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Bricks and Clicks: How much infrastructure will a CIO be responsible for in the future?

Published: May 08 2012, 09:20 AM | no comments
by Colin Bannister

Bricks and clicks is one way to describe traditional IT infrastructures and future technologies. I have borrowed this term from Mike McNamara, CIO, Tesco, who was using the social media tool, ‘YouthTube’ (as I like to sometimes call it), to describe the in-store innovations that Tesco has created for its employees and customers, such as scan as you shop, QR codes and click & collect; Broccoli Cam, smart badges and electronic shelf edge labels.

 

The future role of the CIO has been a trending topic in recent months and there is an increasing need to look at how much a CIO needs to own and be responsible for, in terms of conventional IT foundations vs. future end point devices. There is a strong argument that from a traditional IT infrastructure perspective the answer could be ZERO; servers, networks, storage, etc. could all be hosted in the ‘the cloud’ or hosted by managed service partners.

However, consider Mike’s emerging world of technology, as referenced in my opening paragraph. With this is mind, what does the potential future look like for CIOs and their accountability and responsibility for the physical IT environment?

For a start, they shouldn’t limit their thinking. Instead they should have a broad field of vision around how to support and accelerate the business, using technology, in order to enable business growth and gain competitive advantage. This ranges from reshaping an enterprise’s physical infrastructure to drive IT projects, which are critical to the strategic and operational objectives of an organisation.

Yet many CIOs also lead the effort in integrating new and emerging technology into both their long-term IT strategy and immediate business plans. So, as well as looking at alternative sources of capability, be it service providers or cloud based services, the power of end point computing to enable innovative business models, and ultimately customer services can be invaluable.

Innovative businesses like Tesco prove it can be both.

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By: Colin Bannister
Colin Bannister is CTO and Vice President of Technical Sales for UK&I. The office of the CTO in Europe works closely with CA Technologies largest customers and partners to ensure that the relevant solution strategy maps appropriately to customer needs. Colin is responsible for managing the technical...
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Here come the girls .....

Published: March 16 2012, 07:23 AM | no comments
by Colin Bannister

Earlier this week for the 3rd year in a row CA Technologies hosted, on behalf of e-Skills UK, the ITMB Student Event and ever since the Sugababes song (made most famous by a certain retailers TV advert) "Here come the girls .." has been ringing in my ears.

Before I explain why let me explain what the event was all about. It is a coming together of over 200 1st/2nd/3rd year students studying the IT Management for Business degree (ITMB) from 11 Universities, over 60 employers of the largest recruiters of IT skills across the UK business sector (including CA Technologies, IBM, Shell, P&G, Capgemini, Deloitte, HP, PwC, and many more) for a day full of competitions, executive lectures and skills sessions.

 

The ITMB degree has been created by employers, for employers; the learning outcomes have been defined by the employers and the major advantage to the students is the continuous involvement of the employers throughout the degree (with events like these) giving them an "unfair advantage" when it comes to finding employment upon graduation. The degree is, in my opinion, unique and equips the students with the skills necessary to be productive the minute they enter the work place.

So back to the point.

One of the noticeable trends we are starting to see is the marked difference in gender diversity within ITMB (33% female and growing) compared with traditional Computer Science degrees (15% and declining); a significant and most encouraging difference given the diversity challenge in most organisations today.

On the day of the event CA Technologies offers the main prize to the leading student for the day (the one that stands out most in either the competitions, skills sessions or general interaction with the employers) the opportunity to become ‘General Manager of CA Technologies UKI' for the day - a fabulous opportunity to see how a large organisation really works! The shortlist for the day is drawn up by all the employers present and a final interview process determines the winner.

At this year's event the shortlist was made up entirely of young ladies!!

Congratulations to the winner Irina Fotache from Manchester University who will become my "boss" for the day!

So guys watch out they are after you ........."Here come the girls ........"!!!!

 

 

 

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By: Colin Bannister
Colin Bannister is CTO and Vice President of Technical Sales for UK&I. The office of the CTO in Europe works closely with CA Technologies largest customers and partners to ensure that the relevant solution strategy maps appropriately to customer needs. Colin is responsible for managing the technical...
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SaaS is the reality of today - ‘Yet another island to manage???'

Published: February 27 2012, 07:11 AM | no comments
by Sevi Tufekci

Recently over lunch with a friend (who is the head of operations at a telco provider), we were discussing a recent Forrester research report.  The survey results show that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has become a mainstream trend across Europe. Overall adoption rates will grow from approximately 15% in 2011 to 40% + over the next two years. My friend was confirming that the growing demand to deliver new business services faster, and to provide a flawless end-user experience, combined with the pressure to lower costs is driving enterprises to employ, flexible SaaS-based solutions that are, easy to buy and use, require no upfront and capital costs, and are up-and-running quickly. In line with the study's findings, he expressed that SaaS will not be a replacement, but rather a complement to the existing on-premises applications.

However, he seemed to be concerned that while it is no longer solely IT that chooses the applications and platforms supporting the business, IT is still expected to be responsible for the availability and performance just as they have for the internal/on-premises applications. His reaction was...'Yet another island to manage!!!'

When I asked him to explain what he meant, he mentioned that although his organization takes advantage of the efficiencies that SaaS-based solutions provide, they still need independent visibility into end-user experience and service delivery to ensure that vendors are meeting service delivery commitments to the business. They need new tools in order to monitor and safeguard the SLA's that are required. He was afraid that SaaS will create another island.

We then discussed the point that SaaS applications are not standalone, but should be integrated to on-premises applications as a part of business processes. This dispersed and very heterogeneous IT landscape cannot be monitored by a multitude of siloed management tools. There is a need for real end-to-end visibility across all applications. The real end-user perspective is the key parameter, and IT needs to be able to very quickly deploy tools that measure this perspective from various locations.

He was a little relieved when I mentioned to him that we may be able to help him to effectively safeguard the end-to-end performance of all their critical business services across all types of delivery models; enabling them to identify and resolve performance problems more quickly, manage end-user experience proactively, and help prove that SaaS vendors and MSPs are meeting service delivery commitments. Furthermore, the solution I was recommending to him is a cost-effective 100% SaaS based solution which provides this end-to-end response-time visibility into cloud and traditional web applications to understand the health, availability and end-user experience in a flexible way.

He walked away with the link to CA APM Cloud Monitor site to take a look for himself at: http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/

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By: Sevi Tufekci
Sevi Tüfekçi is CTO and Vice President of Customer Success Team for Emerging EMEA. The office of the CTO in Europe works closely with CA Technologies largest customers and partners to ensure that the relevant solution strategy maps appropriately to customer needs. Sevi is responsible for assisting customers...
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Meet the New Boss

Published: January 05 2012, 03:26 AM | no comments
by Colin Bannister

Not so long ago, whenever a boardroom discussion turned to the chief information officer (CIO), it was often swiftly followed by reference to that eponymous rock band: The Who. For far too long, the CIO was associated with software, servers, and storage. He or she was also famous for being in charge of the largest cost centre in the company.

Well, it's time to meet the new boss, as Roger Daltrey sang. Now is the time to reconsider the outdated belief that CIOs are not equipped for high-level management and explore a new way of thinking about who is best placed to become the business leaders of tomorrow. Affording your CIO the opportunity to advance towards becoming the CEO could be the best strategic decision your business can make.

How has this come about? With the rapidly increasing intersection of business and IT driven by cloud computing, CIOs see a new landscape of opportunity to drive business strategy with technology at its core.

There's strong evidence to support the notion that CIOs are eager to step up to the CEO plate. Recent global research commissioned by CA technologies found that just under half of CIOs say that they have the necessary skills to migrate to the CEO role. However, the research also found that the CEO position was dominated by executives with other skills: of today's current CEOs, 29% have risen from the CFO position. Only 4% of CEOs have risen from the CIO position.

 

Five or six years ago, many businesses introduced the CIO job title with the idea that it was about maintaining the technical platform. However, the CIO role should be seen as not only leading the technology side of the business, but adding value and creating cost efficiencies, bringing the role to life by making the board digitally literate and helping them understand how technology can help from a business perspective.

CIOs could take a leaf out of Philip Clarke's book. Clarke is the new chief executive at Tesco, and one of his previous roles was-guess what-CIO. When he was appointed, ManMohan Sodhi, a professor at the Cass Business School told BBC News, "It was a very strategic move by Tesco to appoint Clarke as chief executive. Clarke's experience as CIO meant that he knew not only IT but also how the supply chain worked; everything from ordering and procurement to how a warehouse operates."

So it can be done. But CIOs still need to step out of their shell a bit. Our report indicates modern CIOs are not just technologists. They have the necessary business acumen, commercial ability and people management expertise to add considerable strategic value to the business and its shareholders. What they lack is the opportunity to externalise these with customers and partners, and all too often they lack a forum to share their unique insight with their own leadership team in the boardroom.

Download 'The Future role of the CIO; Becoming the Boss' report here:http://bit.ly/q0rVyv

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By: Colin Bannister
Colin Bannister is CTO and Vice President of Technical Sales for UK&I. The office of the CTO in Europe works closely with CA Technologies largest customers and partners to ensure that the relevant solution strategy maps appropriately to customer needs. Colin is responsible for managing the technical...
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If it does what you claim, I will buy it

Published: December 12 2011, 09:52 AM | no comments
by Colin Bannister

I have just returned from our global customer conference CA World in Las Vegas, and witnessed one of those very rare moments that support our belief that we have some technology that could transform the way IT organizations operate in support of the business.

So what was this ‘moment'?

During a demonstration to the senior executive team of one of the largest companies in the World I overheard two comments; "This is game changing ..." from the Global CTO; "If it does what you claim, I will buy it ..." from the Global CIO.

So what were we demonstrating? Service Virtualisation through our CA LISA platform.

We all live in a world of composite application architectures that require development and test teams to have access to many interdependent IT components and systems that can be spread across the internal datacenter, shared among business partners, or hosted in the ‘Cloud'.

Unfortunately access to and availability of these components can be almost impossible in test environments and often no matter how much testing you perform you still have to cross your fingers when going into production. How many times have you encountered unforeseen problems with new applications and the reason was "we couldn't test that?!"

"Why not?" I hear you ask.

To replicate any production environment in test is prohibitively expensive, resulting in environments that can't replicate the interfaces, data, volume, etc to make application development fool-proof; you also have to spend time waiting for component dependencies and other development teams to synchronize activity.

So what did we demonstrate to this client? We showed how, through using CA LISA's service virtualization capabilities, how we actually take systems that you can't touch, and mainframes that don't have a MIP of availability, and we magically make those capabilities available to the people who need them for 10 cents on the dollar. So Service Virtualization literally "clones" an over-utilized system, to make it available to people who need it. In a nutshell we simulate the complete test environment such that it would react and respond just as their actual production environment would - all in software!

The client in question instantly recognized the huge benefits of this virtual test environment and how it could be leveraged when live system testing is not possible, namely faster parallel development across their organization; massively reduced infrastructure costs; productivity and time-to market gains; and fewer problems when migration application changes into their production environments.

What results are current customers experiencing?

  • Reduced infrastructure costs of between $10-$100 million - imagine the hardware, software, partitions of mainframes, buildings, power, cooling, etc. that you no longer need
  • Reduce the time to market by 30%+ because less time is needed to build a test environment and then test! This means that customers get to revenue faster. It's great to reduce costs, but if we can't help a customer increase their revenue, they will eventually die - you can't cost cut your way to prosperity.
  • Reduce pre-production defects by 80%+ Just like a car coming off the assembly line - you want to sell it to a customer, and have it work - you don't want to fix it in production.

Too good to be true? Take a look for yourself at: http://www.itko.com/

http://blog.itko.com

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By: Colin Bannister
Colin Bannister is CTO and Vice President of Technical Sales for UK&I. The office of the CTO in Europe works closely with CA Technologies largest customers and partners to ensure that the relevant solution strategy maps appropriately to customer needs. Colin is responsible for managing the technical...
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