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News

• Ovum: Gov't must use Facebook, Twitter to engage with public

  Both federal and state governments must utilise social media tools to engage with the public, Ovum has warned.

• Private Cloud can prevent end runs around IT, Microsoft says

  If IT shops want to prevent users from going to the Cloud, they have to bring the Cloud to the users.

• Google Apps: How We Convinced the C-Suite

  Joe Fuller, CIO at Dominion Enterprises, had a mess to clean up. Built through a series of 150 acquisitions, the marketing services company was burdened by inefficiencies, disparities and siloed data. As the economy continued to tank in 2010, the company started to feel the weight of hosting e-mail in 24 separate locations, which posed a multitude of support and integration issues, Fuller says.

• Forrester: Cloud is test bed for collaboration

  Cloud platforms are increasingly the "test bed for new collaborative experiences" in the enterprise, analyst Gene Leganza told Forrester's Enterprise Architecture Forum in London yesterday.

• ISACA enables better social media governance

  Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) has issued a new customisable audit program to help enterprises address the challenges associated with social media governance.

• How SaaS will impact six key software categories

  As more sourcing executives consider incorporating SaaS solutions into their overall technology vendor landscape, the potential to significantly disrupt the current software market grows. And while SaaS adoption is expected to expand in the coming years, the challenge for sourcing professionals will be a lack of uniform adoption across the whole software market. In some software categories, SaaS will be a disruptive technology, in others the only option, and in many cases SaaS will have minimal impact.

• Microsoft to CIOs: Before you go Google, ask questions

  The mounting pressure to move IT resources to the cloud has added a layer of complexity to the already complex job of a CIO.

• Security departments not prepared for new technologies

  Rapid adoption of <a href="http://www.csoonline.com/article/347313/wireless-security-the-basics">mobile technology</a>, <a href="http://www.csoonline.com/article/529764/social-media-risks-the-basics">social media</a> and <a href="http://www.csoonline.com/article/596819/cloud-security-the-basics">cloud computing</a> in the workplace is creating a security problem for IT departments worldwide as they struggle to keep pace with demands, according to a survey released this week by security certification firm (ISC)2.

• Testing the cloud

  "Identify a high value application that you have within the business and start there," is the key advice Kirsten Wolberg, CIO of Salesforce.com has, for enterprises making the initial moves from on-premise apps to the cloud environment."If you are actually working with an application that adds a lot of value really quickly and is important to the business, it is a really good business case to show the power and flexibility of the applications," says Wolberg, in an interview at the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where she was one of the speakers.Peter Coffee, head of platform research, Salesforce.com, echoes her advice. "I don't want you to replace anything that is working well enough for you [and] generating good ROI," says Coffee. "Take about 20 applications that some VPs in the company really, really wish will be right for him or her that you have not been able to deliver. If [you] can take the wish list of five VPs and do the top two items on the list, that is 10 apps you can probably write in six months in force.com," says Coffee. "All of a sudden, those five VPs no longer think of you as a cost centre to be minimised but instead think of you as a value partner to be nurtured and to be given more resources. That is a much more attractive environment for the CIO to be in."Wolberg and Coffee say cloud technology provides opportunities for CIOs to become more strategic, and downplay concerns it will diminish the role. "Every major change within any industry puts people at risk and those who succeed are those who change with or are ahead of the change, as opposed to those who fight it," says Wolberg. "It [the shift to the cloud] is a great opportunity for CIOs to be more involved in the strategy of the company and not just focusing on the technology side of the business. I see it as a fantastic opportunity for CIOs to define the value they add to the organisation. It will allow CIOs to have more strategic conversations with their executive peers."Cloud computing, she says, is "fundamentally a shift in the change to how values are being delivered in enterprises and as a CIO. You can fight it, but ultimately you [as] the CIO will end up losing. But if you embrace it and you figure out how your role is changing and embrace these new technologies and help this organisation, that is how the CIO can be more successful."Coffee, on the other hand, says it would be a mistake to think a move to the cloud is a "daring exercise in risk taking". He says from the experiences of the early adopters who spoke at the conference, the cloud is "making their lives simpler and less exciting so they can focus on business benefits".He says the CIO role is not being made redundant as more enterprises move to the cloud because "now, the CIO is a value-creation partner to the business rather than being a cost centre"."CIOs are made redundant when the work they do is easily outsourceable. And if all you are doing is running the email and keeping the server farm running, you are very outsourceable. But if you are running a team of business process engineers who are out there in the business units everyday, actively working with people to solve their problems, that is not outsourceable. That is the kind of thing you want an in-house IT team to do."<strong><em>CIO editor Divina Paredes attended Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com.</em></strong>

• Alcatel-Lucent unveils social media solution

  Riding on the popularity of social media, Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a solution to help organisations with their social media strategies.

• The Cloud CIO: A tale of two IT futures

  This week I saw two articles that captured the two visions of IT that will dominate the future. Both were interviews with senior IT leaders, one a CIO of a major technology company, the other a senior executive with a leading system integrator. One article depicted a vision of IT as a future of standardized, commodity offerings, while the other portrayed IT as a critical part of every company's business offerings. Two visions of ITs role in stark contrast to one another. Each seems to obviate the other. But is that really true? My take is that both views are true, and the CIO of the future has to push one to make room to achieve the other.

• Inside an enterprise Salesforce Chatter rollout

  In 2009, Den-Mat, dental equipment manufacturing company based in California, ran on severely outdated IT. Employees relied on a 30 year-old legacy AS400 ERP green screen system with antiquated applications. Communication between departments was nearly nonexistent and processes were paper-heavy, says Jonathan Green, VP of IT. On top of that, the business faced a 48 per cent turnover rate for new employees, which was directly related to its old platform.

• Business growth driving Specsavers' move to Google Apps

  Specsavers is migrating its 2,500 staff across the world to <a href="http://www.cio.co.uk/article/3257491/twenty-companies-to-watch-in-2011/">Google Apps</a> in an effort to ramp up the pace of <a href="http://www.cio.co.uk/article/786/specsavers-goes-global-cio-michel-khan-explains-his-vision/">expansion into new markets</a>.

• Google's CEO switch could be a risky move

  Google's decision to change CEOs, announced on the same day it reported yet another blockbuster quarter, begs the question of whether the company is trying to fix something that isn't broken.

• Microsoft turns up the heat on Salesforce.com, Oracle

  Microsoft announced Monday that its Dynamics CRM Online software is now available in 40 markets around the world, bringing it in closer competition with Salesforce.com and Oracle's CRM on Demand.