Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and IT

In the HBR.
The digital marketplace has created a business imperative that every company be — in some way — a technology company. This means that IT departments are being pulled out of their traditional “gate keeper” role of protecting the core technology infrastructure to collaborate across the enterprise to drive business outcomes.

While almost all business units, such as HR and sales, have started working more closely with IT, we have become especially interested in the marketing-IT relationship because we’ve seen firsthand just how much of marketing is increasingly powered by technology. Even the aspects of marketing that aren’t traditionally thought of as being tech-driven, such as event marketing and mail campaigns, now are. ...  " 

Global IT Trends Research

Excellent report on IT trends, via Jerry Luftman of GIIM. " ...

GLOBAL IT TRENDS RESEARCH
A significant set of IT benchmarking insights that provide organizations with a point of reference (domestic & global) for important business, technology, sourcing, social, and spending transformations. ... "

IT Trends and Service Management: Global Institute for IT Management

Brought to my attention  The GIIM.

Slides from a GIIM talk by Jerry Luftman on IT Trends and Service Management, can be found here. 

Institute Objective:

The objective of the Global Institute for IT Management (GIIM) is to impart a complete, flexible, and immediately actionable set of best practices by an international group of over 250 prominent academics, practitioners, and management consultants, to prepare IT thought leaders and business executives for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The institute provides a comprehensive set of 32 IT management certificates, with each frequently considered as being the single most important educational experience in the attendees’ professional life.Institute Objective ...  " 

Demise of the IT Department

In BaselineMag:   My view:  CIOs are moving from technology based solutions to services. Demand will still continue to rise, but results will be more carefully positioned and measured. I believe that this will mean that the solutions proposed will have to be more closely connected to business process.

IT Driving Employee Passion

Good IT is a magical thing that can drive employees to do new things.  My reaction to the title here. Why else does everyone have a smartphone and/or a tablet, and refers to it constantly?.  You could not have imagined old technology ... a Rolodex, Adding Machine, a tethered phone or a Sears Catalog would have been quite the same thing.  It can be obsessively used, but at the same time the opportunities are endless.  Just create the right App.   Now we have much more, in a nice compact form.  Use it wisely.

Changing Role of IT

Bill Inmon on the changimg role of IT.  The evolution of technology and how the IT department reacted.  Including a look at some of the glorious failures we have all decided to forget.

PureFlex Expert System for IT Operations

I worked on several large scale expert systems applications during the AI drive of the 1990s.  One of the areas we specifically examined was the configuration of systems as they were moved to new applications.  So I was intrigued by the application called PureFlex, to be featured at the XChange 2012 meeting next week.

We were particularly interested in the integration of software with existing hardware, and how the life cycle of that software could be controlled and optimized.   It is now a decade plus later, and it looks like the problem has been solved, see the excerpt below.  If you are not attending this conference, see the details about a tweet chat below.  I plan to participate.  Note also the mention that this expert system is only one of a family of such systems for the midsize business.   I look forward to seeing the others.  Anything to make a small to medium size business easier to operate.

" ... PureFlex Systems can improve IT operations for midsize companies. He’ll be joined by other IBMers to lead breakout sessions for IBM Business Partners about PureFlex. ....

There’s also a live tweetchat scheduled for Monday afternoon on August 20 at 2 EDT with an extended panel of IBM experts, executive and business partners.  The topic is how this packaged offering of power, storage, networking and management can help midsize businesses optimize their infrastructures and transform their approach to information technology (Monitor the chat session here or follow #expertsyschat).

The need for a highly flexible, resilient and efficient IT infrastructure has intensified in the face of continued cost pressures and made midsize businesses realize they need to take advantage of virtualized, shared architectures to make the most of their IT investments. ....

IBM PureFlex is part of an integrated family of products for midsize businesses that feature expert systems technology. These systems deliver cost savings and improved efficiency by reducing setup times, saving on staff resources and automatically configuring themselves for maximum efficiency. The PureFlex System was “born virtualized” to offer extraordinary agility and cloud-computing- readiness out of the box. ... "

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines  of a smarter planet. More here.