strategy

Chief Information Officers – The Glue That Binds

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ZDNet have an article by Steve Ranger called ‘CIOs must bridge gap between business and tech’. The essential point of the article is that the role of CIO is not technical, it is about business strategy and implementing that in the technical sphere.

The CIO is responsible for the stewardship of technological resources within a defined architectural framework – and then implementing strategic direction (not technical implementation!) to achieve technological goals.

This echoes the discussion CPA Australia was having recently regarding information technology governance. Keep it simple for the board, and break up the tasks in terms a layman can understand: Keeping It Running, Plan It, Manage It, and Build it. At the end of the day, that’s all that’s involved in IT (it’s a lot more complex than that, technically, but business-wise – that’s all that matters.

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Disaster Recovery Planning Made Simple

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Disaster recovery and contingency planning have been highlighted in the past week as the biggest issue since sliced bread started getting mouldy, as Hurricane Katrina hit NOLA hard and fast. In its wake was left the startling realisation that even the richest country in the world can have infrastructure devastated and destroyed by the forces of nature. The cost of the disaster is $US100 billion and climbing, with a significant part of that the IT Infrastructure.

And the week prior to that was the Zotob worm, which shut down Holden’s processing plants for a day (estimated costs: $A6,000,000 and yes, I checked the zeros).

In the IT context, both these events show that there is an increasing reliance upon information technology, and clearly business continuity plans are going to be top of the charts again for a while for our clients. This also comes back to IS Strategy and Governance procedures for clients. The facts bear out the old adage that luck is the residue of good planning – good IS Strategies and Business Continuity planning will help business A survive and business B not.

Probably a future cause celebre fot IT Disaster Planning – although some would perhaps suggest that it has worked too well – has been www.directnic.com, which is an ISP operating in a New Orleans downtown skyscraper that has maintained its connection to the internet throughout the disaster. Its biggest problem now is that it is getting many hits from around the world because people are blogging about it (just as I am now) which is causing some stress on their connectivity.

They have also maintained a blog about the disaster throughout, as reported by The Register and located at /mgno.com.

Interestingly, at least partly because of this blog, the ongoing debate about the issues related to blogs and their journalistic integrity has now tended to swung in favour of the humble blogger who, as johnny-on-the-spot in a time like this, tends to report what they see rather than filter it through the eyes of a journalist – which is both its strength and its weakness, clearly.