Allan Alter

CIO INSIGHT: Some businesspeople say overzealousness about IT security makes it harder to be agile and responsive to the marketplace. What do you say to them? WESTERMAN: We hear that, and I actually believed for a long time that if we put more process, governance and standards in place, we actually would hurt the agility […]

Business people know risk and return are opposite sides of the same coin; you can’t have return without risk. So successful companies learn to analyze, accept and manage risk…most kinds of risk, anyway. When it comes to IT risk, organizations tend to focus on avoiding risk instead of managing it, by preventing intrusions and preparing […]

The IT world is full of brainy people with not enough time to think. Hence, the ever present need for researchers who can dive into its most pressing issues and surface with practical answers. Few research organizations are as respected as the Advanced Practices Council of the Society for Information Management. Its members, who decide […]

They aren’t as far along as larger businesses, but mid-market companies are adopting service-oriented architectures and Web services, and making them the bedrock of their information systems environments. Mid-market companies, like their larger counterparts, seek integration, process improvement and lower costs. That’s driving a wave of upgrades; we found eight kinds of applications that are […]

The metaphor of “services” lies at the heart of one of the world’s most ballyhooed trends: using service-oriented architecture and Web services to integrate applications, automated processes and data. In accordance with our version of Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion—for every lionized technical trend there should be an equal and skeptical reality check—we’re tracked […]

Peter Fader, professor of marketing at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, is the ultimate marketing quant—a world-class, award-winning expert on using behavioral data in sales forecasting and customer relationship management. He’s perhaps best known for his July 2000 (PDF) expert witness testimony before the U.S. District Court in San Francisco that Napster actually boosted music […]

Every time we ask IT executives about recruiting and retaining IT talent, they tell us it’s becoming more difficult–and more confusing. Despite outsourcing, are companies still committed to their employees’ career growth and development? Are employers still recruiting IT college graduates? To shed light on these issues, we devoted this year’s survey on IT organizations […]

Mid-market companies need to attract and retain more technical talent, but don’t have the deep pockets of their larger competitors. That isn’t proving to be an insurmountable barrier, however. While large companies focus on pay-based incentives to recruit and retain employees, or turn to outsourcing and cut staff, mid-market companies are much more likely to […]

It seems no matter how many companies make the news because of IT security problems—recent victims and foul-ups include AOL LLC, AT&T Inc., Sovereign Bancorp Inc., the TJX Companies, UCLA and Verizon Wireless—the perceived state of security resembles Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon, the town “where all the women are strong, all the men are […]

“Influential” will never have the air of rigor, however phony, that ROI enjoys. There is no equivalent in the IT world to baseball statistician Bill James, measuring CIOs by such metrics as NPCC Average (Number of Projects Copied by Competitors), PCOTAB Percentage (Projects Completed On Time and Budget) or LIF Index (Lifetime Industry Firsts). Still, […]

For several years now, CIO Insight‘s annual security surveys have found that IT executives have more confidence in their security than is warranted by the strength of their security measures, or the number of breaches that are occurring. However, CIOs at companies with revenues below $500 million don’t have the same level of bravado as […]