CIO Insights editor, Doug Moran, lists 16 attributes of a leader, which he calls the “16 Ifs.” The “If” part he attributes to a Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name, which describes for Doug, “a leadership path that I have chosen to follow.” Doug says the first two lines might have been written for today’s CIOs:
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;”
Here are Doug’s 16 attributes of a leader:
- Composure ― The Power to Keep Your Head
- Character ― The Wisdom to Know and Trust Yourself
- Patience ― The Strength to Endure
- Selflessness ― The Ability to Put Your Cause and Beliefs Ahead of Yourself
- Vision ―The Power of Having and Sharing a Dream
- Self-Efficacy ― The Confidence to Gain from Triumph and Disaster
- Integrity ― The Wisdom to Know the Truth and the Strength to Defend It
- Resilience ― The Ability to Bounce Back from Adversity
- Boldness ― The Ability to See and Seize Opportunities
- Accountability ― The Will to Take Ownership Regardless of the Outcome
- Courage ― The Ability to Face the Dangers When They Become Real
- Stamina ― The Will to Hold On When You Have Nothing Left
- Authenticity ― The Resolve Always to Be Yourself
- Inspiration ― The Ability to Connect With and Motivate Friends and Foes
- Enthusiasm ― The Energy to Fill Every Minute
- Ambition ― The Will to Make the World What You Want It to Be
To read the entire CIO Insights article, click here.
The Society for Information Management recently polled CIOs about their IT spending priorities and plans for dollar allocation in the coming year. An overview of the results is presented in this slide show on CIO Insight. It’s hard to visualize from the slides so I created these two pie charts to represent their findings about 2009 versus 2010 budgets. It looks like the news is better in the coming year— roughly half of the CIOs surveyed said their 2010 budgets would remain the same.
50% of CIOs said their budgets would be lower in 2009.
45% of CIOs said their budgets would be the same in 2010.
According to several analysts in this NetworkWorld article, “When looking to strike a deal with a service provider, enterprise IT executives need to take a step back from the need to reduce expenses immediately and think about IT needs a year or more from now. Outsourcing in a tight economy can represent a classic case of ‘You get what you pay for’ to enterprise IT executives.”
You know, EasyStreet believes in providing good value for our customers. We recognize that IT budgets are tighter than ever, but after 14 years in this business, we also know what it takes to provide the level of reliability and support our customers require — and don’t want to degrade our best-in-the-business SLA just to get the sale.
After all, the goal is for ALL of us to stay in business, isn’t it?
The article quotes Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner, who says, “Oftentimes, you are going to be disappointed with the level of cost reduction you can achieve in an outsourcing deal, and if that is all you are focused on, inevitably, it will produce a bad deal. Historically customers get lousy quality of service when trying to squeeze an outsourcer. In the short term the deal may help a company’s bottom line, but long term, enterprise companies need high-quality services to better compete.”
The article goes on to say analysts advise enterprise IT decision makers to research service providers’ financials, product road maps, deal flow and turnover. “Outsourcers are not safe from the current economic conditions and may not survive the storm any better than others. There has to be a big focus on vendor risk and vendor viability. The deal may sound great now, but if the vendor goes south in six months, where does that leave you?”
You can read the whole article here. End of lecture.
I ran across this recent InfoWorld article that discusses how IT jobs — especially those of data center managers — might permanently change because of today’s tight budgets. “There’s an incredible focus this year on driving efficiency,” says Rick Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC. “What this means is reducing capital expenditures and trying to cut operational expenses wherever possible.”
The article points out that many small and midsize companies are beginning to think of the data center as a utility. “Such thinking would ultimately lead upper management to realize that hosted data centers could serve customers tremendous scale with such little effort and cost that CIOs simply have to start buying professionally managed services rather than spending resources to do it themselves. The writing is on the wall. Small and midsize data centers won’t exist very long as companies take a look at why they’re managing data centers themselves.”
We’re seeing this trend from the other side, which is why EasyStreet continues to focus on providing reliable data center and managed services for the increasing number of northwest companies that decide to move their data center responsibilities “outside.” (OK. End of commercial.)
Of course, the article concludes, “Internal IT operations will still be responsible for the last 10 feet of cable, so they’ll have to be even more aware of their users’ needs… This might be a rebirth of the jack-of-all-trades who can interface with users, make the software do what they want, talk to the back-end guys. Those jobs will be around for a long time.”
You can read the entire InfoWorld article here.
Since 1995, EasyStreet has been coming up with good reasons why companies should outsource their IT infrastructures. Now, technology giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo are echoing a lot of what we’ve been saying for 14 years. They too want to convince companies to move from costly and inefficient corporate data centers to the benefits of a cost-effective, shared environment.
The big difference, of course, is that the technology giants are talking about giant data centers shared by millions of users. Their lures are cloud computing and utility computing, which provides on-demand server capacity. But whether the message is coming from a giant company or from a considerably smaller EasyStreet, it’s clear that more and more companies are suffering from their own vastly overbuilt data centers, recurring upgrade costs and the dramatically escalating price of power.
TechRepublic.com’s editor-in-chief Jason Hines, writing on this topic, recently observed: “For governments, large financial institutions, and other high-security environments, outsourcing the data center will probably never make sense. For virtually everyone else, it’s going to become a very attractive option in the next 3-5 years. I suspect that a decade from now running your own data center will be the exception and not the rule, and IT departments will need a strong business case to justify the existence of a private data center.”
He notes that the Googles, Microsofts, et al, are arguing they can save companies from overprovisioning and overspending on server capacity while adding 24/7/365 monitoring, scalable load management and IT service management — same as you-know-who in Beaverton.
“Of course, the trade-off is that IT departments give up some control, and usually some staff positions as well,” Hines writes. “Many companies will be fine with that since IT is probably not one of their core competencies. They will welcome the expertise from a third party and will be happy to find a new way to control IT costs.”
Amen.
