John Parkinson

Managing the demands of the business can keep any CIO up at night. While several well established processes can help IT executives meet the challenge, it’s equally important to recognize the obstacles that stand in their way. Here are five of the biggest challenges: No clean slate. IT organizations almost never get to start fresh–the […]

It’s not a good feeling when the first voicemail you get on a Monday morning is from your CEO; he can’t get into his e-mail. The fix is simple, but it takes 20 minutes to get the support resources organized to troubleshoot the problem, do the repairs and report back. Your CEO is relieved and […]

The hardware and software platforms on which we run our businesses are remarkably reliable, and we take that reliability for granted. Few of us consider just how this level of reliability is achieved. Historically, we haven’t stressed the platforms all that hard; we’ve used only a fraction of the theoretical capability of the technologies we […]

I’ve been an early adopter of consumer technology for decades—in fact, I built my first computer way back in 1965. Friends and neighbors regularly check to see if I have any cool high-tech discards, because I’m constantly replacing products they consider good as new. When it comes to business technology, however, I’ve long relied on […]

I’ve been an early adopter of consumer technology for decades—in fact, I built my first computer way back in 1965. Friends and neighbors regularly check to see if I have any cool high-tech discards, because I’m constantly replacing products they consider good as new. When it comes to business technology, however, I’ve long relied on […]

Here’s a quick Trivial Pursuit question: How many data items would it take to uniquely identify you from among the other 6.7 billion people on earth? The answer is at the heart of the debate over personally identifying information, which in turn is at the center of the evolving information privacy debate. Let’s make it […]

Creating and maintaining a culture of innovation is important for any business. All companies express interest in innovation—who doesn’t want to come up with a new product or process?—but few do much about it. Many companies back away when they see what’s actually involved in sustaining innovation. Then there are businesses that really want to […]

I’ve worked on many projects that involved information security, but security has never been my focus. I’ve always relied on an appropriate group of security specialists to deal with the various security demands of my business technology solutions. We used simple checklists during project reviews and final acceptance tests to ensure that all security angles […]

Over the 20-plus years I’ve been using computers, I’ve experienced only three hard drive failures-not bad, considering how many hours of hard drive time I’ve logged. Still, each of those failures was a major event, though I back up my data regularly and keep redundant copies of every critical file. It’s not that I ever […]

There are a lot of appliances in my kitchen: refrigerator, cook top, oven, microwave, dishwasher, toaster, coffeemaker. They all have specialized functions. No one suggests there should be a single, general-purpose kitchen appliance that could be adapted to cover all these tasks. An appliance model—natural for the kitchen—might also be just as natural for the […]

Most of the businesspeople I know use Google Trends—an online tool that allows ordinary people to compare the frequency of Google search terms— to check out how an idea is resonating with the market, running multiple quick analyses to get an understanding of relative trends. I see this as an example of a new class […]

I have a problem with a lot of the rhetoric about “agile methods” lately. Agile methods, or at least those supported by the Agile Alliance—a nonprofit consortium of software developers—are used by developers to minimize risk by creating software in short time frames, or iterations, lasting anywhere from one week to a month. Each iteration […]