Companies are increasingly developing new executive roles aimed at making the organization as a whole more data-driven and digitally adept. Here’s how three new tech exec titles take different approaches to tackling the same problem.
Corporate culture may matter even more to your project's success than ROI does. Here's how to work with it rather than against it.
If there's no catastrophic system failure or major software deployment to work on, CEOs might wonder what IT does all day. Here's how to make sure your contributions aren't undervalued when things go smoothly.
Many IT leaders admit their spending is too heavily weighted toward keep-the-lights-on projects. Here's how to tip the balance.
Managing the flow of an infinite supply of worthwhile projects through a finite IT operation takes finesse. Here's how to avoid the backlog and the chaos.
IT leaders must learn to tell whether a new technology will transform their businesses -- or just become the next boondoggle. Four CIOs offer their perspectives.
About four years ago, Medidata Solutions decided to switch from its traditional "waterfall" method of software development to an agile methodology. Medidata provides clinical testing solutions in a software-as-a-service model. "We made the change for all the usual reasons," says Andrew Newbigging, senior vice president of research and development. "We wanted to be more responsive to customer needs." At the same time, Medidata's IT leaders explored the possibility of outsourcing some of the company's software development. Though that might have made sense in the traditional waterfall world, they concluded that it was the wrong way to do agile.
An insurance company decided to roll out an application for its sales reps. The new app would give them a wider selection of products to offer customers when out in the field. Information on those products was stored in a legacy mainframe system, so the company created a Web interface that let reps query the database to get details on offerings.
A user-friendly interface is paramount if you want employees and external users to adopt an enterprise application. But what, precisely, makes an app user-friendly? That's a complicated science, with detailed books and research papers devoted to it. But if your app has any of the following three elements, that's probably not a good sign.
Can deploying a user-friendly enterprise application solve customer service problems? For British Airways, the answer appears to be yes. In August, the airline conducted a pilot test in which about 100 crew members were given iPads loaded with its new Enhanced Service Platform app. After a successful test, the airline is now distributing 2,000 iPads with the app to senior crew members across its route network.
Many companies initially installed Linux for noncritical uses, but now the operating system is frequently being used to run core applications. To keep those applications running smoothly, IT managers must provide their staff with the necessary Linux expertise.
In a previous job at a large refining company, IT director Bob Ghirlanda spent a year putting together a plan to install a computerized maintenance management system. With the system specifications and ROI analysis in place, Ghirlanda went to work implementing the project. Then things started to go wrong.
Last July, GoTo Auctions was knee-deep in problems. Part of Pasadena, Calif.-based GoTo.com Inc.'s portal site, Raleigh, N.C.-based GoTo Auctions is a "shopbot" for auction sites, allowing users to search hundreds of different auctions for specific items.
A few years ago, Tony McDonald was Budget Rent A Car Corp.'s director of financial systems and in charge of creating new reporting technology for the Lisle, Ill.-based car rental agency. The project was well under way when the corporate controller who had sponsored it left the department.