. As a result, these employees could pose a whole new set of security threats to an organization. Brian Wolfe, a security expert and co-founder of Laurus Technologies, an IT consulting firm specializing in security, says that companies must have controls in place to make sure that people can?t do things, such as authorizing a purchase order to a fictitious vendor, and having funds disbursed to a company that never receives the goods.? Meanwhile, security breaches still continue to plague America at the rate of about one a week. In fact, within the first few months of 2009, Merrill Lynch, Continental Airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the United States Postal Security all became victims of security breaches. Wolfe says that CIOs do have something to worry about. He adds that about 75 companies out of the Fortune 1000 have an ISO 27001 certification for security. ? CIOs must think about whether or not they have the proper security controls in place to both prevent on-going threats, and these newer threats. They need to have some access controls that clearly delineate between the software development area, test and quality assurance, and product. The goal here is make sure that no one person is in a position to introduce fraudulent or malicious code or data into some critical applications. CIOs also need to cover all of their bases with respect to vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing, especially data loss or data leakage prevention.?

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Have you had your Coke today? Jack Bergstrand knows what it takes for a $30 billion beverage company to maintain its global brand. During his 25-year career with The Coca-Cola Company, he gained much operational and strategic experience running everything from manufacturing to marketing, and even IT. In fact, as vice president of business systems, Bergstrand overhauled the company's global IT operations. Today, Bergstrand heads Brand Velocity, a consulting firm focused on helping Fortune 500 companies improve the business impact of IT across large-scale technology projects. Now let's meet Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity.

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Dr. Norman Jacknis has much experience finding innovative ways to use technology. For 10 years, he served as the CIO for Westchester Country, one of the most prosperous counties in New York State. His mission focused on working with business leaders to create real business impact from IT. Because he had extensive knowledge of the business, Dr. Jacknis used every opportunity to speak to the CEO, who he reported to, about how to improve things, some of which didn't necessarily involve technology, but management issues or policy issues. He says, "I wasn't afraid to say we can use technology here, but you first need to address this issue." One of Dr. Jacknis' innovative solutions involved establishing a unit that analyzed all of the data Westchester County collected from its transactional systems. He says, "We fed the analyzed data back to the business lines according to what actions made them successful and visa versa, based on long-term criteria. For example, the police department might look at programs that kept repeat offenders out of jail or programs that helped to prevent traffic accidents." Under Dr. Jacknis leadership, Westchester County earned many technology innovation awards, including the Center for Digital Government's top ten digital countries in the country, and American City & County's Crown Communities Awards for technology. Government Technology Magazine named Dr. Jacknis as one of the country's Top 25 Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers who broke bureaucratic inertia to better serve the public. In 2008, Dr. Jacknis left his post at Westchester County and joined a think tank within Cisco Systems, established by John Chambers, Cisco's CEO. He says, "People kept asking Chambers what they needed to do if they wanted to run a successful business such as Cisco." As director of the state and local government strategic consulting unit within Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group, Dr. Jacknis speaks to business leaders and government professionals about how to use technology in innovative ways in their organization. He says, "We don't charge anything, we don't sell anything, and we don't ever talk about products, especially Cisco's products. We are out there as strategic advisors." Because many government agencies have an interest in Web 2.0 technologies, Dr. Jacknis is working on a concept within the government to take advantage of Web 2.0's collaboration capabilities. He says, "We give them examples of how it has been used successfully, how they can apply these examples to their needs, and how it is meaningful to political leaders. We might talk about the Web site Samsung set up for customers to help each other. People trust more what they hear from other customers. In return, Samsung is getting loyal customers, and free market research."

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Few CIOs or CTO blog about IT. Andy Blumenthal, on the other hand, has plenty to say about enterprise architecture and what he calls the TotalCIO. Blumenthal works as CTO for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). His user-centric enterprise architecture blog promotes the adoption of sound business and technology planning and governance. That goes for both private and public sectors. His TotalCIO blog promotes a customer-centric focus on IT leadership. It can lead to mission excellence, not mission impossible. As the protector of our nation, the ATF works to reduce violent crimes and to prevent terrorism. Blumenthal, working in conjunction with the CIO, plans and carries out strategic technology solutions to help ATF's special agents and investigators to do their jobs better. His responsibilities including developing technology solutions and improvements, incorporating new emerging technology solutions and best practices, and guiding the enterprise architecture planning and governance process. He also reaches out both internally and externally to communicate and to collaborate about shared IT interests, especially around enterprise architecture, governance, emerging technology, and IT leadership. Blumenthal says he has developed a special methodology for enterprise architecture called user-centric enterprise architecture. "It focuses on first defining the users and their requirements and then building the appropriate solutions for them. It also includes having central IT governance to ensure that money gets well spent on the best solutions possible."

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When troubled IT organizations need help, then Transition Partners can provide the perfect solution. This IT consultancy specializes in turning around ineffective IT organizations by providing them with experienced IT leaders and established business processes. The company's client base includes Aramark, Bates Advertising, Hilton Hotels, and Ingersoll Rand. Transition Partners specializes in handling the one problem most CIOs don't like to talk about -- dealing with the politics of IT. Thomas L. Pettibone, Transition Partners' founder, has waded through a lot of political muck in his 18-year IT career. In fact, after working as a CIO for several Fortune 50 companies, he concluded that he often found himself in a no-win position and that he'd be happier being on his own as part of an interim team, parting friends with the organization at the end of the day. He says, "When it comes to allocating funds and delivering services, the CIO has to be the judge and the jury. The demand always exceeds the supply. The CIO often winds either saying No to the end-user executive or trying to deliver something on a shoestring. Either way, the CIO loses politically." Pettibone and his Transition Partners staff have a good track record helping some wounded IT organizations, as well as wounded companies, achieve real business value from IT. In fact, the bankrupt TransWorld Airways, now part of American Airlines, was one of Transition Partners' first clients. Pettibone says, "TWA was a mess. Most of the top IT management had left. Things ran poorly. The company was close to signing a terrible outsourcing deal." The Transition Partner's team took over the IT department, and within 12 months had created a high-performance IT organization, delivering high reliability and good end-user satisfaction. Pettibone says, "IT was one of the bright spots when American Airlines acquired TWA." Several years later, Transition Partners worked with Tsumura Consumer Products. He says, "The new CIO was being held hostage by several of his IT lieutenants. They wanted hefty bonuses or else they would disrupt operations. We parachuted in, fired the offenders, and took over the IT operational responsibility with no business interruption. Within six months, we rebuilt the IT organization. The parting comment from the CIO was great. He said that we took the gun away from his head." People within an IT organization usually know what's going on. Computer systems don't breakdown by themselves. The problems that arise between IT and the business often relate to management issues. After signing on with a new client, the Transition Partners' team immediately sits down with the IT organization and lays out what it plans to do as turnaround people. Pettibone says, "We tell them that we seek their support with our processes and methods to correct the situation. We emphasize that within a year or shorter, we'll leave and they'll be the recipients of the benefits we can create together. Of course, someone has to be appointed to lead IT. It's a chance for someone to move up in the organization."

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Part 2 - Hank Leingang -Being a CIO is a touch job. No one knows that better than Hank Leingang, the former global CIO for the Betchel Group, Inc., and the former CIO for Viacom. As CEO of ITM Software, which BMC Software recently acquired, Leingang worked with both CIOs and their executive teams to maximize the business impact of IT. His IT consulting firm, ThinkLift, also helped CIOs and their IT teams to achieve business impact. So what's the business impact of IT? It's really about running IT as a true business that makes growth opportunities happen. Leingang says that achieving business impact means that the IT organization has evolved through five stages beginning with a stable applications portfolio, developing automated support for processes and functions, carrying out an ERP implementation, enabling a business transformation, and delivering business products and services developed by IT or that containing IT components. He says, "Customers benefit from the results of these IT activities." Where can you see visible proof of the business impact of IT across the organization and how do you measure the outcome? Leingang lists four areas where you can see it: enabling of individual productivity, enhancing group productivity, enabling a function or a process, and delivering products and services to customers of the enterprise. He says that you can measure it by profit and loss cost reductions, improvements in revenues, and an increase in shareholder value. He says, "At the end of the day, whatever business case that is developed from the associated IT activities has to contribute to all of these."

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Being a CIO is a touch job. No one knows that better than Hank Leingang, the former global CIO for the Betchel Group, Inc., and the former CIO for Viacom. As CEO of ITM Software, which BMC Software recently acquired, Leingang worked with both CIOs and their executive teams to maximize the business impact of IT. His IT consulting firm, ThinkLift, also helped CIOs and their IT teams to achieve business impact. So what's the business impact of IT? It's really about running IT as a true business that makes growth opportunities happen. Leingang says that achieving business impact means that the IT organization has evolved through five stages beginning with a stable applications portfolio, developing automated support for processes and functions, carrying out an ERP implementation, enabling a business transformation, and delivering business products and services developed by IT or that containing IT components. He says, "Customers benefit from the results of these IT activities." Where can you see visible proof of the business impact of IT across the organization and how do you measure the outcome? Leingang lists four areas where you can see it: enabling of individual productivity, enhancing group productivity, enabling a function or a process, and delivering products and services to customers of the enterprise. He says that you can measure it by profit and loss cost reductions, improvements in revenues, and an increase in shareholder value. He says, "At the end of the day, whatever business case that is developed from the associated IT activities has to contribute to all of these."

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Nathan Langston knows what it takes for the almost 100-year old Boy Scouts of America to train five million youths in citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in outdoor activities, educational programs, and career-oriented programs in partnership with community organizations. About 15 years ago, Langston, got into scouting as a volunteer leader and then served as a scoutmaster and a committee chairman. Today, Langston serves as the national director of the administration group at the Boy Scouts of America's Dallas headquarters. Langston wears many hats at the largest youth organization in the U.S. He not only serves as the CIO overseeing IT, but he manages the national service desk, portfolio management, properties and treasuries, and health and risk management. He says that his technology hat demands the most time and holds the most interest for him. Like most organizations dealing with tight dollars, the Boy Scouts of America needs to make sure that its technology investments result in a business impact. Employees, however, don't drive business impact as much as the volunteers do. In fact, the Boy Scouts operates locally through units sponsored and operated by churches, clubs, and civic associations. Volunteers lead each unit. Local councils consist of some paid professionals and volunteers. Langston says, "Business impact for us is all about helping our volunteers to enjoy the programs and for our youth to progress on the path to eagle scout. We look at this benchmark in whatever decisions we make." Langston says that these volunteers demand improvements in technology. "As their time gets squeezed and squeezed with our other things, they need to have the administrative side of scouting simplified so they provide the activities to our youths." One such technology investment includes the online reporting of all volunteers within each unit. This yearly task has always been a paper-based process. Within the first three months after the system went live, more than 100 councils adopted the process. Today, more than 80 percent of all scouting units, which represent three million youths, use this process. A new social networking investment promises to have significant business impact for volunteers, scouts, and the paid staff. Langston says that you need to belong to a Boy Scout unit in order to participate in this social networking community. "The site assures everyone that you have a legitimate connection to the Boy Scouts of America. It's unique in that we're including paid staffers. For the first time, everyone will have the chance to gather around an electronic campfire to talk about how we can resolve issues. We can communicate best practices, not only to a unit, but across the U.S. On the business side, Langston says the organization has made several IT investments to improve the staff's ability to get information from a system consolidation that occurred a decade ago. "Our people kept saying they couldn't get access to the information needed to help facilitate the volunteers. At first the CEO had some skepticism about how many staffers would use the internal, Web-based portal. We had some people who were adverse to technology. Today, everyone uses this portal to keep track of fund raising, membership, and other important information. It's the most widely tool we have."

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Building a robust enterprise architecture that can meet the needs of a business isn?t an option, it?s something every organization has to do. And asking about the ROI on an enterprise architecture project is like asking about what?s the return on investment of your physical plant. You need to focus on making sure your enterprise architecture delivers real business value. That?s the authoritative conclusion from Len Fehskens, The Open Group?s resident expert about anything having to do with enterprise architecture. Fehskens? official title is vice president and global profession lead for The Open Group. CIOs interested in all aspects of enterprise architecture construction, especially service-oriented architecture, might consider getting a company-membership in The Open Group. A merger of the X Open group and the Open Systems Foundation, The Open Group is a consortium of IT vendors and users that focuses on the development of open standards for enterprise architecture, as well as the professional certification for enterprise architects. The organization focuses on the concept of Boundaryless Information Flow, which is the integration of enterprise applications (including legacy components), the exchange of information between those applications, and the standards to support these things. These efforts have led to the creation of The Open Group Architecture Framework or TOGAF. The current version spells out types of enterprise architectures ? the business architecture, the data architecture, the technology architecture, and the application architecture. When it comes to the complex subjects of enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture, Fehskens, in this podcast, dispels much good advice from the dozens of conversations he had had with members of The Open Group. He says that you can?t do an entire enterprise architecture project as a separate effort and expect that it?s going to come out right. The best way to do an enterprise architecture project, according to Fehskens, is to do it proje

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In 2000 a fire at the Philips chip plant in New Mexico sent shockwaves through the telecom industry. Nokia and Ericsson ? the two major telecom companies that used the chips? handled this event very differently. Nokia had the processes to deal with it immediately and worked with partners to adapt to what happened. Because Ericsson didn?t have processes in place to deal with this event, it, on the other hand, lost hundreds of millions of dollars immediately. By 2004 Ericsson saw its revenues decline 52 percent from pre-fire levels. The face of the mobile phone industry had changed forever, all because of a fire that had been contained in ten minutes. Dr. Amit S. Mukherjee, who conducts executive education seminars for C-level executives of major companies such as ConAgra, Johnson & Johnson, and Kraft, has studied why some companies, such as Nokia, can survive crisis. In fact, Dr. Mukherjee?s book, The Spider?s Strategy: Creating Networks to Avert Crisis, Create Change, and Really Get Ahead, draws from his exclusive interviews with top executives at more than 500 manufacturing and retail companies to look at the importance of living in a networked world -- one in which each company partners with a set of other companies. Dr. Mukherjee says that Nokia was able to adapt rapidly after the fire because it had already created the capabilities (built into its strategy, processes, and values, and supported by technology) to carefully work with its network of partners on crises (and opportunities) that no one could?ve reasonably predicted. He says, ?Just contrast this event with what?s happening in the U.S. financial industry. Despite the extensive networking of financial firms, neither executives of individual companies nor regulators have considered the importance of such capabilities. So, they, like Ericsson, got caught flatfooted when disaster struck.?

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Within the past five years, CIOs have seen a broad shift from focusing on the technology aspects of IT management to concentrating on the service management aspects, especially emphasis on how these services help businesses succeed. For example, version 3 of the IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL v3 has a more logical and intuitive structure than ITIL v2. As a result, people can relate better to this new framework in ITIL v3. Each of the five ITIL v3 books centers on a service lifecycle, such as service strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual service improvement. Because of the lifecycle approach, people can drill down on the portions of the IT issues and problems they're having at a particular time, and get the answers they need. Business service management or BSM and configuration database management or CMDB have always been a focus on ITIL. However, ITIL v3 now acknowledges both BSM and CMDB. ITIL v3 has renamed CMDB as the configuration management system and also has changed the definition to bring all of an organization's configuration management together. To this end, an organization will have a number of CMDBs, some of which will be specialized, such as server management. Through federation, all of these CMDBs will represent an organization's configuration management system. Paul Burns, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a consultancy that specializes in all aspects of IT management, says that BSM and CMDB will spread the adoption of ITIL v3. He says, "Now that ITIL is talking about BSM and CMDB, you have all of the vendors talking about ITIL, too."

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In 2004, the $6 billion Corporate Investment Banking division of Wachovia, one of the largest banks in the country, launched a multi-million dollar, end-to-end, service-oriented delivery platform. Working with the CIO, Tony Bishop, the division's senior vice president and chief architect, spearheaded the three-year transformation program, driven by critical business strategies of being able to compete, using technology, against the best in the industry. Bishop says, "We wanted the ability to leverage and to reuse technology, and to do it at a lower investment cost than our competitors." Service-oriented architecture (SOA) formed the underpinning of this platform transformation. Bishop says, "We needed an efficient way to align the functionality with where it was needed to respond to market changes." While the project turned out to be a success, Bishop says that the bank derived many incremental benefits during the three years of the project implementation. He says, "We had many checkpoints along the way to make sure we were making the right investments in people and in technology" Bishop is now applying what he learned at Wachovia, as well as in other industries, in his latest venture, Adaptivity, an IT business transformation consulting firm. He says that adaptivity to everything is the one thing he learned throughout his career, especially at Wachovia.

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Social collaboration via the Internet changed the direction of the 2008 presidential election. Whether you like it or not, social collaboration has begun to change the way major companies, such as Procter & Gamble, do business. Things will continue to evolve as more and more members of the net generation, young people comfortable with MySpace and Facebook, enter the work force. No one has better prepared executives for the future than Don Tapscott, author and chairman of nGenera Insight, a technology think tank that looks at new business models. Tapscott consistently identifies and explains the next business imperatives and defines the business models and strategies that the new imperatives require. Published in 2006 and updated in 2008, his book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, has appeared on the New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller lists, and has been translated into 19 languages. Based on the largest investigation of strategic IT in business ever conducted, Wikinomics explains how businesses can tap the full potential of the emerging networked economy and its self-organized, mass-participatory communities. Tapscott?s latest book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing the World, explores how the first generation to grow up with the Internet is redefining today's workplace, marketplace, schools, family and government?how they learn and work and what power and influence they hold. This is an indispensable message for all organizations that seek to turn the net generation?s talents and worldview to competitive advantage. Also based on a multi-million dollar research project, Grown Up Digital carries forward the groundbreaking ideas first expressed in Don's bestseller Growing Up Digital.

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Fortune magazine has called the 40-year-old Society for Information Management or SIM the IT field's top professional group. In fact, Robert Keefe, CIO of the $1.8 billion dollar Mueller Water Products, attributes his successful career in IT to his involvement with SIM. Keefe is SIM's current president. Membership in SIM is open to qualified senior IT professionals, academics, and consultants. SIM currently has about 3,600 members in 36 U.S. chapters. (Yes, each SIM chapter does due diligence on each prospective member.) SIM's offerings fall into several categories: information exchange through chapter meetings, educational programs, and chapter-sponsored venues, such as the MIT Sloan School CIO Symposium. SIM also holds an annual conference called the SIMposium. About 16 years ago, Keefe went through SIM's year-long Leadership Forum. He says, "At the time I took the course I wasn't a CIO. I quickly landed a CIO position and then had my company join SIM's Advanced Practices Council." Each year about 300 professionals attend monthly Leadership Forum classes in 10 major cities. Keefe says, "These people have good IT skills and business acumen, but this program helps them to think outside of the box." The course curriculum blends about 40 different pieces of media, mostly books ranging from The Old Man in the Sea to The Innovator's Dilemma. The Advanced Practices Council, another SIM educational program, consists of about 40 member companies that contract with academics to do IT research. The research can range from a look at new, emerging technologies to different segments of IT leadership. Recently, Boston University delivered a paper about the competitive levers for leading innovation in the 20th century. Keefe says, "It's not all about technology but how business models are changing. For example, google.com gives away a search engine, but charges for it through advertising. How do compelling changes in the marketplace like this one translate into decisions that a CIO must make?"

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When Dr. Jerry N. Luftman established the information systems graduate programs at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, he didn't envision that it would someday become one of the world's largest, with more than 1,000 students. Most of the graduate students have at least 10 years of professional experience. The effective alignment between IT (or IS) with the needs of the business has become a critical part of the curriculum and a major research area for Dr. Luftman. Students put themselves in the tactical role of a CIO, and then in the strategic role where a CIO builds business strategy driven by IT. During the past 20 years, many processes have evolved to improve the over arching relationship between IT and the business. Business service management or BSM has emerged as an important concept for improving availability and performance. It's also a complement to the IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL. BSM tries to ensure that IT processes are in harmony with the business processes so IT can improve the business's services. Specifically, BSM looks at what affect each of the different services and the technologies supported by IT can have on the business.

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The first generation Web focused on pushing out content in a one-way mode. In contrast, Web 2.0 provides a very dynamic, highly interactive user experience, similar to consumer Web sites, such as amazon.com or ebay.com. Steve Papermaster, chairman and CEO of nGenera, a company that offers a platform for transforming next generation enterprises, says, ?You don?t notice the technology. Instead, you?re completely tied in with your environment. It?s like you become one with it.? Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 technologies taken one step further, includes a portfolio of newer, mostly on-demand technologies designed for the enterprise. These technologies could include open source, on demand software as a service applications, or other types of on-demand cloud-based applications and services. Papermaster says that the key question is how do these new technologies impact and power capabilities in the enterprise? He says, ?You need to understand the business benefit and the economic benefit before you seriously start to deploy them.?

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Seventy-six per cent of executives surveyed at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May 2008 said they didn't have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent said that greening their data centers is crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives. This wasn't the case for Avnet Inc., $14 billion worldwide distributor of electronic components, computer products, and technology services. In fact, Avnet received Computerworld's Best Practices in Green IT Award for a three-year project to create a more energy-efficient data center. Avnet's 13,000 square foot data center houses 1,200 logical servers, more than 200 terabytes of disk storage, a central tape backup system, and redundant UPSs, generators, and switch gear. For Brad Kenney, vice president of infrastructure at Avnet, the greening of the company's data center wasn't another IT project, but an on-going process that has saved the company thousands of dollars in unnecessary power consumption, under-utilized servers, and inefficient UPSs. He says, "Most of all it's saved us the millions of dollars it would cost to build out our data center to house more servers we didn't need." Kenney begin the process by looking at every piece of equipment on the data center floor. Two important factors included the age of the device and its energy efficiency. Because manufacturers have become more concerned about energy consumption, Kenney found it more cost-effective to replace older air conditioners and older UPSs with new devices that were at least 20 percent more energy efficient. He even looked at replacing floor tiles, lighting, and making adjustments in air handling. He says that little things like these can save up to 30 percent in energy consumption. Server virtualization enabled Kenney to liquidate about 300 severs. Twenty-four physical ESX hosts now represent 378 virtual servers, and 39 AIX servers have more than 200 servers on them. Other consolidated efforts include moving to a centralized tape backup system and a storage area network.

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When Don Hopkins retired as chief information officer at NCR, he decided to join SunGard Availability Services, a business unit of SunGard, a $5 billion business continuity and disaster recovery company. SunGard Availability Services provides the company's more than 10,000 customers in North American and in Europe with solutions that insure uninterrupted, access to mission critical data and systems. By reporting to SunGard's CEO, Hopkins has insight into the company's strategic initiatives and, as a result, has the opportunity to understand what technologies would be good enablers to those strategic decisions. In 1979, Hopkins joined NCR where he moved up the IT ranks from the director of general purpose products eventually to vice president of technology and infrastructure in NCR's IT services group, and to his last position as chief information officer. In fact, he played a leadership role in NCR's transformation and performance turnaround. In 2007, he successfully completed the very complex IT spin-off of Teradata as a separate company. Although this event happened during a very aggressive timeframe, Hopkins and the management team did it under planned budgets, both before and after the spin-off. In this podcast, Hopkins talks about how he has translated his IT experiences at NCR and applied them as CIO at SunGard Availability Services. He also talks about NCR's strategy to cut its IT infrastructure costs and increase the company's profitability, its process for making investment decisions in technology, and its methodology for measuring the value of those investments.

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Despite the downturn in the economy, some financial services companies are holding their own and hiring people, especially in areas such as IT. Genworth Financial is one of those companies. With more than $103 billion in assets and 15 million customers worldwide, Genworth Financial is comprised on Genworth Financial, a full service broker-dealer; and Genworth Financial Advisers Corporation, an SEC registered investment advisory firm. Genworth has earned the highest company ratings in its industry. It is a leader in product long-term care insurance and annuities. Christina Hollingsworth will be the first one to tell you that IT resides at the core of Genworth Financial's business operations. As corporate IT director at Genworth Financial, she oversees the strategy, planning, and execution of the company's enterprise finance technology acquisition and integration. Hollingsworth has earned a stellar reputation for leading global teams and initiatives and partnering with multiple suppliers. Like many IT executives, Hollingsworth has to be sure that she has a well-stocked pool of qualified personnel who are, not only technically savvy, but can lead IT projects. She says, "In the past, IT professionals have been very good about executing on initiatives, or basically carrying out what they were told to today. Things have changed. Given the speed at which technology is evolving, we need people who can develop strategy based upon trends in the industry, can translate those trends into action, and then can execute on those initiatives." In fact, Genworth Financial has deployed new technologies such as desktop video, and software as a service, which manages travel expenses and investment portfolio expenses. The company also has a social networking pilot underway that is similar to Facebook. In fact, it's called Facebook. Hollingsworth says, "As a global company, we have both employees and contractors working at a variety of locations. The best way to get good ideas is to have many ideas coming from our global talent pool. Our Facebook will make it very easy for people to tap into these resources."

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What is the chief concern of chief information officers? According to the a recent annual survey by the Society for Information Management, the number one concern of CIOs is attracting, developing, and retaining good IT professionals. So, if you?re looking to move up the corporate IT ladder or you?re a first time IT job seeker, consider sharpening your enterprise software skills at SAP, or working for a SAP partner, or getting SAP training and then going to work for an SAP customer. With revenues of about $10.5 billion and 50,000 employees, SAP ranks as the world?s second largest business software company and the third largest independent software provider in revenues. SAP ERP deployments can be found in more than 41,000 companies, in more than 25 industries, and in about 120 countries. Unlike Oracle which has grown through 30 acquisitions, SAP has grown organically by hiring people. No one knows more about the SAP hiring picture, as well as the hiring needs of the IT industry, than Mark Steinke, vice president of global recruiting at SAP. He oversees SAP?s recruiting and staffing for professionals, senior executives, university graduates, interns, and contingent staff. According to Steinke, the demand for IT professionals with SAP knowledge has never been greater than today. He says, ?The quantity of IT candidates has dropped off because of the demands of skills in our space.? While Steinke strongly suggests that IT candidates at all level consider SAP training, he says that technical skills might get you in the door, but won?t give you staying power. He says that today?s business needs demand that IT employees at all levels know how to manage change, to think strategically, and to communicate effectively. He says, ?Universities do a good job of incorporating the IT skills in the curriculum, but fall short in those other areas."

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The Web 2.0 revolution has moved from the college campus to corporate America. While Web 2.0 makes lots of headlines, can it make lots of money for companies? Amy Shuen, a former professor at the Wharton School of Business, answers this question in her new book, Web 2:0: A Strategy Guide. She explains what's different about Web 2.0 and how those differences can improve the bottom line. Rather than focus on the technology, she looks at the importance of creating a Web 2.0 strategy and integrating those strategies within the existing business. She says, "You have to create places online where people like to come together to share what they think, see, and do. When people come together over the Web, the result can be much more than the sum of the parts. The customers themselves help to build the site, as old-fashioned word of mouth becomes hyper growth.

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When John E. McDermott joined Xerox as chief strategy officer, the $18 billion copier and printing giant was in recovery mode. He worked along side Anne Mulcahey, Xerox's CEO, to crystallize the business strategy and the turnaround strategy. In 2007, with the business in good shape, Mulcahey decided that the company needed to do a faster job of carrying out certain aspects of the business strategy. McDermott says, "To do that, we had to build new business processes, which are dependent of critical relationships between the business and IT." To bridge the gap between the IT organization and the business, McDermott moved into the CIO role when Patricia Cusick, the former CIO, retired. McDermott spent his first few months on the job asking customers' CIOs how much they spend per seat to do printing and copying activities. He says, "Most CIOs can't come up with an answer. They can tell you down to the very nickel how much they spend per seat to provision workplace-computing services. The print and copier world has been treated as a second-class citizen by the IT organization." Xerox's biggest challenge today is to fulfill the needs of its large customers that want services offerings around their Xerox copier and printing devices. McDermott says, "If you start to manage these devices as an infrastructure, then you have the tremendous capacity to use their scanning capabilities as an on-ramp to a company's digital workflow." To this end, Xerox has begun to build significant value-added services on top of the infrastructure management business that helps customers to deal with document-intensive business processes.

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During her climb up the corporate ladder at SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, Suzanne Gordon, SAS's vice president of information technology and CIO, developed an air-tight strategy for how IT could work in lockstep with internal SAS customers to reinforce the company's success. A roadblock stood in the way of selling her idea to management. Meanwhile, she decided to move out of IT and into the sales consulting side of SAS. It was here that she saw IT from the customer's perspective. In 2003 when the CIO position came opened at SAS, a company that provides 44,000 customers with analytics software, Gordon got the job. She now could turn her vision into a reality with her IT staff of more than 300 employees. In fact, that same year, Computerworld recognized Gordon's leadership talents by including her in the list of Premier 100 IT Executives for that year.

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Since joining Scottrade as CIO in 2005, Ian Patterson has racked up a series of IT accolades for the stock brokerage firm, which manages $55.7 billion in assets. In both 2008 and 2007, Computerworld named him to its Premier 100 IT Leaders, a list of the country top IT executives. In 2007, under Patterson's leadership, Scottrade got named to the CIO magazine's CIO 100, an award that recognizes outstanding strategic IT leadership. Scottrade has also made it on the InformationWeek 500 list of the most innovative users of IT in the U.S. What has made Patterson so successful? As a former consultant with Deloitte, Patterson realized that many companies view the IT organization as an outsider, different from other business units. He says, "This never made any sense to me. Why should IT be treated any differently from marketing or finance?" At Scottrade, Patterson created an environment to converge IT into the overall corporate strategy to promote growth and profitability. He says, "Of course, a strategy without execution is just a dream. Our leadership meets regularly to review our five-year plan and to make any adjustments to it."

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In the early 1990, Jim Champy saw the writing on boardroom walls -- companies have to change the way they work if they want to be effective and to be profitable. No wonder, Champy's book, Reengineering the Corporation, became an immediate best seller, being translated into 17 languages. Although the Internet didn't exist when Champy wrote this book, he says that the concept of work flowing horizontally inside a corporation and across the boundaries of a corporation hasn't changed. In his book, X-Engineering the Corporation, Champy argues that companies have to go beyond their walls and think about how their processes, their systems, and their technology can connect across organizational boundaries to customers, suppliers, and partners. He says, "We see much inefficiency in those processes. About 40 cents of every healthcare dollar goes to settling healthcare claims. If you want to reduce that cost, you have to look at the processes between hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies." According to Champy, the new version of the corporation will have much built-in transparency. He says, "Of course, companies will always have physical walls and various processes they'll own. The Internet has forced companies to become more transparent because of what their constituents expect and what regulations require for disclosure."

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In 2007, Andrew Moss, the former chief financial officer at Lloyds, became the chief executive officer of Aviva Plc, the world's fifth largest insurance group and the largest insurance company in the U.K. He immediately devised a strategy to drive 20 percent growth across Aviva's three lines of business: long-term savings, fund management, and general insurance. The company manages about $800 billion for about 45 million customers. Moss's strategy includes transforming the business by streamlining costs and making sure that all 57,000 employees work toward the goal of providing better value to customers. Since becoming global CIO of the Aviva Group in January 2008, Toby Redshaw has had no problem incorporating Moss's strategy into how IT operates across the three lines of business. Redshaw says that his role is to make sure IT operates at the right pace, with the right resources, and with the right talent. He also takes a bottom line approach to IT by challenging his front-line IT managers to ask their financial counterparts how specific IT projects relate back to the profit & loss statement. Redshaw says the conenction between IT and the company's bottom line is the biggest gap that IT has with the business. Getting and keeping customers or customer turns shows up on the bottom line. IT managers need to understand what they can be doing to improve this metric, and thus the bottom line."

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In 2005, when Warren Bennis, the author of several best-selling management books and a professor at the University of Southern California, gave a talk at Harvard Business School, he asked the audience how many knew what the blogosphere was. One third of the audience raised their hands to acknowledge their familiarity with the term. In his latest book, Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor, Bennis takes on the world of social networking and the world of transacting business across virtual borders. His premise is simple: if companies are going to succeed today, they must be as transparent as possible. Whether companies like it or not, blogging is here to stay. Bennis says that the CEO of Starbucks tunes into blogs to learn what employees in the company's 15,000 stores are feeling, thinking about, and doing. He says, "If companies can't handle transparency, then someone else will come out with the news ahead of them, or offend them, or surprise them."

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Ace is the place, especially if you're looking for home hardware in the U.S. or in Saudi Arabia. And no one knows this better than Paul Ingevaldson. After a 25-year with Ace Hardware, Ingevaldson retired as CIO and senior vice president of international and technology for the $3 billion dollar global hardware wholesale. Its more than 5,000 retail hardware stores do $12 billion in annual sales. Ingevaldson was responsible for Ace's IT needs for the entire corporation, including the retail stores in more than 70 countries. Of his many accomplishments, Ingevaldson is most proud of having become an officer of the company, heavily automating all aspects of the retail operation, and having the full corporation of executive management to align IT with the business. He attributes much of his success in these areas to a stint where he moved out of IT and handled distribution for Ace Hardware. He says, "The experience enabled me to see IT from the user's perspective. I realized that we had to spend more time training people how to interact with IT." Since his retirement, Ingevaldson has written a variety of tutorial IT management articles for both CIO and Computerworld. His topics have covered everything from improving governance to delegating authority. He also has cranked out many articles about how CIOs should report to CEOs. In fact, his article, IT Cheat Sheet for CEOs, helps a CIO to explain the mechanics of IT to a new CEO. Ingevaldson says that there are many reasons why it's important for CIOs to report directly to CEOs, than CFOs, and to be on the executive leadership team as a peer with CFOs. He says, "When it comes to corporate funds, CFOs take a risk adverse position. If you want to move the company forward through automation, then IT has to assume certain risks. If IT isn't willing to take a chance, then it will be a follower. If you work for a CFO, you have to go into much detail about every aspect of IT. Most of all, you aren't a peer with the rest of the leadership team. I'd never take a CIO position reporting to a CFO." In this podcast, Ingevaldson talks more about why it's important for CIOs to sit at the corporate leadership table, and how they can maintain their place at this table.

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PeopleSoft. Brocade. and Forte. All of these IT companies got their start with funding from Norwest Venture Partners. Since its inception more than 45 years ago, Norwest has funded more than 400 IT companies in areas ranging from infrastructure to security. Today, the $2.5 billion fund concentrates on early-stage IT companies in areas such as semiconductors and components. enterprise software and service, communications systems and Internet infrastructure. So what technologies does a VC firm like Norwest find particularly attractive these days? Robert Abbott, general partner at Norwest, says, "CIOs want to buy things that are easy to deploy and to manage over time. To this end, we like managed infrastructure services, such as outsourced security, and enterprise applications based on software as a service. We also like enterprise applications based on an appliance model. With so much emphasis on virtualization, we're looking for things that will take the challenge out of managing all those virtual machines. We still continue to fund things that make it easier to manage all the systems in a data center.

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The State of Michigan has become a pioneer in how to make IT work better and more economically viable for the State's citizens. The answer focused on consolidating IT into one state agency, and then developing a strategic plan and a enterprise architecture to support the plan. In 2001, the entire IT organization across the State of Michigan merged into the Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT), under the direction of Ken Thesis. MDIT's 1,700 employees support 19 other state agencies. These agencies have a combined annual budget of $434 million, 800 business critical applications, 55,000 desktops, and 1,300 telecom locations. The consolidation has helped to reduce the overall IT expenditures in Michigan by 34 percent, almost taking more than $100 million off the state budget. Some of these strategic moves included closing 23 data centers and creating three main data centers, reducing the number of email servers from 700 to 70, and centralizing one petabyte of data storage. Meanwhile, MDIT also addressed errors in programs, such as Food Stamps. In this podcast, Ken Theis, director of MDIT, talks about the agency's overall IT strategy, the components that comprise the enterprise architecture, the initiatives that are bringing smaller and more efficient government to the people of Michigan, and the challenge of managing IT investments.

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Molly O'Neill has both a technology role and a policy role at the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. As an assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Environmental Information, she oversees the life cycle of information to support the agency's mission of protecting health and the environment. O'Neill's role as CIO includes overseeing the agency's strategic information planning, investment and information policies, enterprise architecture, and information security program. In both of her roles, O'Neill is working toward the same goal -- helping the EPA to use technology to collaborate and exchange information with the widest possible network of bright minds around the world. The EPA employs about five percent of the U.S. environmental workforce. The majority of this workforce consists of people who work in state government, in consulting firms, in private industry, and in academic institutions. She says, "Environmental issues are huge. People work at the EPA because they believe in its mission. We want to reach everyone who has a thirst for knowledge about environmental issues."

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Barry Libert, a social media visionary and the founder of Shared Insights (now Mzinga), knows how to use technology to harness the power of what he calls the crowd. Mzinga provides software as a service solutions for online communities. It currently manages about 14,000 communities, and services more than one billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. Libert is currently chairman of the board of Mzinga. He and his co-authors set up a community and enlisted members to contribute to a book called, We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. In fact, this is the first book on the subject that actually used an online community, based on a Web 2.0 technology from Mzinga, to help create the book. About 4,000 qualified members joined the online community and helped shape the final product. By using the same social networking tools and techniques that their book covers, Libert and his co-authors could provide practical and unique look at online community building.

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In the second of two podcasts, whurley, without mincing words, talks about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of mantaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source. To hear Part 1 please visit http://www.enterpriseleadership.org

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In an effort to bring a consistent message about open source to customers and to partners, and to participate more actively in the open source community, BMC in 2007 hired William Hurley (aka whurley), an open source activist, inventor, and chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management. Whurley's role as chief architect of open source strategy has many facets to it. BMC's executives depend on guidance for anything that has to do with open source. Whurley contributes to the company's open source strategy, as well as carries it out. As an evangelist, he is the BMC open source voice at IT venues. He manages BMC's presence in the open source community by getting customers involved with it. In fact, management has encouraged whurley to maintain all of his open source community connections. In the second of two podcasts, whurley, without mincing words, talks about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of mantaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source.

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Almost everyone agrees that anyone who seeks to lead must get firsthand experience. Experience, however, by itself doesn't guarantee learning. What matters most is what one makes of experience, particularly traumatic and often unplanned crucible events that challenge one as a leader. This conclusion comes from research done by Robert Thomas, who is executive director at Accenture's Institute of High Performance Business Leadership and as an associate professor at Tuft University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The empirical research down by the Institute provides Accenture's consultants and clients with insight on topics ranging from new business global to talent management. Most of the information analyzed in Thomas's new book, Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn from Experience to Become a Great Leader, comes from interviews with leaders selected on the basis of their proven ability to grow and to sustain an organization during times of trial. In this podcast, Thomas talks about what some CEOs have learned from their crucibles, how even CIOs can leverage their crucibles to move up the ranks, and how C-level executives can help emerging leaders learn from their experiences.

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Innovation can deliver a desirable experience for your customers, and sustainable growth for your company. Many companies, however, struggle with how to deliver top-line growth and deliver true business innovation. Meanwhile, come companies have become astounded by the curve balls being thrown at them because of rising energy costs in the global economy. Getting corporate innovation right goes beyond delivering the next generation product. If you want to deliver something that creates value Innovation can deliver a desirable experience for customers, you need to take a holistic look at innovation. This approach requires a total solution based on the right business model, the ability to leverage partnership relationships, and the desire to reach customers through different channels. Cheryl Perkins practiced this holistic innovation model while she was chief innovation officer for Kimberly-Clark. This model has become the underpinning of her strategic innovation consulting practice called Innovationedge. She says, "We started the practice to deliver a roadmap so companies can get their leadership teams focused on key priorities and capabilities so they can start to innovate." Because so many products have a tie in some way to IT, CIOs plays a critical role in driving innovation more than they did a few years ago. Perkins says that CIO and their teams can harness the important discrete pieces of information that sit in various departments across the company. She adds that even regulated products have discrete information residing in different departments. She says, "The IT team puts critical support systems and information systems in place so you can capture the knowledge and transfer it. This process is critical to speed to market. If you don't have this flow of information and data throughout the corporation, your time to market will be delayed. Without the IT team, the data and knowledge can't be transformed into new solutions."

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Many CIOs grapple with how to align IT with the needs of their businesses. By de facto, they have to demonstrate the value their role serves and to make sure technology works well within their businesses. However, these CIOs aren't alone. Businesses, in general, have a hard time measuring and quantifying the value of IT and how it affects the entire business. Meanwhile, forces such as a mobile global workforce, the growing dependency on social media, and the push for more utility computing based on service-oriented architecture are driving businesses to converge their IT strategy with their business strategy. This move will fuel growth and will sustain profitability. In a converged company, information, not the technology behind it, is what matters to all constituents the company serves. As a result, CIOs take on the new role of information officer not chief IT officer. They become more involve in strategy planning and in the governance process. Moreover, they look at how technology enables the business architecture and how the business manages the overall investment portfolio. No one knows more about getting out of the alignment trap and moving toward convergence than Faisal Hoque, founder and CEO of BTM Corporation; founder of the BTM Institute, a not-for-profit IT think tank; and author of five books on business technology management. In fact, a decade ago, Hoque conceived and developed a unique holistic business model which looks at the relationship between business and technology in the following areas: governance, strategy and platform, enterprise architecture, investment management, and the maturity of the overall management structure. The result is a converged organization where business and technology come together to drive innovation, which, in turn, fuels growth and profitability. In this podcast, Hoque provides a good overview of the organizational changes and the philosophy changes CIOs need to consider if they want to transition from alignment to convergence. He also talks about the BTM Institute's Business Technology Convergence Index, a five-year study that quantifies the relationship between the way global companies value their technology investments and the companies' revenues and profitability. He says, "Companies with mature converged business technology management practices, such as FedEx, UPS, and Procter & Gamble, have better financial performance than their competitors. Think about it. Today, both FedEx and UPS are information services companies, not just movers or packages and trucks."

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Each year, MasterCard processes more than a trillion dollars worth of credit card transactions between its 25 million acceptance locations in 210 countries worldwide. Net revenues for 2007 year were $4.1 billion, a 22 percent increase versus the same period in 2006. Information technology drives all MasterCard's three card business services: franchiser of acceptance locations that are guaranteed through MasterCard's network; processor of all payment transactions through the network and the final settlement of dollars with the financial institutions; and consultant offering a data warehouse of intelligence to help customers, such as merchants and banks, to make the best use of payments. Robert Reeg, interim president of global technology and operations at MasterCard Worldwide, says that he doesn't worry about aligning IT with the business. He says, "We're one and the same. IT and the business are completely connected." In fact, Reeg leverages IT talent around the world to build and to manage MasterCard's massive network. He has even created the role of the business technologist as a way to develop future IT leaders. In this podcast, Reeg talks about how his organization has adapted to the current economy to maintain its position in the marketplace, what processes, best practices, and new technologies are in place to manage a global organization, what role outsourcing plays in the IT operations, and how leveraging diversity can improve the innovation process.

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In 2007, a major company issued a statement saying that it had dismissed its CIO for violating an important corporate policy. The nature of the corporate policy wasn't revealed. Just about every IT publication carried news of the event. For weeks IT bloggers posted comments about what the CIO could have done to be let go. Eventually, the noise level around this executive's dismissal died down, and the executive took a new job in an area outside of IT. In this podcast, enterpriseleadership.org asked one of the world's most sought-after authorities on executive reputation, to talk about how C-level executives, especially CEOs, build their reputations based on their corporate strategies, what they need to do to maintain them, and what challenges they face in developing and executing their corporate strategies. In her role as chief reputation strategist, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross leads Weber Shandwick?s global reputation consulting services and proprietary thought-leadership development. She has done groundbreaking, award-winning research into CEO and corporate reputation, executive team reputation, leadership transitions, and reputation sustainability and recovery. She spearheaded the first comprehensive research on CEO reputation and its impact on corporate reputation and performance. She developed Weber Shandwick?s first global corporate reputation study ? ?Safeguarding Reputation,? which identifies strategies for sustaining and recovering corporate reputation. Dr. Gaines-Ross also created Fortune?s ?On the Minds of CEOs? research. Her book, CEO Capital: A Guide to Building CEO Reputation and Company Success, was published in 2003 by John Wiley & Sons and her book on reputation recovery is scheduled to be published in 2008, also by John Wiley & Sons. Dr. Gaines-Ross created www.reputationRx.com, the Web site devoted exclusively to reputation news and information, and her blog can be found at http://reputationxchange.com/.

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Because of the rapidly accelerating pace of change in global business today, C-level executives in all size companies need to respond quickly to changes in their business climate. Thus, executives have to be aware, not only of their own external environment, but also they have to immerse themselves in their industries, and to look at society -- both nationally and globally. By understanding where changes come from or what changes to make, executives can take advantage of new opportunities. Meanwhile, executives must also focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in order to be successful. In fact, the Carnegie Mellon MBA programs looks at innovation in organizations, ranging from startups to the Fortune 500 companies. In this podcast, Dr. Art Boni, the director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about how entrepreneurial leadership and innovative drive corporate growth. (Boni also holds the John R. Thorne Chair of Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business.) He says that to achieve this, executives need to understand their market, and their customer needs, and then to develop strategies for going forward. He says, "Companies also need to have good leadership because a strategy without a good team to execute it won't go very far." Boni views corporate strategy as an integral part of innovation and success for any organization. He adds that good integration of information across the enterprise can help executives better execute their strategies and move the company forward. Dr. Boni has solid experience to back up what he teaches and preaches. Before getting his doctorate and becoming a full-time professor, Boni pursued an entrepreneurial career in the private sector. He joined Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) after its startup period and become part of the senior management team that built the company to $700 million in revenues. Today, SAIC is an $8 billion technology conglomerate. He also founded and served as CEO of a technology incubator, and four companies in technology and life sciences.

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When Hord Tipton became CIO of the U.S. Dept. of Interior, he knew he would be wrestling with some daunting IT issues, especially in security. In fact, the Dept. was reeling from a December 2001 court order that disconnected all Interior systems from the Internet. That order resulted in a multi-million lawsuit brought by beneficiaries of Individual Indian Trust accounts held by the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs, based in part on hackers burrowing into the Trust's accounts. By making a good case for business systems security, Tipton managed to convince the Interior's officials to increase the $4 million annual IT network and security budget to $100 million. Tipton and his staff spent the next four years upgrading systems security and getting all of the Interior's systems reconnected to the Internet. Tipton even gave his IT staff one year to become certified in security. When he received a lot of staff resistance to his challenge, the 60-year old Tipton did something unusual for a CIO. He became a Certified Information Systems Security Professional. This certification matched the job at hand. Under Tipton's leadership, the U.S. Dept. of the Interior established sound IT security policies and guidelines, and initiated testing and IT security training programs throughout the agency. Now retired from government service, Tipton is a board member of ISC2,, the organization that oversees the CISSP exam and maintains the credentialing process.

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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. The 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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To provide end-to-end IT services and business processing outsourcing solutions for Global 2000 companies, UST Global has 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. He says, "Because we know which projects won't meet customers' objectives, we can take the approprate action." The industry-leading expertise found within UST Global's centers of excellence concept plays another key role in the customer engagement process. The CoEs deliver pragmatic IT solutions that allow UST Global to consistently achieve its most critical business objectives. Complementing the CoEs, the partner programs aim to develop strategic relationships with key technology organizations, which can provide UST developers with access to new technology and educational resources. KPMG has certified UST Global as an SEI-CMMI and PCMM Level 5 company. Velleca says, "We've adopted Six Sigma for developing our customer-facing processes. Our centers in India are ISO 27001 certified. These quality practices provide a foundation for all of our services, and also to provide internal benefits to our customers."

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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 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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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 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 1,000 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 Newsmark'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 site.

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Server virtualization. Retiring and redeploying servers. Improved cooling. Virtualized desktops. Even temporary storage of the OS. These initiatives comprise Sybase's enterprise green strategy. Like many large companies, this $1 billion data base vendor has cut unnecessary IT costs by consolidating data centers. Now Sybase plans to keep unnecessary IT costs from growing by going green. In fact, Jim Swartz, CIO of Sybase, says that these initiatives could postpone the building of a new data center until 2017. How let's hear more about Sybase's going green from Jim Swartz, CIO and vice president of Sybase.

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What does agility have to do with information technology? If IT organizations want to lower their operating costs, to improve the business's overall customer service, and to find new revenues opportunities, they must improve their agility to anticipate changes in the marketplace, and to act accordingly. Agility, along with appropriate alignment with the business units, can help IT organizations create more business value. In this podcast, Dr. Nick Horney, founder and principal of Agility Consulting and Training, talks about the agile IT organization. He was one of the expert panelists who participated in the selection of CIO magazine's Agile 100. Now let's meet Dr. Nick Horney. http://www.enterpriseleadership.org

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Today, can you fly to any major city and find high quality, fully staff office space for a day or a month. You can open an office in New York without buying one piece of furniture or signing on with an Internet provider. Enter the instant office by Regus. This global company provides fully staffed, contractual office space, virtual offices, and meeting space in 400 cities in 70 countries. In this podcast, Mark Dixon, the founder and CEO of The Regus Group, talks about how he has combined innovative thinking, strong leadership, and cutting-edge technology to grow his business. Let's welcome Mark Dixon to the enterpriseleadership.org show.

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When it came to outsourcing requirements based on emerging technologies, such as Web services, Achievo decided to base its IT services delivery model on talent from China, instead of India. In this podcast, Bud Mathaisel, chief information officer and senior vice president of Achievo, talks about what differentiates his company's business model from other outsourcers and what has propelled the growth of IT outsourcing in China. Now let's listen to what Bud Mathaisel, CIO of Achievo, has to say. http://www.enterpriseleadership.orgChina, outsourcing, CMMI

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There's an old saying in IT. Business executives get the IT they deserve. Perhaps, this happens because a gap exists between how CIOs communicate the value of IT to business executives. Before they can bridge this gap, CIOs need to first understand where they rank on the Business IT Maturity model, and how they can create a construct they describes 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. Now let's meet Vaughan Merlyn. HOST Tom Parish. Produced at Tom Parish Inc. in Austin TX.

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PepsiCo. Seagram. Reebok. Eli Lilly. During his 40-year career in IT, Tom Trainer has been provided IT leadership for some of the world's most recognizable companies. He's seen IT evolve from the back office, to the cornerstone of the modern global corporation. In this podcast, Tom Trainer gives his observations about governance, IT alignment, innovation, and quality practices. So, join us for a conversation with Tom Trainer, the former CIO and senior vice president at PepsiCo.

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Are you one of those organizations with just too many powerful X86 servers? Then server virtualization might be just what you need. It enables you to consolidate these servers into fewer devices, as well as to reduce power consumption, and to eliminate the need to build a new data center. In this podcast, Simon Crosby, the chief technology officer at Citrix XenSource, provides some helpful guidelines for deploying server virtualization. Now let's join Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix's Virtualization and Management Division.

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These are the best or 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 those 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 CIO is changing and how the CIO should perform in their organization. New CIOs and seasoned CIOs who are reexamining their role will want to check out her Book, The New CIO Leader -- Setting the Agenda and Delivering Results, published by Harvard Business School Press, and thos podcast, as she talks about what it takes to become the new CIO leader.

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Those companies that get IT alignment right experience significantly larger business growth than their peers. They also see their IT costs go down. On the hand, many companies fall prey to the IT alignment trap by over aligning and, in turn, introducing more complexity into the organization. These are the findings of a study done by C.R. (Rudy) Puryear and his colleagues at Bain & Co.

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When it comes to deploying Six Sigma initiatives, IT organizations and IT service companies face a lot of challenges. The Juran Institute, a quality managing consulting firm founded by J.M. Juran, has been helping Fortune 1000 organizations to carry out Six Sigma successfully, especially in IT. In this podcast, Joe De Feo, CEO and executive coach for the Juran Institute, will talk about how Six Sigma applies to IT, and how organizations can correct the common mistakes they make in carrying out Six Sigma. He'll also dispel the myth that Six Sigma stops innovation.

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China. India, Brazil. Because the U.S. is no longer the sole player in IT innovation, companies such as IBM have had to devise new models for reaching start-up ventures around the world. Formed in 2000, the IBM Venture Group doesn't offer an investment pool of funds. Instead, the group works with more than 150 venture capital firms around the world to identify start-ups that might be candidates for non-equity relationships with IBM. Drew Clark, the co-founder, and director of strategy for the group, says, "We leverage the investments VCs make in these companies by working as a partner throughout their lifecycle." In this podcast, Clark tells how any CIO can replicate the group's model for innovation. It can start with what Clark calls the "open innovation jam," or "jamming," a process that encourages people outside of research and development and the corporate staff to contribute ideas for new processes. But regardless of their business, says Clark, "CIOs ... shouldn't limit themselves to one model for innovation."

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For the past 25 years, Jenny Craig, Inc., has become more of the U.S.'s leading health-conscious weight management program. Each week, more than 120,000 people follow the Jenny Craig program through the company's more than 500 Jenny Craig's center. Jenny Craig, Inc., which was purchased in July 2006 by Nestle for $600 million, is on a mission to do what it takes to keep its competitive edge. This move has included updating technology that enables Jenny Craig to offer a responsive relationship management program throughout customers' weight loss lifecycle. For example, features like click-to-call on the Jenny Craig Web site allow customers to enter their zip code and automatically receive a telephone call from the nearest Jenny Craig weight management center. Shourky Tiab, Jenny Craig's CIO, says, "Features like this help us to get close to our customers." Tiab, who joined the company in early 2007, is currently working on a back-office application that would sit on top of the new wide area network, which will connect all of more than 500 Jenny Craig weight management centers. Tiab says, "This application will give us a complete view of each customer, regardless of what channel he/she uses to communicate with us. It will help us to make our supply chain more efficient." In this podcast, Shoukry Tiab, chief information officer at Jenny Craig, talks about how the company perceives it customers and how technology is applied to serve their unique needs.

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Has anyone offered you an Altoid lately? Ever chew Wrigley's Doublemint gum when you were a kid? These are just two of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company's enduring brands. In 2001, the 116-year old company decided to expand and update the global image and reputation of the Wrigley brand. This move included replacing an aging, disparate IT infrastructure with a single supply chain platform using SAP. Donagh Herlihy, Wrigley's CIO, spearheaded the three-year, international implementation, and helped shape the governance process needed to carry out the initiative. Now, IT?s helping to increase brand awareness for Wrigley in innovative ways, even helping Wrigley to reach out to young customers with a presence in Second Life and a safe, family-fun Web site where kids can indulge in multi-player games. http://www.enterpriseleadership.org

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In 2003, Michael Paravicini became the new chief technology information officer at Zurich Financial Services, one of the world's largest insurance companies. Right away, he knew he had his work cut out for him. First order of business: how to transform a highly decentralized, locally based staff of 7,700 IT professionals, including 30 CIOs, and several data centers. Paravicini says that although it was a tough road, he met the challenge, reducing costs by 30 percent through careful oursourcing choices and best practices including IT Infrastructure Library.

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Why do half of all IT projects fail? Why do most companies create major IT plans that have no linkages to corporate strategy? Can IT really be run as a business? Faisal Hoque, author of IT management books inclucing The Alignment Effect, and Sustained Innovation, and founder of BTM Corporation, has spent years researching questions like this. In this podcast, he talks about some of the conclusions he's drawn, and about the "holistic business model" for managing technology and business together that have helped global companies like Marriott and JPMorgan achieve a competitive edge.

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Patricia Morrison has a stellar track record delivering the value major corporations expect from the IT organization. In less than two years, she?s taken the $42 billion Motorola Corp. from #42 to #12 on InformationWeek's ranking of Top 500 IT innovators in 2006, and #1 in the manufacturing industry segment. She has one consistent message for her team of 2,200 Motorola IT professionals: "Make sure we deliver what we commit to." In his podcast, Patricia Morrison, executive vice president and chief information officer at Motorola, talks about everything from corporate governance to business process improvements to IT career development through rotational programs.

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Ever received a courtesy call from DirecTV or have subscribed to an AARP service over the telephone? Then you've probably spoken with one of the 14,000 customer care representatives from PRC LLC, formerly called Precision Response Corp. PRC is the country's third largest contact center outsourcer, which manages customer relationship for some of the world's leading corporations. PRC aims to deliver value for both its B to B and B to C customers. And, IT provides the crucial underpinning for driving the contact center services. In this podcast, CIO and CTO Umesh Jain talks about how a large enterprise can gain a deeper understanding of its customers' behavior by harnessing the contact center's vast amounts of customer and market data.

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Lt. General Harry Raduege had spent a professional lifetime working in technology for the military -- the last spent as director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. Then came 9/11. The lessons he learned about the importance of "netcentricity" got up-close and personal on that day and after, as he led efforts to prioritize and restore telecommunications throughout New York City and the Pentagon. Now, as chairman of the new Deloitte Center for Network Innovation, Raduege brings deep understanding of today's increasing need for interdependent information networks that are secure and interoperable, whether in the public or private sectors.

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In managing today's ever-more-complex data environment, the common complaint is about data silos that are out of control. Enter Master Data Management (MDM), a way to integrate all those disparate silos of data without having to replatform your system. MDM could help your enterprise with issues that arise from compliance requirements, M&A support, and CRM support. It might also be a great way to move incrementally toward a service oriented architecture. Jill Dyché and Evan Levy are the authors of the new book, Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth; they're also consultants with Basline Consulting, which specializes in MDM. In this interview, they'll talk about how MDM can be a segue for SOA, when to know if an MDM initiative makes sense for your business, some of the do's and don'ts you should know about implementing such an initiative, and more. http://www.EnterpriseLeadership.org

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Being a new CIO in a new company has it challenges, and its rewards. Just ask Vin Melvin, who become vice president and CIO of Arrow Electronics in 2006. The $14 billion provider of electronic components and computer products had grown rapidly through global acquisitions. But as a result, Arrow's supply chain became highly fragmented, and other key issues emerged, like the need to improve IT governance, and to adopt formal best practices to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. Functions like driving innovation and IT governance remain works in progress, but compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley propelled Arrow to adopt formal best practices like the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. Says Melvin, "ITIL has brought a process discipline to the IT community which has made compliance less burdensome to both the auditors and IT."

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Acxiom Corp. has quietly built a $1.5 billion business aggregating and managing more than 20 billion customer and prospect records for more than 1,000 global companies. An innovative culture has garnered numerous awards for this 38-year-old company; for example, it brought grid technology into the mainstream by developing the Customer Information Infrastructure (CII), and it did away with formal titles (like CIO) in 1992. Kevin Zaffaroni, Acxiom's IT organization leader, says, "We continued to enhance this culture of innovation. That's one of the reasons why the world's largest companies come to Conway, Arkansas, to have us do their work."

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Remember the Jules Vern classic, Around the World in Eighty Days? Now, get ready for "around the global economy in one day" ... any random day. That's the structure through which author and journalist Daniel Altman has woven a series of insightful and thought-provoking snapshots of the global economy in his new book, Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy. Reading Altman's book will put to rest any doubts you've ever had that the sovreign destiny of nations is increasingly like an incredibly complex web comprising wealth, politics, and culture. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation with this respected global writer that may leave you with a much better appreciation for the old phrase, "it's a small world," and its significant implications. http://www.enterpriseleadership.org

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As CTO of Indian behemoth Tata Consultancy Services, K. Ananth Krishnan has relied heavily on the work of Dr. Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution to help drive innovation. In May 2007, Krishnan received an InfoWorld Top 25 CTO award for two far-reaching initiatives: One was Ultimatrix, an intranet and transaction platform that digitized and integrated all of the company's end-to-end information, ranging from human resources to sales. The other was Project Infinity, a multiprotocol label switching backbone to tie together all of the companies Internet-based communications, such as telephony and network access, and video collaboration applications. In this podcast, Krishnan talks about the wisdom he's gotten from Dr. Christensen, the role of a corporate think tank, an overview of TCS's service computing framework, and the best practices the company uses to carry out technology initiatives.

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Charlie Catlett is the CIO and division director of the Energy Dept.'s Argonne National Laboratory's Computing and Information Systems Division. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies, many federal agencies, and other organizations, in areas ranging from climatology to biotechnology. Because of Catlett's unique scientific and technical background, his duties push the boundaries of the traditional CIO role, from managing an IT group, to serving on the scientific computing leadership team, which is turning out plans and strategy for the Digital Laboratory. He also works with the TeraGrid Project, a $90 million project funded by the National Science Foundation that is deploying a 25-teraflops computational grid system integrating resources at Argonne, California Institute of Technology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and other institutions. And, an upcoming project is to establish a Second Life presence for Argonne, where scientific collaboration can be virtual and in real time. http://www.enterpriseleadership.org

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During the past decade, business intelligence and performance management have moved from being applications used by specific departments to being vehicles for strategic decision-making across the enterprise. In this interview, Don Campbell, vice president, platform strategy and technology at Cognos, will discuss the challenge of delivering the value of business intelligence to everyone in an organization, not just knowledge workers and executives. He will explain how technology trends such as enterprise search and wireless applications are changing the playing field by making business intelligence information more accessible by its current users, and for the first time, easily accessible by anyone in the extended organization.

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From the day when Tom Mendoza became president of Network Appliance (NetApp), he set out to create a culture based on candid communications among management and employees, emphasis on employee creativity and innovation, and respect for all employees, regardless of their position using technologies like CDs and podcasts as well as brown-bag lunch sessions with employees and executives. This culture helped the company to weather an $800 million loss following the dot.com debacle to better days as the fastest growing provider of turnkey network-attached or fabric-attached storage devices. Mendoza says, "When we interview prospective employees, we talk a lot about innovation. We want employees who can adapt to change and who provide us with good ideas for process and product improvements."

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BT Global Services is one of four business units that make up the BT Group, a $28 billion international provider of IT services and solutions. The award-winning group provides BT Group's customers with services like desktop and network equipment and software, transport and connectivity, and more. Yet, when Roel Louwhoff, president, customer service and network operations for BT Global Services, joined BT Global Services, it consisted of disparate entities from joint ventures, regional organizations, acquired companies, and services. His new business model included standardized operational processes for service delivery and service support, with the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, providing the framework. Join us for a conversation with Roel Louwhoff, on developing seamless customer service across continents and cultures, and how ITIL helped him build his organization into an award winner.

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What do Procter & Gamble, Austin Energy, and the Commonwealth of Virginia have in common? They?ve reaped the benefits of ITIL -- an IT service support/service delivery framework based on the IT Infrastructure Library. Selecting specific ITIL initiatives, like the service desk or change management, has become a norm with organizations using ITIL Version 1 or Version 2. Yet, few companies have embraced all of the ITIL initiatives. But that could all change with the lifecycle approach to IT service management built into ITIL Version 3, which provides a beginning and end to the entire service management process. In this podcast, Derek Lonsdale, an ITIL program manager at PA Consulting, provides a look at where organizations are with ITIL Version 1 and 2, what enhancements have been made to ITIL 3, and what are some of PA Consulting' lesson learned about carrying out ITIL successfully.

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Each day, American Airlines' 80,000 employees make sure more than 5,000 flights leave on time and arrive safely, on time, at their destinations. Monte Ford, vice president and CIO of American Airlines, doesn't mince word when he says his IT organization is a front runner, keeping pace with the highly competitive and dynamic airline industry. Ford sums up his common-sense approach to IT leadership as follows: "You constantly need to take your customers' pulse to know if you're doing a good job or not." Join us for a conversation with Monte Ford, vice president and CIO of American Airlines, who talks about how he oversees an IT organization in an industry that soars. http://www.EnterpriseLeadership.org host: Tom Parish

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When Rebecca Blalock became CIO of the Southern Company, a Fortune 500, $14 billion regional electrical utility in the Southeast, she made it her goals to (1) deliver the cost efficiencies to keep the company competitive and provide customers with low rates, and (2) educate business unit leaders about the benefits of working closely with IT. To accomplish those goals, Blalock took steps like implementing money-saving process improvements, and devising a Technology Showcase and a governance model that took the IT organization from obscurity to front-line innovation driver. Join us for an interview with Rebecca Blalock, senior vice president and CIO of the Southern Company, as she talks about being a force for positive change in her IT organization.

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Information management convergence is a very big and important subject for today's enterprise. There are more and more tools emerging in the marketplace to help manage boatloads of data, but Tim Jennings, research director for the Butler Group, thinks these tools are all part of a solution to a common set of business challenges. In this interview, he talks about the three types of business challenges for information management, how the rise of SOA figures in to the broad landscape of data management, and more.

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You might say that Vanguard, a global mutual fund giant that manages more than $900 billion in assets for 19 million customers, has created its own IT vanguard. The 2,600-person, in-house IT team, supplemented by 300 contractors and 500 business-unit professionals involved in IT, built 70 percent of the applications, and purchased the remainder of them from large software suppliers. The highly centralized IT organization aligns functionally and strategically, not physically, with each of the major business units. Says CIO Paul Heller, "To lead a business, you need to understand and appreciate the value of the technology being used." And, given the mere four-percent employee turnover rate that IT enjoys, it?s obvious that his organization appreciates his leadership. Join us for a conversation with Vanguard CIO Paul Heller, about the strategies and issues at work 24/7 in a company where IT is at the core of business success.

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I don't think anybody could doubt that Chevron Corporation should make the Fortune 10 list -- if it hasn't already. Chevron has $200 billion in annual revenues and one of the largest internal IT shops in the world. Gary Masda, Chevron's CIO, has a staff of 3,500 employees who oversee 10,000 servers, and support more than 60,000 employees. Since he became CIO, Gary's successfully carried out several huge IT projects, that have saved the company more than $200 million dollars. Join us, as Gary Masada, chief information officer of Chevron Corp. and president of Chevron Information Technology Co., talks about talks about what it takes to build a cutting-edge and highly efficient IT organization.

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The demands made on IT by a large and growing oil refiner can be incredible. In this interview, Valero Energy's CIO, Hal Zesch, and director of reporting and financial systems, Kirk Hewitt, talk about how IT meets those demands with initiatives like successfully creating and deploying Valero's enterprise resource planning (ERP) business model using SAP, and providing top-notch business intelligence to company execs. Valero's IT also ensures it stays ahead of the compliance curve, implements effective governance as an important part of aligning IT with the business units, and keeps the energy (and the revenue) flowing in spite of serious, weather-related events. Join us for an opportunity to learn more about the IT force that drives an energy giant.

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Hauling coal, grain, and, especially goods from China, have turned Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Corp. into a $14 billion company. In fact, BNSF operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America. To handle its growth, BSNF spent about $1.4 billion in capital improvements in 2005. The company also invests about $275 million a year in information technology to stay competitive. Solid metrics, like the Balanced Scorecard, have helped Jeffrey Campbell, BNSF's chief information officer, to align IT strategies and projects, and to make them predictable and workable with corporate strategies. Now let's listen as Jeff Campbell talks about keeping IT on track at Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

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In 2003, Jon Piot and John Baschab took their knowledge and experience from teaching IT and consulting on IT projects for Booz-Allen & Hamilton and Anderson Consulting to produce the first edition of The Executive's Guide to Information Technology. The book quickly reached the Top 30 on Amazon?s sales ranking, dozens of universities around the world adopted it as a standard IT textbook, and it was translated for the Chinese market. Now, the second edition reflects the many changes that have occurred in technology, along with the two authors' latest research. The revisions, plus two first-time chapters about IT strategy and IT problem solving, make the book a complete guide to aligning IT processes with business operations, and is a must-read for everyone from prospective IT professionals to well-established IT directors or managers. In this podcast, authors Jon Piot and John Baschab take turns answering a wide range of questions about their book, IT today, and the future of the role of CIO. Their answers might surprise you.

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About 33 acquisitions during the past 10 years have helped Avnet, Inc., grow to become a $14 billion worldwide distributor of electronic components, computer products, and technology services. But Steve Phillips, CIO of Avnet, is up to the challenges of managing a globally aligned IT team to leverage the company's scale to drive cost efficiencies. At the same time, IT must remain responsive to local business unit needs. To help achieve this, Avnet?s IT organization utilizes a business scorecard (modeled after the Balanced Scorecard) and benchmarking to make all key projects highly visible across all regions. Phillips also puts a high priority on innovation, and on career development for his team. Join us for a conversation with Steve Phillips, CIO of Avnet, who talks about how his organization is meeting the challenges of global, enterprise IT.

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show notes

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In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission got a wakeup call from Congress for failing to review the financials of Enron and Worldcom. The new SEC Chairman immediately launched a plan to improve all aspects of the commission's operations, especially information technology. This included hiring Corey Booth as CIO. Booth recently talked with Enterpriseleadership.org about the many initiatives he has since tackled to improve efficiency and effectiveness, including reporting requirements for companies, expanding the SEC's networked storage infrastructure, providing examiners with project better tools for tracking all investigations through the chain of command, and overhauling the information security program. Join us for this conversation with Corey Booth, CIO of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an increasingly integral government agency that, by its very nature, relies heavily on IT to successfully accomplish its mission.

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Management guru Peter Drucker used to say, employees need to feel like contributors, and customers need to feel like the boss. Arunas Chesonis obviously took that statement to heart, so when his former company was acquired by a mega-telecom in 1998, Chesonis and a team of former employees started PAETEC to provide the first-rate customer service they saw as non-existent in the industry at the time. Now, PAETEC has become a $1.5 billion provider of telecommunications services to medium and large businesses, healthcare organizations, and universities. Chesonis has chronicled his "value people before profit" management philosophy in a book called, It Isn't Just Business, It's Personal: How PAETEC Thrived When All the Big Telecoms Couldn't. Interested in hearing more? Join Arunas Chesonis, founder of CEO of PAETEC Communications as he talks about his company's culture and approach to product innovation this week on Enterpriseleadership.org.

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Nobody knows better than Michael Burgett about the complexity of today's IT organization, or of the job of CEO. He came up the ranks to become a CIO, then he founded CIO Partners of Atlanta to meet what he saw as a real need in the marketplace. Michael's seen the role of CIO evolve along with the IT organization itself. In this podcast interview, he assesses today's job market for CIOs, the changing role of the CIO in today's enterprise, what management and people skills a CIO might need to differentiate him- or herself, and more. If you're in the market for a new career opportunity, or just curious about the state of today's marketplace for CIOs, join us for an informative interview with Michael Burgett, president and managing partner of CIO Partners of Atlanta.

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In 2001, Accenture, one of the world's largest global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing companies, launched a major IT transformation to support company growth in the years ahead. IT went from supporting 75,000 employees to 129,000 employees around the world; and from using hundreds of disparate systems to just two. Accenture cut IT spending by 30 percent, yet the audited return on expected benefits from IT projects has grown to 124 percent. And, company revenues have gone from $11.5 billion in 2001 to $16.6 billion in 2006. In this podcast, Accenture's CIO, Frank Modruson, talks about how a good governance structure can enable an organization to run IT as an agile, profitable business.

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When it comes to running businesses in China, Dr. Bing Xiang has begun to create his own Chinese version of C-level executives with a graduate business education comparable to the powerhouse programs at Wharton and Columbia. In 2002, Xiang left his teaching post at the Beijing University to set up the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), where he is now the dean and accounting professor. The CKGSB MBA curriculum provides a unique management experience that combines global perspectives with a China focus, as well as a good understanding of humanities. He says, "We also combine this thinking with a better understanding of how Chinese companies function and how to integrate them into the global marketplace."

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What does it take to be a dynamic leader of a large IT organization? Mary Finlay, deputy CIO of Partners HealthCare System, has all of the right qualities. She manages a staff of 1,000 employees, and the massive IT infrastructure of New England's largest integrated healthcare organization. Finlay has consistently received IT leadership awards for improving business processes, carrying out new technologies, and helping further the career of her 1,100 staff members. Join us today for a conversation with Mary Finlay, CIO of Partners HealthCare System, as she talks about everything from overhauling her IT infrastructure to introducing career development programs in IT.

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Data, data everywhere! Some are crying, "Enough already!" But according to a study done by the University of California at Berkeley, more data has been created within any two-year period between 1995 and 2005, than during all of the prior history of mankind. And no one knows this better than Iron Mountain; it ranks as the world's largest protector of corporate records -- including paper documents, backup tapes, and other forms of digital media. Tune in to a candid conversation Iron Mountain CIO Kevin Roden, who talks about all things data: compliance, security procedures, encryption, and more.

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If you live in the Open Source World, you know that a lot happened in 2006. With some recent, high-profile acquisitions and strategies, software giants like Oracle, and even Microsoft, seem to be saying, hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! So, what's going on here? We've asked author and consultant Pete Loshin to join us today, to talk about the recent activities in the open source world, and what these mean for the enterprise. Pete's been watching the evolution of open source for some time, and he has some educated insights and even some predictions about what may be coming this year. So join us for a conversation with Pete Loshin about open source and proprietary software, and the twists and turns they're each taking today.

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Scenario for a "learning opportunity": When a career IT professional shifts from the private sector to the government sector. That was the career change that Thomas Jarrett made when he moved from a long career at Verizon to his current job as Secretary of the Department of Technology and Information and CIO for the State of Delaware. What made the opportunity irresistible? The opportunity to establish an IT organization that functioned like a business within a government environment.

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Have you ever wondered what the U.S. employment picture will look like in 10 years? 20 years? And what about the meat and potatoes of our economy, the Small and Medium Size Business -- can anyone get a clear picture of the future in that segment? Today, Paul Sarvadi, CEO and co-founder of Administaff, the nation's leading professional employer organization, talks about what's happening now in employment for small business in this country, and about what's changing. He's a big believer in using technology to drive his company's success, and he explains why. Paul is also a successful entrepreneur who's glad to share what he's learned about being an entrepreneur, and more. Join us today for a conversation with Paul Sarvadi, who's at the helm of the very successful Administaff.

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Over the past 60 years, the RAND Corporation has evolved from technology pioneer to leader in groundbreaking studies in IT, especially in the areas of security and privacy. These days, RAND's projects include one of the first national surveys to measure the impact of cybercrime on American businesses, a Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation Methodology to help corporations analyze their security issues, and a Research and Development database, to track federal funding for research and development in areas such as information technology. And at the helm of its operations since 1981 is Jim Thomson, president and CEO. During his watch, RAND has remained at the cutting edge of policymaking and technology innovation, and that's the way he likes it. Join us for a talk with Jim Thomson, who leads one of the nation's premierenon-profit, non-partisan research organization on public policy issues.

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What is "content-centric networking"? It's a networking approach that focuses on the information contained in data packets instead of focusing on the data packets themselves. It might also be a way to bring true connectivity -- and trust -- to the network and to the modern enterprise. Join us for a conversation with Van Jacobson, research fellow and Internet pioneer, who is developing a way to address the "security disaster" that today's Web presents to eBusiness, and to enable individuals far greater connectivity than they currently experience in an environment of firewalls and restricted perimeters. With content-centric networking, individuals and the enterprise may not have to exist on "virtual islands of connectivity" any more.

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What leads to innovation? How can mature companies sustain that cutting edge? Today, faced with tough, new realities including global competition and commoditization, it's more critical than ever for companies to find, and sustain, their innovative advantage. Drs. Mohan Sawhney, Inigo Arroniz, and Robert Wolcott believe that business innovation is about creating "new value, not new things." That's why they have developed a new framework for corporate innovation: the "innovation radar."

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During the past five years, Unisys, with annual revenues of $4 billion, has transformed itself from a mainframe manufacturer to a major provider of IT services, software, and outsourcing. Unisys's global customers include government agencies, financial services companies, giant media outlets, transportation providers, and even sporting events. Listen as Fred Dillman, chief technology officer at Unisys, talks about how his company transformed itself, and how Unisys is moving toward an exciting IT future.

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As city manager for the City of Dallas, Texas, Mary K. Suhm functions as the chief executive officer -- she just doesn't have the CEO title. Some of her job challenges could make some corporate CEOs run for cover. She's charged with encouraging accountability and efficiency for 13,000 employees, improving the quality of services and of life for the citizens of Dallas, and showing residents and the City Council that every cent of the city's $2.18 billion budget counts. Meet Mary Suhm, who talks about the challenges and rewards of managing a major, metropolitan area by using some new ideas, some new technologies, and some old-fashioned common sense.

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At a time when manufacturing and service jobs seem to be flowing out from industrialized countries like water, is it just an inevitable effect of globalization? Or could there be something more at work here, something much closer to home? Join Enterpriseleadership.org for a podcast with an expert who raises serious issues about the current conventional wisdom about outsourcing, and the future of global and domestic business.

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With global competition in high gear these days, the mantra for corporations is "improve processes, reduce costs, and cut waste ... continually." Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), a global corporation with annual revenues of $14 billion and 78,000 employees worldwide, is no exception. What is exceptional is their Six Sigma program, which has reduced internal and client costs by more than $100 million in both hard and soft savings. And another exceptional factor in that success is the man behind CSC's Six Sigma program, Robert Bryant, who's not only CSC's vice president of Six Sigma and Quality Assurance for the company's Global Infrastructure Services Group, he's also a prolific author, a record-setting athlete, and a licensed minister. Join us for a podcast interview with an inspirational guy who might inspire you to strive for more quality in your corporate environment, and in your life.

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How many times have you heard about a great idea for an invention or a business and said, gee, I wish I'd thought of that? Well, prepare to add another to your list: 1-800-GOT-JUNK. This brainchild of a high school grad who was more interested in starting a business than going to college, was launched with $700, an old pickup truck, and a lot of nerve. Today, it boasts more than 260 franchise locations in 38 states, four Canadian provinces, and parts of Australia and the UK. Interested in finding out more? Listen in on this podcast interview with Cameron Herold, COO and (another) company wunderkind, as he talks about what makes 1-800-GOT-JUNK so unique (besides the name), from its innovative Web-based Junknet system to "huddle" meetings to rubber chickens hanging from the ceiling. This podcast is sure to add an interesting new flavor for the word, "entrepreneur."

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Think you know everything you need to know about outsourcing? Find a great vendor, sign on the dotted line, and cross your fingers that all will go smoothly? The authors of a new book, Smarter Outsourcing, say, it's just not that simple. And, they have something to offer you: knowledge they've each acquired from years of doing business in the U.S. and Europe, and arranging and overseeing outsourcing deals. In this podcast interview, Jean-Louis Bravard and Robert Morgan talk about why, and for whom, they wrote their book, some of the greatest risks in an outsourcing deal and how to mitigate these, and why smart outsourcing may just be how Western companies can maintain their edge in a global marketplace of increasingly smart, cheap competition.

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Austin Energy, the 10th largest public utility in the United States, has a lofty corporate mission: to make Austin, Texas, the most livable city in the U.S. -- and why not? As chief information officer at Austin Energy, Andres Carvallo takes that goal seriously. In fact, he spearheaded a revolutionary program to transform a jumble of outdated legacy systems into a streamlined IT operation. He is now helping the company transform its business model to a offer a range of commodity power services and to build the systems to deliver them to customers. Listen as Carvallo doesn't mince words about running IT as a business and as a service provider.

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Now hear this: Good enough is no longer good enough. To survive, and thrive, your company must truly innovate, and not just once in awhile, but constantly, relentlessly. But, take a deep breath: According to thought leader and innovator Patricia Seybold, there are end users out there in the marketplace who would be only too happy to help you come up with enhancements, new applications, and even entirely new products, not to mention new processes to optimize production. They are the voices in the Internet ether who are having conversations amongst themselves all the time about topics you'd like to hear. And in a remarkable, new book, Seybold tells you how to join the conversation, learn from those voices, and lead your own innovation revolution.

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ITIL is a term you see a lot in IT these days, but does anyone really know what it is? According to ITIL expert Ken Turbitt, "ITIL is nothing more than documented common sense." The discipline of ITIL is something Turbitt strongly believes in; he holds an ISEB ITIL manager qualification, and has been a Gartner-qualified TCO consultant for more than seven years.ITIL may just be about doing what everyone seems to agree should be done, says Turbitt; yet, putting it to work requires discipline, deliberation, and having the patience to look at the big picture of business goals and IT, together.

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For Mark Popolano, "thinking big" just comes naturally. After all, he is the president of AIG Technologies, Inc., and the global CIO of AIG, a Fortune 100 corporation. So, when he took time out of a packed schedule to speak with Enterpriseleadership.org, what types of subjects/ideas were on his mind? The importance of risk management, data privacy concerns, and how an enterprise can achieve an agile, entrepreneurial culture (yes, it really is possible). Join us for a fascinating interview with a CIO for whom thinking big, thinking globally, thinking enterprise ... is not a big stretch. And see whether some of the points he raises and ideas he has might not also get you thinking big ... thinking enterprise.

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These days, "globalization" means more than EuroDisney or what factory in Bejing sewed the jeans you're wearing. As more companies use global teams in their business strategies, they're finding that the technologies that have made global teams possible can't solve the complexities that come with them. Maarten Nijoff Asser, a senior partner with Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Intercultural Management Consulting, has built a career of helping companies navigate those complexities. It's still all about the people, says this expert who's lived and worked globalization for years. Join us for a fascinating interview and hear what he has to say about this not-so-small world.

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For global business, today's world really is smaller ... but is it also risky? Business opportunity in Latin America looks hot ... but what's the climate there really like for the global investor? Tune in to Enterpriseleadership.org as Dr. Gerald McDermott from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is brings his unique insights and expertise to the conversation. In this two-part interview, he'll give us his views on some of the overall challenges that global businesses might face in the region; about how well he thinks that Argentina has weathered its economic storms; which economies in the region about which he's most positive; and he even gives some advice to those who are interested in investing in Latin America. So join us for a rich and insightful conversation with an expert who's been around the world (and then some), Dr. Gerald McDermott, as he offers his unique observations to the listeners of Enterpriseleadership.org.

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Although a lot's changed in the past 40 years in Silicon Valley, the place that nurtured Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak continues to attract the curious, the ingenious, and the passionate ... like Tim Marsland, chief technology officer and Sun fellow for Sun Microsystems. In this podcast interview, Tim describes what led him from academic life in the venerable halls of the University of Cambridge, to life in the hard-charging Valley. He also discusses the evolution of thought that led Sun to make its Solaris 10 OS free and open source, how the CTO must appreciate both the beauty of creative technologies and their market potential, and what he sees on the horizon for the tech industry. Robert Metcalfe once said, "Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley." And this interview will help you to understand why.

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Have you heard about RFID technology? Chances are you're already using it, if you have a toll road tag or an employee ID badge. Some say it's the most exciting innovation to happen in years. Others say, with all that real-time data flooding in, get ready for total chaos. And, still others say, RFID is another version of Big Brother. But if you're curious about this new technology that's becoming a part of our daily lives, tune in to this podcast interview with Oracle Corp.'s Peggy Chen. She'll talk about how RFID works, some of the challenges and opportunities it offers, how RFID technology can be most intelligently deployed and utilized. Peggy will also offer some high-profile examples of organizations that are using RFID technology to improve their business processes and their bottom line. So join us for an exploration of RFID: The future is here, and the technology advantage belongs to those who learn.

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VoIP is not just for techies anymore! Today, a company called Vonage has taken it mainstream, with more than 1.6 million customers utlizing its technology. And Vonage CTO Louis Mamakos sees promise and continued refinements in Vonage's technology and business, while acknowledging the challenges that his, and other, large enterprises face today. Join us for a dynamic conversation with an even more dynamic individual, who thinks the future's so bright he's gotta wear shades.

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Managing IT functions from bench to bedside for cancer research and patient care is no small feat for Lynn Vogel, vice president and chief information offer of The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. How could Vogel's interesting background in driving social welfare and policy issues in the 60s and 70s help him with the most important aspect of his work in IT today? What's his secret to balancing the needs and requirements of multiple customers while at the same time retaining a clear commitment to the corporate bottom line? Join us to learn more about this, and about this remarkable leader on the front lines of the battle against cancer.

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What is Enterprise Business Architecture, or EBA? According to Ralph Whittle, author and IT consultant, it is that rare convergence of service-oriented architecture, business process management, and enterprise architecture initiatives, the way to (finally) get the business and IT organization to talk the same talk, and walk the same walk. Join Tom Parish for a thought-provoking conversation with a man who has built a career around an idea whose time (he says) has come.

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Chances are, if you are an executive with an enterprise today, you've heard about a business strategy called the Balanced Scorecard, first outlined in a book called The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action. This book proposed the impossible notion that it is possible to achieve significant goals by developing a roadmap and executing on it. In this podcast interview with the Palladium Group's George McMillan, he talks about why he is a true believer in the Balanced Scorecard, and why he believes that you can move big corporations to achieve big goals, and that each employee can feel like more than just a cog in a wheel. You'll come away from listening to this podcast interview with some powerful, useful information.

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What's it like to work in a place that encourages playfulness, creativity, and innovation while demanding scientific rigor and integrity? How would it feel to influence the evolution of the machine as tool, not like a hammer that sees everything as a nail, but with an intelligence that allows judgment and discernment? Only a lucky few of us get to experience these things. And Dr. Victoria Bellotti, a researcher at the legendary PARC, is one of those. Tune in for a fascinating conversation about the ubiquitous email, the future of human-computer interaction, and about her role in inventing a part of our future.

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What does it mean to be a consummate entrepreneur? You might ask Sashi Reddi, founder, chairman, and CEO of AppLabs, a global IT services company specializing in testing, development, and certification solutions. Sashi has founded three companies since entering the workforce, and despite experiencing his share of lumps during the "DotBomb" explosion, he emerged to found his current, successful venture, and willing to share what he's learned from some of his hard-won experiences.

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Is the world really flat? No, says Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, economist, author, and educator, although the world is certainly in what he terms a "situation of flux," in which anybody ... from Malaysia to Madison, Wisconsin ... might be someone else's competition. And, he insists that corporations and governments can't turn a blind eye to the needs of those individuals caught in this new state of flux, to maintain stability and prosperity. Tune in to a fascinating interview with a brilliant economist who has something to say about the very-real bumps and boulders that make up this "flat world" of globalization.

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Will physical security and IT security become a singular function managed by a single CSO (chief security officer)? If so, does that mean the role of CISO (chief security officer) will go away? These are some of the questions posed in this podcast to Tim Williams, Nortel CSO, and Steve Hunt, research president and founder of 4A International (4AI), a physical/IT security convergence consultancy. Tune in to get these experts' take on the converging roles of CSO/CISO in the enterprise of today and tomorrow.

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Warren is giving away his billions. Bill is taking early retirement to concentrate on working with his charity. U.S. charitable giving has reached new "highs." What's going on here? Is social responsibility becoming cool? The CIO of a $1.6 billion dollar wholesale/retail company that has built its culture around social responsibility believes that being progressive can also be profitable, and she proves it. Timberland is the company, and Rosalee Hermens is the CIO whose task it is to align the nuts-and-bolts of IT with Timberland's goals for social responsibility and business success. And she does it very well.

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Tight Budgets. Answering to lots of different people. Struggling to be heard in strategic business discussions. These are just a few of the challenges a municipal CIO faces daily. But none of these bothers Gail Roper, the CIO of the City of Kansas City, Missouri. She looks for ways to use technology to improve the economic and educational landscapes of this culturally diverse midwestern city with 500,000 citizens. In fact, she has received numerous awards for transforming Kansas City into one of the country's most technologically sophisticated municipalities. Roper's not afraid to find ways to retain legacy programmers, advise Fortune 500 CIOs, and more. And the old stereotype of bureaucratic paper-pusher? This is a CIO who pushes envelopes!

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Meet Marcus Sachs, director of the cyber security research center for the Department of Homeland Security, and hear what he has to say about disturbing trends in online crime and what enterprise organizations must do to protect their data and their users while at the same time bolstering our critical national infrastructure.

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How many CIOs would climb 16,000 feet up the Andes to test some mobile satellite terminals with digital links to laptops? Providing IT solutions for colleagues in a remote African jungle or high up in the Andes has become second nature to Gregory Smith, CIO of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) based in Washington, D.C. This chief information officer might work for a not-for-profit, but he runs IT as a business with a strong governance framework. Smith also takes time from his busy schedule to mentor newly minted IT professionals. Since 1995, he has been an adjunct professor at John Hopkins University. And in 2005, he took time to weave his professional experience and teaching experience into a book, Straight to the Top -- Becoming a World Class CIO.

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Every security professional in IT has to make the tradeoff between the time, the frequency, and the risk of the individual network vulnerabilities. Even if you outsource network security to a service provider, you're still accountable for the final outcome. That's an example of the straight talk you'll get from Lloyd Hession, chief information security officer for BT Radianz, a financial industry network service provider owned by the $25 billion BT Group. And IT security is the subject of this podcast interview with this outspoken security expert.

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Got compliance? Every U.S. business today does, and maybe no one knows better how complex these issues can be than Michael Rasmussen, vice president and analyst in Forrester's IT Management & Services research group. He's worked in this arena for more than 12 years, and believes that the focus in risk management is shifting from emphasis mainly on financial risk to emphasis on operational risk. In this interview, Rasmussen provides an overview of the 500-lbs.-and-growing issue of regulatory compliance, and discusses what he calls The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Compliance Programs. It's an information-packed discussion with an expert who knows compliance, knows business, and knows that today's enterprise must, and can, move forward in this complicated and sensitive environment.

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Can an IT infrastructure differentiate an organization strategically from its competitors? That was the premise of the May 2003 Harvard Business Review article called, "IT Doesn't Matter." Written by the Review's editor, Nicholas Carr, the article sent IT executives everywhere spinning in their ergonomic swivel chairs. His 2004 book, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, expanded the article's premise by asking executives to think about IT and its role in business strategy. Whether you agree with him or not, Carr has become one of the most influential thinkers about the value of technology, its role in the business, and what this means for the CIO and for the organization.

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Have you ever heard the saying, it's not what you know, but who you know? Dr. Kathleen Carley at Carnegie Mellon University has dedicated a career to bringing to light the shadow network behind the org chart, where and how the real work gets done in an enterprise. Using scientific methods and technological tools including metrics, data analysis, and computer simulations that study interactions via email, phone exchanges, and more, Carley and others seek a clear view of the flow of knowledge and power. Join us for a conversation with a pioneer who tries to predict future behavior within entities from corporations to terrorist cells by using high-tech means to map then most fundamental of human structures.

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How do you start an avalanche? Suppose you simply throw rocks off a 1,000 foot mountain; the rocks would break apart into pebbles, and together they would gather momentum down the mountain until ... In the end, each pebble is disparate, but uniquely useful; together, they create an unstoppable force. The new book, The Pebble and the Avalanche -- How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions, examines how this phenomenon plays out in business. Author Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky begins with this question: Why do certain kinds of innovations like, say, the personal computer and the Internet, start avalanches in business and technology, and what do these inventions fundamentally have in common? Sometimes, says Yudkowsky, breaking things apart unleashes incredible power.

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Even if you don't know a lot about IT, it's hard not to be intrigued by what Dr. Sinclair Stockman has to say (and you probably won't be able to predict what he will say). As an executive who directs a staff of 9,000 IT professionals for BT Global Services, no one could say he isn't a true technologist, but he's also well-read enough to quote from The Lord of the Rings to describe convergence, and British World War II General Bernard Law Montgomery to talk about leadership.

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Pioneer. Early Adopter. Risk Taker. All of these adjectives describe Robert Worthington, CIO of Chattanooga-based BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. He's helping to transform the way Tennessee's largest health benefit company serves its 2.9 million enrollees who work for companies such as Wal-Mart, Olan Mills, and the State of Tennessee. Worthington welcomes the challenge of applying new technology to streamlining processes, such as processing claims. And, Worthington has what it takes to weather major cultural shifts in a very conservative company. He's not only putting the technology in place for the next generation of healthcare management, but he's forming a culture that focuses on employee innovation and creativity.

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Sometimes, control can be beautiful ... especially in the complex (and expensive) arena of IT governance. And that is when CobiT -- the Control objects for IT -- can be beautiful, too, helping you to streamline and improve your processes for managing IT service delivery. And not many people understand this better than today's guest, Gary Hardy, IT consultant and contributor to the original initiative that created CobiT.

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Is the phrase "IT flexibility" an oxymoron -- you know one of those paradoxes in two words, like "jumbo shrimp" or "goverrnment organization"? It certainly can be. But Tim Jennings, research director for the UK's Butler Group, says that, not only is achieving flexibility and agility in IT possible, he is there to tell you how it can be done, and he's happy to talk about this. The devil is indeed in the details -- the architecture you set up, the infrastructure you utilize, and the governance and processes you implement --

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Process management programs like Six Sigma or Total Quality Management can streamline processes, increase efficiency, and result in cost savings for companies that use them. But can too much of even this good thing spell trouble? Yes, says Prof. Mary Benner of the Wharton School. Her research, with Dr. Michael Tushman from the Harvard Business School, has shown that that the same process management programs that have helped business increase quality and efficiency also drive out the kind of radical innovation that moves technology forward to "the next cool thing." Not ready to ditch your CobIT, but still keen on creativity? Tune in to this informative podcast and hear Dr. Benner's discussion on her research, as well as her Rx for balancing the yin of control with the yang of change.

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It's great to feel good about what you do for a living. But, imagine feeling in awe of what the organization you work for accomplishes. That's the benefit the soft-spoken Clarence White gets from working as CIO for The Salvation Army Territorial Headquarters for the Western United States in Long Beach, California. Whether it's trying to bridge the digital divide, provide job training for adults completing The Army's drug rehab program, or ensuring his territory's IT infrastructure keeps pace with corporate America, White has his work cut out for him. But Clarence White aims to make sure IT is always an integral part of The Army's continuing success story in the face of modern urban challenges as well as sudden, natural disasters. That's why you can call Clarence White is a man on a mission.

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Take two large, legacy health care systems, each with distinctly different IT systems, technology infrastructures, staffs; merge them together; and what have you got? Absolute chaos? Not if you're talking about Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, the product of such a merger. It's ranked among the top pediatric hospitals by U.S.News & World Report and as one of the top 10 children's hospitals nationwide by Child magazine. Just to top it off, it was also featured as one of Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2006. In this interview, Jack Storey, CIO of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, will talk about the merger, how he and his team survived, thrived, and made IT work.

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It's a fact that when you really love what you do in your work life, that passion helps fuel your whole life. Case in point: Brian Young, CIO and Vice President of Information Technology at Creighton University in Omaha. He's the CIO for a prestigious, private university. He produces weekly podcasts that give technology tips for your everyday life with a local television station. He does volunteer work with childrens hospitals. He's on the board of directors for Nebraska Public Television. One question: When does this guy sleep? To hear this guest tell it, he doesn't need a lot of sleep: He is a man who's found exactly what it is he wants to do in life, and he draws on his passion for his work to keep him going (and going, and going ...).

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When was the last time that you heard an executive say they viewed the organization's people as its true intellectual assets ... and mean it? Sandra Hofmann, once a teacher of special needs kids, then a manager for Big Blue and later an award-winning CIO says that, and more. In the post-Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley era of business, Hofmann maintains an old-fashioned loyalty to "character," that mysterious virtue that the '90s sort of left behind; cultivate executives with character, and you have not just managers, but leaders, she contends. The lady likes to think outside the conventional box, is comfortable with change, is comfortable viewing work through the prism of life. The lady is comfortable redefining what it is to be a "gadfly."

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Is the ability to succeed as an entrepreneur something that we learn, or something that we are? Can science, and specifically, the field of genetics, provide at least some of the answers? Join Tom Parish for a conversation with Thomas L. Harrison, successful businessman, CEO, author of the new book, INSTINCT: Tapping your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, and what some people might call a "born entrepreneur." You may come away with some new insights about who you are, and some strategies about how you can use that insight to achieve success in your life goals.

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What is "Iron Mountain"? Sounds like some kind of top-secret military base -- maybe even a rock band. But Iron Mountain is one of those companies that you seldom hear much about, or know much about, until you need them -- really, really need them. If you'll tune in to this interview, I know that you'll learn a lot that you didn't know before about a business service called "technology escrow," and you might even start thinking big thoughts about big issues, like trust, technology, and about a safe harbor in a fast-changing world.

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BMC Software's CTO Tom Bishop is part of that tribe of people called Techies -- those folks who carry on a love affair with great coffee; work in front of a computer all day, go home at night, and turn on their computers; and are not particularly WOWed when inventions like cellphones emerge, because chances are, they've already envisioned them. And always, always, they are thinking, dreaming, about what will be The Next Cool Thing. In this podcast, Bishop explores some of the hottest topics in tech today, from what will Oracle CEO Larry Ellison do next, to how will the video iPod change the world, to what he thinks about the latest GOOGLE/Sun Microsystems announcement (and what he'd hoped they'd say). He even wonders aloud about the Disneyworld, or Brave New World, that the present Internet infrastructure will usher in ... and he invites the listener to think, and to dream, along with him.

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In taking on the role of Provost/Vice President and CIO, Johns Hopkins Medical Center and University, Stephanie Reel assumed responsibility for what could have been an overwhelming IT bureaucracy serving an incredibly diverse end-user group. Instead, IT has worked with researchers, students, staff, and medical personnel to streamline and improve its processes and systems, and even to develop an award-winning electronic patient records system. Which just goes to show you what can be accomplished with a little talking, a little listening, and a little pasta.

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In the heady days of the Internet Bubble, big-company fish with big appetites eagerly snapped up smaller-company fish and their promising technologies. Now, the technology business seems to be recovering, and some big fish are again getting hungry. In this interview, Dr. Saikat Chaudhuri of the Wharton School of Business takes a close look at the M&A activities of tech in the 1990s: what succeeded, what failed, and why. And, he even gives tips on how your business can solve some of the problems he's studied, and how to avoid others.

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It was an exciting vision -- providing a global, virtual personal assistant -- that was ahead of its time in the 1990s when it first arose, but has been nurtured, developed, and now fully leveraged into a dynamic services marketplace, Rearden Commerce. The man behind the vision and the company, Patrick Grady, is a bit of a dynamo himself, and in this interview, he discusses issues from services as commodities, the future of the U.S. in the global services marketplace, and why Larry Ellison was wrong about Silicon Valley as the new Detroit. Tune in to this engaging podcast, and prepare to open your mind to a new (virtual) world of possibility.

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The fourth Harvard Business School Colloquium on the Computer and Telecommunications industries, held at Harvard University in the spring of 2003, brought together some of the best minds in academia, government, and private industry to discuss one thing: broadband, and the implications of its growth for business, society, and innovation. In a stimulating audio interview, Tom Parish speaks with conference co-chairs Stephen Bradley and Robert Austin, who co-edited the subsequent book from the proceedings, The Broadband Explosion; their conversation touches on topics from the global race for broadband leadership, the disruptive possibilities posed by WiFi, security challenges, and what kind of innovation might be driven by all that processing power.

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In the digital age, it seems that everyone from Amazon.com, to your state DMV, to your local grocery store wants to get hold of your personal data, store it, analyze it, and share/sell it to companies you've never even heard of, without your knowledge or permission. But while Americans nervously scan article after article on the rising threat of identity theft, and the U.S. Congress holds hearings, Europeans think they have a better way to retain a little bit of control over your own privacy, and have since the 1980s: The Data Protection Act. Enterpriseleadership.org invited Mike Davis, senior analyst with the Butler Group, Europe's leading IT analyst group, for a frank and informative conversation about the European model for data privacy. Mike addresses how even the Act is subject to subtle interpretations from country to country within the European Union; what U.S. companies doing business in Europe most often do wrong with regards to data protection; how coming technologies such as biometrics might play in the EU, and more.

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So, you've hired a consultant to help you fix big problems in your IT organization. But instead of telling you how much money to throw at the problem, he tells you that it doesn't matter how much new hardware and software you buy, it doesn't matter how many consultants you call in, because in the end, you must focus on the people within IT to heal IT department. Using this approach will not cost a lot of money; but without that focus, you probably won't ever fix your IT organization. Sounds too good (or too scarey) to be true? Tune in to an energetic conversation with industry veteran Harris Kern as he dispells a few comfortable corporate myths, and see if his approach might mean success for your enterprise.

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For many businesses today, some sort of oursourcing just makes sense. But before you leap into an outsourcing contract -- whether outsourcing IT or business processes like Payroll and Procurement -- you need to remember those devilish details, and educate yourself about them first. Join Tom Parish in a thoughtful and educational talk with John Nicholson, an attorney in the Technology Group at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, focusing on technology and business process outsourcing, and learn how to increase the odds that your outsourcing deal will be a success.

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As part of the University of California's SETI@home project, thousands of hours of CPU time are being logged, 24/7, to analyze data gathered in the search for extraterrestrial life. And the work's being done by a massive supercomputer, not based in a silo in Wyoming, but in a network of home computers all over the world, where volunteers are crunching the numbers and forming a worldwide community of Citizen Scientists. In this interview, meet the project's director, David Anderson, who talks about SETI@home and other projects that now reside under the umbrella of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (yep, BOINC). Learn how BOINC's staff of two navigates issues like security and project management, to push the limits of both distributed computing and Open Source computing to intergalactic heights.

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Life is never dull for CIO Deirdre Woods at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School. She and her team divide their time among a host of constituents, interests, and tasks, from working with faculty on research projects to supporting blogs where current students can share information and their views with prospective students. The pace and scope of all this might easily distract, sidetrack, and overwhelm even a high-energy individual like Woods, multiple times per day. But she and her staff live by one mantra: Focus on the institution's core mission. And from that focus, and the alignment it's ensured between IT and the school's business objectives comes a rich and collaborative environment where everyone can grow.

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As a provider of private mortgage insurance, some might say that the PMI Group is probably a pretty risk-averse company. But ask PMI Group's CIO, Dan Roberts, about this, and he'll tell you that the company is certainly not risk-averse. "We're in the business of risk management," Roberts responds. "What we are," he adds, "is cautious." And this willingness to take on risk, with an eye toward managing it, has paid off for PMI, for its IT organization, and for the man behind that organization.

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In his years of consulting with top corporations, Hrebiniak realized that a lot of time and planning is spent on devising business strategies, but painfully little goes into how to make those strategies become realities. Execution, says Hrebiniak, is not just about "handing off the ball so employees can run with it." Having clear methodologies in place for execution is a critical, but often missing, piece of the equation. A lot of good business strategies fail because of this, leaving management to wonder why.

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In a world where data is being gathered about us every day, we may wonder if there's such a thing as "balance." Post-911, we want the security of passenger screening by airlines and the government, but we may not want them to read all about our traffic tickets or grades in school. We may like the convenience of buying groceries with a credit card, but not at the price of grocery chains building algorithms based on our buying habits. As founder of the Computer Ethics Institute and an expert in the field of data management, Dr. Ramon Barquin does a lot of thinking about issues like these, too. In this interview, he talks about data warehousing, individual privacy versus public good, and he gets to the heart of the matter: When personal information can be gathered about us in so many ways, and used (and abused) in so many more ways, where is the ethical line in the sand?

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To hear him tell it, Kevin Werbach has been interested in all things technological, from his days as an attorney at the FCC, where he focused on the intersection of business, technology, law, and public policy, to his most recent successes with the Supernova conferences, where professionals from business, government, academia, the military, and more, meet to discuss how new technologies effect business and society.

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Back in 1974, when Suzanne Gordon was a college student at North Carolina State University, she recalls seeing an ad in her school newspaper, warning students against choosing a career in IT because there wouldn't be any jobs available when they graduated. Today, she refers wryly to this story when speaking to students about going into high tech as a career. If you truly have a passion for the field, she counsels, don't let the ups-and-downs of high tech stop you: IT needs people with passion. And it's evident from listening to her talk about the career she has built that passion is what brought Suzanne Gordon to the field of high tech, and what fuels her in her current job as CIO of the largest privately held software company in the world, SAS.

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It was a long road to travel, from writing software for geophysical exploration to heading up IT for Sun Microsystems. And along that road, you can bet that Bill Vass, Sun's visionary CIO, acquired a wealth of experiences; among them, working as CTO for the Army, and later, as a Pentagon CIO overseeing IT for the Department of Defense. What can a tech guy learn from heading up that $35 billion behemoth? If you are Bill Vass, you might learn the concept that simplicity is a beautiful thing, and that consolidation can spur, not quash, exciting innovations.

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"It is always the simple that produces the marvelous" -- Amelia Barr. In 1998, a woman named Patricia Seybold authored a book, customers.com, followed a few years later by The Customer Revolution. These two books crystallized all the rampant requisites of dot.com-era eBusiness into one, simple tenet: Know who your customers are and make sure you have the products and services they want. Seybold?s refreshingly straightforward thoughts about customer service, along with the compelling case histories she presented made a lasting impression on the burgeoning landscape of eCommerce. In this exclusive interview with EnterpriseLeadership.org, Patricia Seybold talks about how the landscape of doing business via the Internet has changed -- and how it has not changed -- in the seven years since her first book's publication.

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