Mike Altendorf

iPad legitimises the netbook

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:52:00 GMT

Padding out Netbooks

But there is method in my madness. January proved that technology still has one major hurdle to overcome before it can be considered truly valuable... it needs to conquer the British weather. Thanks to the snow I would say that in
any meaningful sense, this year started...

Big companies will fall behind

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:26:00 GMT

2010: The year of the...

First off I would like to wish all my readers a very Happy New Year or indeed a Happy New Decade. It seems like no time at all since we were all charging our glasses and toasting the new millennium. That was back in a world without Facebook, Twitter, blogging or apps to turn your phone into a pint of beer, a spirit level or a restaurant critic (or in fact the iPhones to put them on).At the end of a decade in which the internet truly came into its own, it's hard to predict what the next 10 years could herald. In fact I am not even going to try. I'll stick to putting in my two pennies' worth on the trends that I think we could see emerging in 2010.First off, I think 2010 could be the year when SMEs really come into their own as an economic powerhouse. Free of the hierarchy and bureaucracy which plagues many large enterprises, they are already starting to open a gap on their slower and heavier enterprise cousins when it comes to cutting costs and delivering real ROI on internal investments. This means they are faster out of the trap when it comes to kick-starting growth in the post-recessionary world. I have already experienced a recession as both the head of a SME (Conchango) and have seen how smaller companies can steal a march on their competitors when times are bad. The 2001/02 recession was felt particularly strongly by the IT sector but it gave us as a company the catalyst for radical restructure that, while very disruptive, enabled us to challenge current thinking on apps and infrastructure delivery. Part of this is because smaller businesses have to fight for their very survival and so need to be radical in order to make it through. Bigger businesses often don't see the threat until it is too late (think Woolworths) and those that do have a far bigger task on their hands in trying to turn the ship around.CIOs of bigger companies shouldn't despair however. There are plenty of examples of big companies who have triumphed when the chips are down so size isn't everything. Take FT.com, a business that saw the future and prepared to face it by bringing in agile IT applications and business change programmes that enabled it to meet internal customer needs in weeks rather than months. Or consider Morrisons and Sainsbury's, two retailers that have found innovative ways to take on the market leader by not being afraid of a little disruption and by understanding and building upon their key strengths.The biggest threat to any business is, in fact, apathy. It doesn't matter how big or small a company is if the appetite for change is there. As long as you understand how big your boat is and what is needed to get it heading in the right direction you stand a good chance of success. The only difference is that the bigger the boat, the longer change takes so the earlier you need to act. Change in a big company moves like a ripple through oil rather than through water.Another major trend I predict will be the decline of outsourcing. That is not to say that it doesn't have its place, but this decade has seen a trend towards outsourcing everything. But what this indiscriminate approach does is effectively to turn your nimble craft into an unwieldy oil tanker. It is much, much harder to implement change when you are reliant on an unseen and usually remote workforce managed by a third-party that has you tied into complex and often overly rigid contracts. Over the next few years this type of outsourcing will be replaced by co-operatively managed services in which upgrades and improvements are part of the deal and where the whole thing is managed as a partnership between the customer and their supplier. This type of approach enables IT to be a catalyst for innovation rather than a barrier.Another trend I expect to see is a move toward more collaborative working and less hierarchy. The most successful companies out there are the ones that take advantage of disruptive economic conditions to be disruptive themselves. This is not just about being different in the way you approach the world outside your company - it is also about changing the dynamics and structure within the company itself.For a CIO, the best approach is to listen to your team. Ask them to think radically and challenge them. Then harvest their ideas. This not only gives you a broad base of thinking but will give you a team that feels valued and involved, helping you to deliver the changes needed faster and more effectively. But that's enough from me - what are your predictions for 2010? I would be interested to know what trends you expect to see emerging over the next few months so please get in touch with your thoughts.

Mike Altendorf recalls a year of social media

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:05:00 GMT

Is Santa Claus on Twitter?

So, 2009: the year of global economic meltdown, bonus backlash and Twitter. This 140-character phenomenon has become a national obsession. Everyone from cricketers to cadets is involved, competing for followers and sharing their pearls of wisdom with the collective crowd. I liken it to the noisy rooks that frequent my garden at the moment - competing loudly for attention and leaving me wishing I had a shotgun to hand.That's not to say Twitter doesn't have value. It is completely of the moment - spontaneous and often random. In many ways it is the antithesis of email, which has now become the primary way for people to organise themselves. On email, everything is stored, tucked away in individual filing systems, neatly labelled and ordered. Not so on Twitter.Contrary to popular thinking (led by a professor at the University of Kent) email is definitely not dead. In fact, the explosion in social networking has meant that email is more popular than ever as most social networks rely on email to update users. In fact, right now, email is killing off another antiquated technology - the file share. More and more of us now use email as our primary filing system and woe betide the CIO who insists on a 50MB mailbox limit these days - he will be condemning his workforce to endless archiving and deleting.But the future does not lie in either Twitter or email - in fact it will be a combination of the two and much more besides. What we are likely to see is each of these technologies effectively replaced at the front end by a much more intuitive interface - one that gives you access to instant messaging, social networks and email and allows you to choose the most appropriate way to communicate based on a particular situation. Such an interface will make e-discovery and archiving much more important as that single interface will be a doorway to a huge information repository.This year was also the year of Windows 7, for which I am eternally grateful. Living with Vista was like having an extra (and particularly uncooperative) teenager in the house: highly unpredictable and the cause of huge amounts of emotional stress.

Avoid one-size-fits-all software installations

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:33:00 GMT

Culture clash

While each have had some impact, in very few cases have they truly delivered. Despite vast amounts of effort in implementing these technologies, most firm struggle to answer basic questions about their business performance.

One reason why global initiatives can struggle, and one that is not talked about very much, is company culture. I have worked for two large...

Motivated IT departments are critical to CIOs

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:22:00 GMT

Investing, not divesting

A quick game of buzzword bingo will soon reveal how many times the phrase ‘keeping the lights on' is being heard in the average boardroom. As senior management wields the sword, IT departments up and down the land are being told they will have to do ‘more with less' and ‘focus on the basics'. While the sentiment is understandable the thinking is less so. All recessions end and when the upturn finally comes and the board is ready to reinvest in technology once again they may find that they no longer have an IT department.So what can CIOs do to protect their investment? According to recent research by Forrester, "How a CIO manages relationships and communicates with peers will strongly shape perceptions of IT effectiveness and either strengthen or weaken the impact of its efforts - especially during economic downturns." But what does this mean? Two things. Firstly, CIOs should ensure that the board (and the CFO in particular) actually understand the impact of budget cuts - not just on the bottom line but on the performance of the business.Secondly, CIOs must ensure that the projects that are being kept alive are being adequately governed and reviewed so that the benefits and outcomes can be clearly communicated to the executive.Proving the value of IT has always been a key part of the CIOs role but this becomes even more critical during a recession, not least because being valued is what keeps the workforce happy. The Forrester report also points to the fact that "too often, when budgets are cut, so is the capability that matters most to business constituents. And as IT budgets shrink, business satisfaction with IT is in danger of declining on an even steeper slope."A recent Fujitsu study reported that the recession is causing CIOs to restrict innovation. Although understandable, this will no doubt impact how IT is viewed by the business. For those in the IT department, unhappy ‘customers' means a considerable decline in job satisfaction. Not only are they not getting to do the kind of high-value, high-impact projects that make their jobs rewarding but they are being bashed for a perceived lack of support from IT for the business.Protecting against this requires a strong relationship between you, the CIO, and the business. Not rocket science but the value of it really comes into its own when times are tough. One of the primary benefits is the ability to work with the business to help them get the projects that they want to kick off approved by the board. All too often the IT department is only involved in projects once they have been signed off but by working in partnership with the business team proposing it you can help them build a business case and perhaps uncover additional benefits that they might be unaware of. BT told SMEs that IT investment is key to surviving the recession - is that something larger enterprises should be considering too?Investing in tools that drive the business forward can't be a bad thing in any economic climate. Right now, the braver companies are taking advantage of the recession and using data to focus on where to find opportunity and hit their competitors while they are making cuts. They are focusing on where to invest, where to control costs and where to withdraw. Aggressively exploiting data through business intelligence is the lowest risk survival and growth option, and consistently beats fact-free gut decisions.You can also help the business build in effective SLAs that allow them to demonstrate value and measure success. Internal SLAs are also an effective way of demonstrating the value of the IT team and to set realistic expectations of what can be achieved - especially when you are probably looking at a budget that is less than half what you would like it to be.Going back to what I said about protecting your investment, providing interesting and educational challenges to your team is a good way of keeping them motivated. These often require little in the way of investment but provide an outlet for their creativity and ambition and also act as training. It is also the perfect time to get the team focused inwardly, taking on the challenges that fall to the bottom of the list when a firm is focused on growth.Keeping a team motivated enough to want to stay with you when things improve is one of the biggest challenges for a CIO in a downturn. Many of you will have spent years building up your department and the talent it contains. Losing it to the lure of greener pastures is a very real threat. As the Forrester report concludes: "Now is the time to sit down with managers and staffers and assure them that they are valued. CIOs may be forced to limit raises and bonuses, but can still motivate staff through on-the-job training and rotation."

Private clouds on parade

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:17:00 GMT

Lots of CIOs buy into cloud computing but feel ceding everything is a step too far. Private clouds might act as an on-ramp to greater change

Cloud computing is everywhere right now - and, unfortunately, everyone is using the term quite loosely. The biggest feedback I get from CIOs is a single instruction: "Don't use that term because we need something more tangible". So let's try.Analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that, through 2012 at least, enterprises will spend more on private clouds than public cloud service providers, so it's worth knowing more about what constitutes ‘private' and ‘public' in this sense. Put simply, private clouds are similarly elastic to external services and are delivered over the internet - but they are delivered by IT departments to internal customers only. Public clouds, on the other hand, are typically run by third-party providers for a range of customers.As Phil Dawson of Gartner states: "With cloud offerings coming in the form of services, this means that the IT organisation will be replaced by relationships to many cloud computing service providers, each for one or a handful of services. Larger organisations will continue to have an IT organisation that manages and deploys IT resources internally. Some of these will be private clouds, but not all. IT departments will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility - determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services."As Dawson suggests, the picture will be mixed for some time with some though not all using private clouds as a stage towards public versions of the same. Interestingly, far from viewing it as a panacea, Gartner also sees limited application of private clouds with over 75 per cent of use focused on "very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by start-ups with little to no IT infrastructure".So, far from being some amorphous, woolly concept, cloud computing starts to become a little bit clearer once we define our terms and accept that some purposes will fit it neatly for some companies - and others perhaps not at all. I tend to see the private cloud as part of a journey or a multi-step process. Different companies will pick up key services for the cloud but adoption depends on the characteristics of those firms, their markets and their appetite for risk versus control.Once firms start using the cloud, what will really differentiate the success of cloud computing will be just how ‘virtual' datacentres can become. It will be the automation and management side that will differentiate ‘good' clouds from ‘bad'. There will be quick wins to be had in basic automation and ringfenced services but the biggest successes will come from fully virtualised infrastructures that use a hypervisor and cloud operating systems with service levels applied. Storage and networks will have to be unified so that you have total governance over the information flow and can apply policies and become genuinely service-oriented.

Net cannot beat personal touch

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Digital Britain is all fine, but is it agile?

I can't pretend to have read all of the Lord Carter-commissioned Digital Britain report, but for CIOs it seems to pack some significant implications as regards home/mobile working and widening and accelerating broadband access.As Lord Carter says, "Digital Britain is about capturing the opportunities on offer for UK plc and the public, and advancing our standing as a world leader in these industries. Our ambition is to see Digital Britain as the leading major economy for innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries. We will seek to bring forward a unified framework to help maximise the UK's competitive advantage."On the plus side, the Digital Britain vision promises to provide rich media access to employees wherever they are located. That's important because video, images, audio and other bandwidth-hungry media make applications more attractive. For CIOs, it's particularly important because, even in these difficult times - and I must confess that this has been a bit of a surprise for me - we continue to see a huge investment in employee portals. Money has been allocated and Microsoft SharePoint seems to be the product of choice, which is also a bit surprising given that it's not the most full-featured portal environment around, although it is a good framework.Back at the beginning of the year I didn't think there would be scope for many projects like this but together with social networks, blogging, wikis, video and podcasts, there have been significant deployments around role-based portal access, and it's certainly a step improvement over intranet access. With faster broadband to the home and on the move, home/distance working via employee portals should become easier and more productive.As for geographical coverage, there are still areas of the UK that are absolutely dire and where broadband performance is woeful, so on that front the improvements foreseen by the architects of Digital Britain should be good. There is generally a drive to be more mobile and fast, and ubiquitous wireless access on the road is obviously a positive target to enable the must-have communications tools of today.Instant messaging is an increasingly common tool in the consulting area and best exploited in alliance with search and email. We also need to be doing more internal blogging to keep everybody in the loop, and on-tap access to fat pipes is clearly an aid. I don't underestimate the frustrations of a slow network connection, having experienced my kids going berserk at the speeds I receive at home. There's this expectation today that you need it delivered and you need it delivered immediately, and we can do a lot better to achieve that, especially as regards provision to rural communities. The good news here is that WiMAX and other wireless technologies should provide a serviceable fix over time to fill in the gaps where wireline connections cannot go.Will the advent of more bandwidth lead inevitably to fatter code and sloppy development and usage patterns in the way that more memory and bigger hard drives let bloatware prosper? Not necessarily. A by-product of cloud computing and virtual datacentres could be that the new architectures act as an anti-cholesterol drug for networks and that we learn to strip out all the crap that we don't really need.However, unlike some pundits I don't think provision of fast internet access anytime, anyplace, anywhere will have any broad cultural impact, and I'm not even sure that it will be entirely a positive development. Having the freedom to work from anywhere can be valuable but, at the risk of sounding a stick in the mud, living on the internet means you don't get time to think because you're always on email. With SMS, email, Twitter and so on you don't get the chance to concentrate and the chance to truly interact is diminishing. Sometimes you need a real evaluation of where you're going. The upcoming workforce may want to behave like this, but my feeling is that when you have a meeting, you have a meeting and you don't scan emails.After all, the success of Agile and software development methodologies like Scrum come because it makes people come together around a daily stand-up in front of a whiteboard. Sometimes you need to meet, swap ideas, sit down and just talk. I welcome the notion that we can become a more connected society and that we might not be as tied to desks and locations as we are today but I'd encourage CIOs who are facing budget cuts and operational pressures to use this time as a process to introduce more agile ways of working and keeping the innovation agenda going.

Time to move on beyond email

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:19:00 GMT

With employees sharing data and ideas using social networking tools, collaboration strategies are a non-negotiable on the CIO's to-do list

The notion of "do more with less" has been tried and, while it has achieved some results, businesses have reached a point where they now need to do some things differently. One solution that seems to be the elusive holy grail of IT management is to create a better connected global business. Ideally, this is done by sharing existing processes and technologies, making it possible to...

Climbing the storage mountain

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:14:00 GMT

We all store more than ever before but now businesses need to get a grip and stop just adding hardware to solve their storage problems

According to analyst firm IDC, the digital universe is doubling every 18 months and total storage on the planet now stands at 487 billion gigabytes. It's a mind-boggling situation that is only getting worse because of a perfect storm of reasons. There's the data-hungry multimedia formats that are increasingly being stored, the proliferation of content-creation devices, the numbers of people capable of creating that content, and the waves of corporate governance that make organisations store and tag more data than ever, often many times over for purposes of backup or just through inefficiency. We all create data whether we want to or not, by walking in front of a CCTV camera, using phones, taking digital pictures or swiping smartcards in supermarkets or on transit systems. Healthcare records and scientific/medical applications alone can generate vast amounts of data, and then there are the new furrows being ploughed by the likes of Google Maps and other systems.Through 2012 the storage total will grow by a factor of about five as IT budgets grow by a factor of 1.2 and staff headcount grows by a factor of 1.1 in the same period. Given the greater sensitivity with respect to data privacy and financial reporting, more attention must be paid not only to the sheer volume of data but also the way the information is managed.From a cost point of view, from a corporate social responsibility point of view and from an information management point of view, one thing is clear: you can't just keep on storing data the way you did before, adding more and more gigabtyes, knowing the truth is in there somewhere, and not worrying about tomorrow. Clearly, Something Must Be Done, but what?First of all, the CIO needs to look more broadly at the management of information technology to see how the business performs and operates in the datacentre with a dashboard and key performance indicators that really look at departmental breakdowns and the IT/business unit relationship. These should reflect not just the service levels but also opportunity levels.For example, we've been working with ING in The Netherlands on a dashboard of the datacentre with simple stuff like storage capacity, utilisation and energy efficiency by treating this information as just another data source. It sounds very straightforward doesn't it, but not many firms are doing this; instead they just chuck any data they have into spreadsheets. This data can go all the way to the CIO or higher, providing any interested party with a clearer picture for managing data to reduce storage needs. It can then be used to let them charge back and allocate business priorities. It's basic to look at these things but in many cases the data doesn't exist, or it isn't used.There are huge cost pressures today and companies need to be more agile and fleet of foot. They can't afford to deploy more infrastructure and people to operate it, or go on with limited interoperability and manual management rather than automation. They need something for fundamental IT management along the lines of a balanced scorecard with key performance indicators. There is a sea of data out there with huge levels of duplication caused by a world of data hoarders. We really need master data management to get a single version of the truth together with a search-based front-end to make information discoverable. People have been focusing on how to store information but now they have to address ways to classify it and how to secure it.There are other opportunities out there. Cloud-based storage offers an attractive way to keep information that is accessible locally even if the data resides on the other side of the world. For companies that see their storage needs go through spikes and troughs, this could be attractive, especially in the form of ‘private clouds' that take their cue from the likes of Amazon.com and Google but offer the assurance of being built and managed for each organisation's specific needs.Storage virtualisation promises to do what VMware did for servers, boosting utilisation, making information easier to manage and providing flexibility and lower admin thresholds. Older capabilities such as de-duplication and tiered storage are also well overdue some love and attention.Some people will throw up their hands and simply outsource the issue in order to pursue a quiet life but that just raises the old adage: never outsource a problem. It's no longer enough to just copy everything onto yet another storage device: you have to act now or run the risk of an inability to respond to legal and regulatory probes, or to find the information that answers a business problem.

I feel a change coming on

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:06:00 GMT

Distinguishing real change from shorter-term trends or outright failures isn't always easy

My company was among those that recently exhibited an application for Microsoft's Surface technology, demonstrating a program for Tesco Wine Club that was developed in association with IdentityMine. I like Surface a lot: it's terrific technology that makes what Microsoft calls ‘massive multi-touch' a reality by interpreting your taps and gestures in a format that resembles a coffee table.It enabled Tesco to have something uniquely collaborative and interactive; something that could persuade people to find out more about their tastes in wine, and there are plenty of other interesting applications out there too. Microsoft has done an excellent job in making a complex version 1.0 system actually work and, if anything, I believe that some people might even be underestimating its potential role. There's more to Surface than a bit of corporate branding in your reception: you're starting to look at a way of using applications that are rich and support touch and even voice as ways to interact. It's a potent mixture, especially backed up with today's enterprise search software as virtual interfaces bring search to life. You could also think of the Surface theme reappearing in a system for home grocery shopping without a web browser or the need to touch a keyboard or mouse. Then again it could be for a system that is like knowledge management on steroids, with spider diagrams, mind maps and text interlinked with images and videos that can be moved around and mashed up with each other. Or it could of course become a fantastic new generation of kiosk technology that taps wireless links to replace store product listings systems.On the other hand, I'm not daft enough to bet the farm on Surface, nor any of the current crop of new technologies. Surface systems are still expensive and aimed at a niche audience, although I'm sure some of the underlying technologies will find their way into other products.

Nobody say 'green shoots...'

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:57:00 GMT

It has been a strange start to the year and the picture of IT investment might not be as bleak as feared, prays Mike Altendorf

You might think of this as the year of doom and gloom for IT suppliers, a period of lying low, scratching a living and surviving on the licence and maintenance revenue from the glory days - and you might still be right. However, and whisper it for now, I'm beginning to feel a little bit more confident about IT spending in 2009. I'm still not saying it will be a fantastic year for investing in technology but the signs are that activity is picking up. Every pound will have to be sorely earned but this is also a market that sorts the wheat from the chaff. In short, I'm hopeful things are not all that bad on the supply-side of the business.That said, it's a weird market out there, and one I've never seen the like of in 20-something years working in IT. Clients are cutting back in terms of people and IT expenditure and yet there's still huge interest in carrying on with projects. You've got redundancies everywhere but there are also deals being done, albeit with buyers demanding very clear returns on investment within a year and suppliers being asked for shorter engagements with sharp cut-offs. If I had a quid for every CIO who has told me "we're cutting the number of projects in our portfolio but we're going ahead with some on these specific terms", I'd be at the races now.It's still slightly surprising to me but there are lots of opportunities and many of them are to do with a few areas, namely CRM, collaboration, governance risk and compliance (GRC), and cloud computing.In CRM, a lot of people have either just got Siebel to work after 10 years of trying or they're demanding simpler CRM that doesn't require an army of system integrators. There's still a willingness to put CRM systems in to pursue superior customer retention and service, however, and the shoot-out we're often observing is between Microsoft CRM - which is now getting some traction after a slow-ish start - and Salesforce.com.In terms of collaboration, we're seeing a big interest in platforms for team-working, project management, sharing and so on, and a pronounced emphasis on social networking. Companies are trying to learn from their younger workers and they want to interact a lot more with blogs, wikis, instant messaging, portals and the simpler forms of document management. This approach has a couple of advantages beyond appealing to youth, of course: it's also relatively cheap and quick to get up and running.The appeal of GRC, given what's just happened to the global economy, might be harder to fathom. It may seem a case of shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted but banks are investing heavily in governance, risk and compliance solutions and this is going to be a massive focus for us as a company. I think there's a simpler approach to GRC to be taken than the traditional way of heavyweight solutions. You can still expect the GRC space to be filled to bursting with the familiar names, however, from HP, Capgemini, Accenture, IBM, Oracle and the rest. One other clue to the action: many consultants are being moved back from retail and other cooling areas towards GRC and government work.The other area that is warming up nicely is cloud computing. Just in case there are any awards for being ahead of the game (if indeed I am ahead of the game in this case) let me remind you what I wrote on the subject back in November:"It's a very interesting area and firms not only want to save costs but also want that agility to spin up and configure projects very quickly. We researched our customers and were surprised to find that half of them have already tried the most established cloud computing model, Amazon.com's EC2. Even more interesting was that not one of them said they were disappointed and all said they would use it more seriously in the next six months - and not just in test-bed environments."OK, so maybe it was our customers who had the foresight and I was just reporting back from the field but still, the cloud model is really happening. What's emerging is that rather than for transactional scenarios, say, people are seeing, firstly, virtualisation of datacentre hardware, and then, core applications such as intranet, email and portal-type activities being pulled into the cloud.Another thing that is being fed back to me by buyers, if you'll forgive me straying from my technology beat, is to do with licensing. One CIO to whom I spoke expressed a view that is becoming typical. He gathered together all his application software vendors and said he wants to change to per-user, per-year terms so that he can shrink or grow his business and pay for software accordingly. That's a request that in the past might have received a dusty answer from the dominant incumbents of enterprise software but these are different times. Still, there are those glimmers to cheer us up.

Travel websites left me cold

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:38:00 GMT

The harsh weather of White Monday demonstrated the importance of real-time updates to a not particularly impressed

When I awoke bright and early to travel to my flight, I wasn't surprised to see the snow as it had been forecast with uncanny accuracy by the Met Office. So I consulted various websites to discover my travel options only to find that they had been affected by their own form of snow blindness.

I will spare the...

Travel websites left me cold

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:38:00 GMT

The harsh weather of White Monday demonstrated the importance of real-time updates to a not particularly impressed

The year of living sensibly

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:56:00 GMT

For technology bosses, 2009 will be a time for aligning with business metrics in order to build bridges with fellow C-list executives

With all this talk of credit crunches, car makers asking for US government bail-outs, job cuts and retail collapses on one hand, and good news from Sainsbury's and John Lewis and possible printing of money to allow banks to regain liquidity on the other, CIOs must be sitting there wondering which way the year is going to go.

The year of living sensibly

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:56:00 GMT

For technology bosses, 2009 will be a time for aligning with business metrics in order to build bridges with fellow C-list executives

CIO Debate: Collaboration is building momentum in 2009

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:30:00 GMT

Despite the budgets pressures, CIOs see collaboration technology as strategic in 2009, research carried out by MWD in association with CIO UK reveals.

Read the thoughts of an NHS CIO on collaboration

Economic downturn will affect IT sourcing choices

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Research carried out by Macehiter Ward-Dutton in association with CIO.co.uk reveals changing attitudes to sourcing and SaaS

Enterprise IT spending is set to dip - but only marginally
It's no surprise that there's been a huge amount of industry debate over the past months regarding how overall IT budgets are likely to be affected by the economic downturn. On one hand, it's clear that few executive boards are going to be in the mood to grant significant IT budget increases in the...

Mike Altendorf : Home thoughts from abroad

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

CIOs are getting hurt by consumer expectations of service levels but they have developments in search and visualisation on their side

I’m on holiday in the Caribbean and feeling a little bit sorry for CIOs. The cellular reception here veers between fantastic and non-existent and getting annoyed at wireless problems in a distant, exotic spot like this reminded me of how far we’ve come in terms of expectations of service levels.

Mike Altendorf : Home thoughts from abroad

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

CIOs are getting hurt by consumer expectations of service levels but they have developments in search and visualisation on their side

Mike Altendorf : Home thoughts from abroad

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

CIOs are getting hurt by consumer expectations of service levels but they have developments in search and visualisation on their side

Mike Altendorf : Home thoughts from abroad

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

CIOs are getting hurt by consumer expectations of service levels but they have developments in search and visualisation on their side

Microsoft Silverlight shines through

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Google's App Engine, a new version of Microsoft Silverlight and the 3G iPhone catch Mike Altendorf's attention -- but one really made an impression

A hat-trick of technology stories has caught my attention in recent weeks. The first one was Google launching its App Engine, essentially a competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web-based environment and Microsoft’s tranche of Live services. It’s an environment where you’re again using external systems for processing and storage. Interesting, but CIOs will quite rightly ask what the benefit is for them.

Microsoft Silverlight shines through

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Google's App Engine, a new version of Microsoft Silverlight and the 3G iPhone catch Mike Altendorf's attention -- but one really made an impression

Microsoft Silverlight shines through

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Google's App Engine, a new version of Microsoft Silverlight and the 3G iPhone catch Mike Altendorf's attention -- but one really made an impression

Microsoft Silverlight shines through

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Google's App Engine, a new version of Microsoft Silverlight and the 3G iPhone catch Mike Altendorf's attention -- but one really made an impression