Summer’s recently released CIO Connect magazine featured a profile interview with Deloitte UK partner and CIO Mary Hensher, a people person with a passion for the potential of IT to change business. The feature covered the following areas:
- Deloitte UK CIO Mary Hensher is only too aware of the fact that she remains a scarcity amongst the rarefied air of UK business leadership; a woman with a responsibility for technology at a leading firm.
- There is hope that the balance will once again shift towards women, and that hope comes in the form of social media: “Technology used to be anti-social; now it’s social,” says Hensher, referring to the increasing prevalence of collaborative technology.
- “You need pioneers to prove that new models of working are possible,” says Hensher. “Part-time employment will not work in every job but IT should be more accommodating. Employees need to be as flexible as they can. A good working relationship can make new models work.”
- Information is everything. It is crucial that a central core of IT experts are retained in-house to ensure that client data is secure: “We can’t afford ignorance and managing secure data is essential,” says Hensher.
- Hensher says issues of security and mobility come together and create concerns around connectivity: “The challenge is to connect your people effectively,” she says.
To read the full article please, click here.
CIOs say a principal part of their role is developing strong partnerships with external suppliers and internal colleagues. But what makes a good relationship and how do you maximise its effectiveness? My latest feature for silicon.com investigates:
Read the marketing bumf from most technology vendors and you would be forgiven for thinking that just about any technology system is a potential cure-all for the business’s ills.
Words such as ’solution’ are allied to terms like ‘leverage’ to suggest a meaningful – but actually, meaningless – route to IT-enabled operations. If only IT could deliver everything that supplier’s promise. In most cases, it simply cannot.
“The industry’s not as bad as it was but there’s still an issue of over-promising,” says Neil Pamment, a technology veteran and IT director at legal firm Denton Wilde Sapte. With previous experience of working with vendors across various sectors, including manufacturing and healthcare, Pamment says over-zealous marketing assertions can create issues for CIOs.
For the full feature, click here.
IT leaders value the opinions of executive and IT team peers when it comes to cost cutting, according to CIO Connect research.
Cost savings continue to be a major priority for IT leaders. Recent research from CIO Connect suggests that cost remains a key business priority for 2010, despite the increased importance of strategies for growth.
And an additional poll from CIO Connect shows that most IT leaders are likely to consider the views of executive and departmental peers when calculating potential cost savings. In both cases, as much as 50% of CIOs suggest the views of either the executive board, or the IT team, are most important.
Click here to read more…
We’re putting the feelers out for some new research at CIO Connect. The research addresses the relationship between the finance director and CIO – if you’re an IT leader, we’d love to hear from you. Here’s the blurb:
Do you sometimes feel like you’re playing Oliver to your FD’s Mr Bumble? Or have the tough economic conditions provided an opportunity for you to work closely together on IT-driven efficiencies to help cut operational fat?
CIOs expecting budget increase in 2010 are among the lucky few. Only one third are anticipating a bigger slice of the pie, according to a recent survey by analyst group Ovum, and even then expectations are slim – an increase of between just 1% and 5%. Meanwhile, CIOs taking part in a Gartner survey at the beginning of the year said they are planning on IT budgets in 2010 mirroring 2005 levels.
The recession has left its scar and many FDs are wary the economy could bite again in the face of high unemployment and the UK debt burden. Understandably, they are reluctant to dish out more from the organisational pot. With FDs under pressure to keep finances tight, and CIOs hit with greater demands to do more with less, how does this challenging dynamic impact your working relationship?
We are carrying out a survey to discover just how the vital partnership between CIO and FD is working in the current economic climate. Click here to find out more and to participate in the survey.
I’ve been getting a bunch of emails from PRs that are pitching for what they believe to be forthcoming features in CIO Connect. The pitches are always welcome – but many of the suggested features have already been written and are about to be published.
Take the corporate social responsiblity (CSR) feature, which has received a lot of attention in the last week-or-so. Some nice ideas, too. The problem is that the feature is due to come out in July’s spring edition and was finished a long time in advance. I’m actually now working on content for the autumn edition, which goes to bed mid-summer.
One PR told me she’d got the details for forthcoming features from ‘Features Exec’. It’s a regularly repeated story – don’t believe everything you read on a database; better to get it from the horse’s mouth (in this case, me). Here’s what I’m currently working on for the autumn edition:
- Hyperconnectivity – How can collaborative technologies help CIOs to boost connectivity? Potential areas include mobile devices, next-generation web and the future office.
- Information management – How can CIOs control information management? Potential areas include content management, security, next-generation search and retrieval.
- Executive partnership – How can IT leaders create effective partnerships with other executives? The feature will draw on the significance of senior team relationships.
- Finally – and as ever – I’m also looking for interesting business people with an interesting story to tell. So, that might be CIOs, it might also be other c-suite executives, business gurus, leadership experts and futurologists.
There’s also the back page slot, which gives technology chiefs the chance to talk about out-of-work interests (we’ve recently had mountain climbing, round-the-world sailing and marathon running). Ta.
CIOs talk a lot about innovation. Actually, it’s often all they talk about – along with a bunch of related concepts, such as value, efficiency, globalisation, leadership and partnership. But what is innovation?
It’s a question that’s being analysed in a number of ways by CIO Connect and I’m putting together a special feature, speaking to CIOs and senior researchers at blue-chip businesses. Early conclusions? CIOs – and other business executives, more generally – often wrongly focus on the ‘blue sky’ element of innovation.
‘Blue sky thinking’, as well as being a bloody awful phrase, is only one tenet of innovation. It covers the research and development part, the creativity. But there’s another area of innovation that is probably more important, especially in the current economic climate.
Innovation is not just about developing something ‘new’, it is also about the re-use of existing assets in different and exciting combinations. Basically, it’s about regeneration and making good with something bad – ‘brown-field site thinking’, if you will (to borrow and manipulate the phrasing of geography).
Now, which is better – ‘blue sky thinking’ or ‘brown-field site thinking’?