http://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-05-16T13:37:00ZCompanies are too afraid of risk, among other factors, according to Accenture.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/innovation-isnt-working-at-4-out-of-5-co/240155030?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioTurns out that business innovation is hard. And it's hard even if you have a chief innovation officer, a platform for crowdsourcing ideas or other formal means to turn the crank. <P> Just 18% of execs in a new <a href="http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-low-risk-innovation-costly.aspx?c=mc_prposts_10000040&n=otc_1013 ">Accenture study</a> of 519 U.S., U.K. and French companies said they're getting a competitive advantage from their innovation strategies. <P> Now, that number <i>should</i> be fairly low -- if three-fourths said they get a competitive advantage, I'd say a lot of people had fooled themselves. Who would be left to have an advantage over? <P> But 18% is a surprisingly low percentage given how much effort companies are putting into innovation programs, said Adi Alon, managing director in Accenture's innovation and product development consulting practice and an author of the study. A full 70% of survey respondents consider innovation at least among the top five strategic priorities at their companies, and two-thirds said they're extremely or very dependent on innovation for long-term success. Half of companies have increased spending to drive innovation, and a mere 10% have cut it. <P> <strong>[ For more thoughts on how to drive innovation, see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/5-contrarian-tips-on-innovation/240154681?itc=edit_in_body_cross">5 Contrarian Tips On Innovation</a>. ]</strong> <P> Alon thinks the questions left plenty of wiggle room for execs to give their innovation programs the benefit of the doubt. "We didn't frame it as 'everlasting' competitive advantage," Alon said. Another metric in the study shows that for every one of 15 different innovation areas, execs were less likely than they were three years ago to rate them "very satisfied." <P> "Commercialization and launch" and "consistent innovation performance" fared particularly badly. Companies do rate their innovation results higher on most fronts if they have some formal program for it. But still, only 21% of those with formal innovation programs say their companies' innovation delivers a competitive advantage (14% of those without a program say it does). <P> Alon blames two big factors: <P> First, companies are too risk-averse. They're still timid from the recession and fail to take a portfolio approach. If they thought in terms of a portfolio, they would be more likely to take a few big, risky bets along with smaller, safer ones. <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Second, companies aren't learning enough from the digital economy -- meaning they're not analyzing enough data from social network communications or their own systems. Get that right, Alon said, and execs will have the confidence (or ammo) to overcome the risk-averse piece. (Accenture's report has tips for building an innovation program, like crafting it for speed and agility.) <P> To Alon's factors, I'd add one more: not understanding your company and its unique innovation metabolism. <P> How much risk and change can it digest, where will the organization reject new ideas like a virus, and who do you work with and around in order to make progress? My recent column suggesting <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/5-contrarian-tips-on-innovation/240154681">5 contrarian innovation tips</a> showed CIOs tweaking conventional approaches to fit the realities of their companies' cultures. <P> Innovation programs are awash in buzz. Successful innovators hunker down on the unglamorous work of creating a repeatable way to generate ideas, assess the risk, hone the best ideas and move them through to a measurable outcome.2013-05-13T09:06:00ZThink small, don't partner with business units and don't treat innovation like an election.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/5-contrarian-tips-on-innovation/240154681?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity-applications/office-2013-10-questions-to-ask/240150037"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/959/01_Intro_175.jpg" alt="Office 2013: 10 Questions To Ask" title="Office 2013: 10 Questions To Ask" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">Office 2013: 10 Questions To Ask</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for slideshow)</span> </div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Here's an oxymoron you never want applied to your company: It has a stale innovation strategy. Innovation is just as prone to insipid groupthink and cookie-cutter efforts as any other corporate initiative. <P> That risk is why I latched onto a few contrarian ideas I heard at last week's <em>InformationWeek</em> <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/cio.php">CIO Summit</a>, held as part of this year's <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/">Interop</a> event in Las Vegas. Our Summit brought together a dozen original thinkers to discuss practical innovation efforts at their companies. Here are five innovation ideas that jumped out at me. <P> <strong>1. Start With Internal IT Projects.</strong> <P> My first thought would be to start innovation efforts with business-facing projects, whereby the IT organization can dazzle its peers outside IT. But when <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/union-pacific-delivers-internet-of-thing/240004930">Union Pacific CIO Lynden Tennison</a> started a program called Innovation Station, to crowdsource innovation ideas from employees, he focused first on IT staff and internal IT projects. Tennison wanted projects he could green light without having to win over the COO or any other business unit executive, and he wanted to make sure this process actually worked to produce useful ideas before introducing it to other company departments. <P> <strong>[ Companies are paying less these days for crowdsourced ideas. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/as-innovation-competitions-grow-prize-mo/240153106?itc=edit_in_body_cross">As Innovation Competitions Grow, Prize Money Shrinks</a>. ]</strong> <P> Here's one way it did. Union Pacific has installed "hot box" sensors that let railroad look for problems on the wheels of its trains before those wheels fail, and one of the pros on the company's IT team saw a way to eliminate many of their false positive readings. Tennison turned the staffer loose on the idea, appointing an executive mentor and providing access to the systems and team that analyze those readings. A false positive costs real money by forcing UP to pull a train off the track or even just slow it down. The fix worked and saved the railroad about $10 million, says Tennison, who's now looking to extend Innovation Station to other business units. <P> <strong>2. Don't Accept The Inevitability Of Failure.</strong> <P> ADP CIO Michael Capone isn't afraid to take a risk. He set up an innovation lab, tearing out the cubicles in half a floor of ADP's New Jersey headquarters to set up an open office environment. In addition to hiring about 30 full-time innovation specialists, Capone regularly takes people <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-dont-let-the-innovation-lab-b/229402849">out of their daily IT roles</a> to do short-term tours in the innovation lab. <P> What he didn't do is turn the innovation group loose on blue-sky, futuristic efforts. It's focused on getting something operational in six to eight months typically. "People say in order to innovate you have to fail," Capone said. "Well, my CEO doesn't buy that." <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --><div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"><div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a><div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div><span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span></div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Setting the culture around an innovation group is tricky. If you're taking risks you'll have some that don't work out. Many leaders try for a "fail fast" approach -- to set short time frames so new ideas don't turn into year-long science projects. Capone knows some things will fail, encouraging people to think differently and experiment, but he's setting a more practical and short-term tone than most other company innovation labs. <P> <strong>3. Consider Alternatives To Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down Crowdsourcing Voting.</strong> <P> No idea in its initial form is a blockbuster. It takes back-and-forth refining to make a spark of an idea valuable, and "voting isn't collaborative," said Todd Dunn, Intermountain Healthcare's director of innovation.Many organizations, including Union Pacific, use voting techniques to help filter ideas. Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system in Utah and Idaho, uses a crowdsourcing platform developed by Intuit called Brainstorm to solicit employee ideas around specific challenges, but instead of tallying up votes to push the best ideas ahead, Intermountain uses the platform to evaluate activity: Which ideas are generating the most discussion? The platform calculates an "activity score" that reflects the passion behind -- rather than the popularity of -- an idea. <P> <strong>4. Think Small.</strong> <P> Dunn puts it bluntly: If someone has a $100 million business idea, they're handing their employer a two-day notice, not the idea. So be realistic. Big, transformational ideas always are welcome, and there needs to be a channel and process for those. Intermountain Health has that. But it also welcomes focused, small-goal-oriented ideas, and it has focused on building a platform to encourage discussion of those ideas and to rapidly prototype them. <P> One example: Intermountain asked employees for ideas that could save them time with everyday tasks in order to, well, focus on new ideas. One IT pro said that if he were given a day's time, he could figure out a way to cut the time it takes him to do a SQL Server install from four hours to one -- and he does about 70 of those a year. Is it worth a day's time to possibly free up more than 200 hours a year? Sure. Union Pacific's Tennison said most Innovation Station ideas are much smaller and more focused than the one that saved the company $10 million. <P> <strong>5. Don't Cut College Ties In Tight Times.</strong> <P> It's tempting to put the brakes on new college hires when budgets get tight. Union Pacific knows about tight budgets, having weathered a huge slide in freight volume during the recession. But Tennison said internships, college recruiting, training and innovation are the last places he'll cut. <P> Union Pacific bets <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/tech-hotshot-want-to-work-at-a-railroad/240004931">big on interns</a>, hiring more than 100 a year. It recruits on a dozen campuses, and even works with professors to try to get UP's problems and experiences into classwork. The company is based in Omaha, Neb., which isn't a magnet for fresh college grads. But Tennison says the rate of acceptance of UP job offers is about 75% among grads who have interned at the company and gotten a taste of the city, compared with about 10% among those who haven't. <P> Got your own take on conventional innovation wisdom? Please share it with us, and keep the contrarian thinking flowing.2013-05-13T08:00:00ZInnovation is tough amid today's regulatory checklists. These leaders are getting it done.http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/leadership/20-health-it-leaders-who-are-driving-cha/240154651?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- May 2013 InformationWeek Healthcare Digital Issue --> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313hc?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Healthcare - May 2013" title="InformationWeek Healthcare - May 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313hc?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a><br /> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313hc?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the May 2013 issue of <em>InformationWeek Healthcare</em></a>, distributed in an all-digital format (registration required).</strong><br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / May 2013 InformationWeek Healthcare Digital Issue --><br /> <!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> A few years ago Atrius Health, a major independent physicians group, tried giving elderly, chronically ill patients devices that they could use in their homes to do things such as provide a verbal reminder to take their medications. "It absolutely made sense," says Dr. Michael Lee, Atrius Health's director of informatics. "It just didn't work." People simply didn't like using the devices, so adoption was tiny. But, Lee says, this is exactly the kind of experimentation health IT leaders need to be doing. "The honest answer is we don't know what changes in processes will truly impact a lot of these patients," he says, "... and the only way we can learn is to innovate and try and see what the outcome is." <P> Lee, who's also a pediatrician, is among the health IT leaders we recognize in this year's InformationWeek Healthcare CIO 20. We call it the "CIO" 20, but as Lee's presence shows, we include people holding many titles who are driving change in their organizations and the industry. The list calls out leaders in informatics, in data integration, even the CEO of a health information exchange. This mix reflects the fact that many people are influencing the tech decisions at health organizations. Lee's colleague at Atrius Health, CIO Dan Moriarty, also is on the CIO 20. This year's list is the third annual one, and as in past years, it highlights new leaders. <P> Today's health IT leaders must balance practical realities with a sense of purpose. They're in healthcare to cure the sick and keep people healthy, and they believe IT can help improve care and lower the costs. But the practical piece is that government regulatory requirements dominate the short-term tech agenda, particularly healthcare providers' need to meet Meaningful Use standards to receive electronic health record subsidies. <P> These 20 leaders are helping their organizations strike the right balance between these pressures. We see Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego experimenting with the Internet of things -- connecting monitoring devices in new ways for better understanding of patient health. We see groups such as University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Iowa Health System and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute trying out new ways to apply analytical software. And we see people like Ed Marx, CIO of Texas Health Resources, keeping all this technology grounded in patient needs by insisting that his IT leadership team, himself included, spend time on rounds with clinical staff. <P> As Michael Smith, CIO of Lee Memorial Health System, puts it, "There is more to do than there is funding or time to do it." Health IT requires tough choices, and these 20 leaders are helping their &#173;organizations get those choices right. <P> <em> -- Chris Murphy</em> <P> <center><strong>Get the full list and articles <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313hc?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">here in our free digital issue PDF</a>,<br /> or click through below to read the profiles.</strong></center> <P><a name="Oriol"></a> &#65279;<strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Albert Oriol</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Rady Children's Hospital - San Diego</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Albert-Oriol.jpg" alt="Albert Oriol" title="Albert Oriol" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Albert Oriol</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Rady Children's Hospital - San Diego</div> </div> The 475-bed Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, the larg&#173;est pediatric hospital in California, is trying to bring device data directly into electronic records. It's including not only clinician documentation in its Epic Systems electronic health records, it's also integrating medical device data with the help of the Vectored Event Grid Architecture platform from Nuvon. <P> That system lets it pull data from monitors of vital signs at every bed in the hospital, and anesthesia devices talk directly to the Epic anesthesia module, saving anesthesiologists time recording data in the EHR. "They're actually very happy with that," CIO Albert Oriol says. Rady brought this system online at the same time it went live with electronic anesthesia documentation. <P> The hospital also is experimenting with drawing data from home-based devices, including glucometers, heart monitors and asthma inhalers. That project is a proof of concept for the institutional review board. Clinicians have to go to a website to see the data, but eventually this will be directly integrated with the EHR. <P> "We're doing this now without [direct] integration per se because we want to prove that the integration works before we invest in it," Oriol says. "This could be an avalanche of data for our clinicians." Oriol is convinced that "we will be able to take better care of the patient if we can monitor their health on an ongoing basis," Oriol says. <P> Oriol faces less stringent Meaningful Use compliance pressures than many on this list. Children's hospitals and pediatricians don't see Medicare patients, so they're only eligible for the Medicaid side of federal health IT incentives. That means fewer requirements and more room to experiment. "We approached MU with a different mindset," Oriol says. <P> <em>-- Neil Versel</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Ross"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Cris Ross</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Mayo Clinic</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Cris-Ross.jpg" alt="&#65279;Cris Ross" title="&#65279;Cris Ross" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Cris Ross</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Mayo Clinic</div> </div> &#65279;Mayo Clinic cares for nearly 2 million patients a year from nearly 150 countries, and Mayo's reputation results in its specialists seeing more complex and unusual cases than typical physicians do. CIO Cris Ross's IT team is trying to find ways to share the resulting expertise by providing tools to physicians within Mayo and with affiliated practices. <P> For example, Mayo has established an &#173;online service called AskMayo&#173;Expert (AME). The program provides clinicians with snapshots of specific cases and offers what Mayo considers the best treatments. AME also gives its phy&#173;sicians direct access to Mayo experts, says Ross, who joined Mayo in August 2012. <P> Not satisfied with that outreach initiative, Mayo's board of directors recently outlined one of its most ambitious undertakings yet. By 2020, it wants to expand its reach from nearly 2 million patient contacts a year to 200 million. Since that can't happen through in-person patient visits alone, the clinic is using telemedicine initiatives and other online services to help reach that lofty goal. <P> <em>-- Paul Cerrato</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Shrestha"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Rasu Shrestha</strong><br /> <strong>VP, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Rasu-Shrestha.jpg" alt="Rasu Shrestha" title="Rasu Shrestha" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Rasu Shrestha</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">VP, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center</div> </div> &#65279;Rasu Shrestha is pushing the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to get away from looking at patients' data as silos that are "application-centric or chart-centric," he says. What's needed is to integrate all the disparate data streams --from electronic records, lab services systems and medical imaging systems, for example. That sounds simple, he says, but it's really a "complex game of connecting the dots." <P> Shrestha, as VP of medical IT and medical director of interoperability and imaging informatics, is responsible for helping UPMC make better use of its data. UPMC is a $10 billion-a-year integrated health insurer and healthcare provider, operating more than 20 hospitals and serving nearly 1.6 million members. With roots in academic research, it's among the leaders in using IT to help healthcare move away from a fee-for-services to a pay-for-performance model. <P> UPMC initially put its resources into creating a technology foundation, including widespread conversion from paper to digital medical records and from film-based medical imaging to filmless technology. Phase two now focuses on using electronic health records and digital imaging to drive this more patient-centric system that delivers better care at the bedside. <P> From a technological standpoint, this journey has meant semantically harmonizing long lists of the medical jargon clinicians use and mapping it to the nationally accepted dictionaries of medical terms that are coded into most software, such as SNOMED, LOINC and RxNorm. <P> How does that translate to better care at the bedside? When Ms. Jones comes into a UPMC emergency room with a heart attack, clinicians will use the emergency room's electronic medical record system from Cerner to enter her condition and medications. More importantly, if the patient was previously given nitroglycerin in one of UPMC's ambulatory care facilities, which use Epic EMR software, the doctors in the ER can read that medication note and understand its relevance to the patient's current myocardial infarction, despite it being in an EMR from a different vendor. "We are able to map that medication to any one of our other EMRs throughout the health system, the health information exchange, and to the data warehouse on the back end, including on the payer side," says Shrestha. <P> While health systems struggle with health information exchange within their walls and across the nation, UPMC has made strides in both areas. But its crowning achievement to date, led by Shrestha and his team, has been establishing fully integrated, enterprise-wide interoperability. Because of that, UPMC is ready to feed its enterprise analytics efforts with data coming in from clinical, financial, research and operational streams. <P> <em>-- Paul Cerrato</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P><a name="Grosser"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Joy Grosser</strong><br /> <strong>VP & CIO, Iowa Health System</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Joy-Grosser.jpg" alt="Joy Grosser" title="Joy Grosser" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Joy Grosser</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">VP & CIO, Iowa Health System</div> </div> Under CIO Joy Gros&#173;ser, the seven-hospital Iowa Health System is close to completing a nearly four-year transition from a fragmented inpatient electronic health record system. It's replacing a system in which nurses did most order entry, with ambulatory care records on a different platform, to an integrated enterprise EHR. This year, Iowa Health will apply for HIMSS Analytics recognition of its system as a Stage 7 EHR, the highest level. The key to Iowa Health's turnaround has been its openness to change "from top to bottom," Grosser says, "because we really believe we're changing healthcare for the future." <P> Iowa Health already has as an accountable care organization, which contracts with Medicare and private payers for the care of more than 100,000 patients. So it's crucial for the organization to harness IT to &#173;improve care coordination and do population health management. <P> But it's not the IT department driving initiatives, Grosser says. Iowa Health consistently seeks feedback from its doctors, nurses and administrators looking for how IT can support the organization. In fact, Grosser is the only IT representative on the system's 20-member IT governing council. <P> "We want our strategic plan to be enabled by IT and information, but not to have compromises to that strategic plan made by IT," Grosser says. "We want to drive side by side with the providers." <P> Grosser comes out of hospital operations, and despite having spent more than 20 years in health IT at various institutions, she has never forgotten her experience in operations. "You have to think about the need for information on the planning side: What are we trying to accomplish?" she says. "Strategic planning and IT planning go hand in hand and have always been part of my mantra." <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <a name="Kessler"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Jeffrey Kessler</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Jeffrey-Kessler.jpg" alt="Jeffrey Kessler" title="Jeffrey Kessler" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Jeffrey Kessler</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute</div> </div> &#65279;Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has three major missions: providing care for cancer patients, developing new cancer treatments and training oncologists. CIO Jeffrey Kessler and his IT department support all of those missions. <P> On the research side, Dana-Farber is trying to create personalized cancer treatments, combining genomic, clinical and other kinds of data. Other organizations are doing this as well: Memorial Sloan-Kettering, for example, is partnering with IBM to use Watson supercomputing for analysis. But Dana-Farber is using its own software and equipment. "Data storage is an issue," Kess&#173;ler admits. "But even that is manageable with tiered storage solutions, keeping the data you need with immediate response times in the higher-cost tiers and moving less frequently used data to lower-cost tiers." <P> On the clinical side, Dana-Farber uses the homegrown Longitudinal Medical Record of Partners Healthcare, since there isn't a well-developed oncology EHR on the market, Kessler says. At Dana-Farber's urging, Partners has added oncology enhancements such as an advanced chemotherapy order entry system. Partners is switching to Epic EHR. <P> Kessler, who became CIO 11 years ago after stints with UMass Medical Center and Cabrini Medical Center, gets strong executive support to serve his multiple goals. The leaders "recognize that the institute's strength is the ability to balance all our missions, including research, education and community outreach," he says. "That makes the job easier to balance." <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Turnbull"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;James Turnbull</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/James-Turnbull.jpg" alt="James Turnbull" title="James Turnbull" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">James Turnbull</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics</div> </div> With a 37-year career in the healthcare industry, most of it in health IT, James Turnbull has whipped his share of electronic record projects into shape. As CIO of Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida and again as CIO of Children's Hospital in Denver, he supervised the implementation of electronic health records and computerized physician order entry systems. When he joined University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics in 2008, he recalls, the healthcare system had been deploying Cerner on the inpatient side since 2003, but had run into a stone wall on CPOE. <P> Turnbull led the team to successfully bring the ordering system live. He displayed the same can-do attitude when it came to integrating Cerner with the Epic system that the University of Utah's primary care clinics had been using since 1999. The IT team used a custom-built interface that lets users pull up information from one system while working in the other one, a project that won the organization a Most Wired award from Hospitals & Health Networks magazine. <P> But that level of interoperability isn't enough. The University of Utah has begun converting the entire organization to Epic, a move it expects to complete by spring 2014. Turnbull explains that clinicians will be able to use a single integrated system more easily, because they will always have the same view of a patient's chart, no matter where they are or what they're doing. <P> Turnbull's efforts have earned him recognition as the 2012 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year from the Health Information and Management Systems Society. Turnbull is a former president of HIMSS and former chair of the College of Health In&#173;formation Management &#173;Executives. <P> Turnbull agrees with those who say that the government should slow down the Meaningful Use incentive program and allow healthcare providers to learn lessons from the progress made to date before moving on. "We're dealing with complex organizations, and the biggest concern is the pace of change," he says. "I don't think the biggest pushback is on the standards. It's more about the pace." <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P><a name="Matthews"></a> &#65279;<strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Michael Matthews</strong><br /> <strong>CEO, InHealth and MedVirginia</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Michael-Matthews.jpg" alt="&#65279;Michael Matthews" title="&#65279;Michael Matthews" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Michael Matthews</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CEO, InHealth and MedVirginia</div> </div> &#65279;Michael Mat&#173;thews wears many hats. He's the CEO of MedVirginia, a Virginia health information exchange, and of InHealth, a clinically integrated network owned by Richmond-area hos&#173;pitals and physicians. He's also the president and a board member of the eHealth Exchange, a national health information exchange that includes federal agencies and private healthcare organizations. <P> MedVirginia connects healthcare systems Bon Secours and Centra Health, as well as physician groups and a rehab facility in Richmond. It was the first HIE in the country to go online with federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the VA system and the military health system. MedVirginia's nonprofit affiliate holds the contract to build and operate Virginia's statewide HIE, ConnectVirginia. <P> InHealth also supplies managed care, disease management and operational consulting to members, including Bon Secours' accountable care organization. <P> Matthews did community health planning in South Carolina and Ohio in the 1970s and 1980s. He supervised strategic planning for Akron City Hospital and Summa Health System from 1981 to 1993. Then he moved to Virginia and started working with a group of healthcare systems that wanted to link their systems together to improve outcomes and begin taking financial risk for care. <P> Matthews sees three pillars to his overlapping companies: physician engagement, care coordination and health IT. It's complex, but "that's what got me interested in the HIE world, where there are so many disparate parts," Matthews says. <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Marx"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Ed Marx</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Texas Health Resources</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Ed-Marx.jpg" alt="Ed Marx" title="Ed Marx" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Ed Marx</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Texas Health Resources</div> </div> &#65279;Texas Health Resources earned a rep as a national health IT leader by implementing its electronic health record earlier than most, and that earned IT credibility inside THR. <P> THR's health IT prow&#173;ess also helped the &#173;organization form an accountable care organization (ACO). In January, the ACO signed agreements with Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas. Both agreements will reward the ACO for providing high-quality care and lowering costs. <P> CIO and senior VP Ed Marx has a staff of 650 and an annual budget of $100 million to provide IT support to a system that includes 25 hospitals and 5,500 staff physicians, of whom 500 are employed. But Marx, who has been with THR for five years, has a role far beyond the nuts and bolts of technology, sitting on THR's leadership council with about a dozen top company leaders. He helps shape THR's business strategies and sometimes suggests options in areas where the other leaders didn't even know THR had problems, he says. <P> Marx says the ideal CIO role in a big organization like THR should be 90% strategic and 10% operational. But when there are fires to put out, "I'm going to jump in and help my team," he says. "So my role is probably split more like 70% strategic and 30% operations." <P> Because of his conviction that health IT must be grounded in clinical knowledge, Marx spends a day each month doing rounds with clinicians in a THR hospital. His senior staff members must do the same. Says Marx: "This makes you realize that you work in healthcare." <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Minear"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Michael Minear</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, UC Davis Health System</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Michael-Minear.jpg" alt="Michael Minear" title="Michael Minear" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Michael Minear</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, UC Davis Health System</div> </div> &#65279;The University of California Davis Health System in Sacramento, Calif., recently received recognition for having an electronic health record that met the tough HIMSS Ana&#173;lytics Stage 7 criteria. UC Davis CIO Michael Minear says achieving that standard felt good because it was so hard to do. <P> The entire organization backed the effort, starting with financial support. "We spent easily a couple of million dollars just on bar-code medication administration," Minear says. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists and everyone on the health information management staff all had to make op&#173;erational changes. <P> Physician buy-in was a critical part of the effort. Back in 2009, physicians began documenting their care online. Ninety-five percent of the staff now uses computerized physician order entry in the hospital, and nearly all orders are entered electronically. The key force behind adoption is a group of 40 physician champions who meet monthly. "They're highly engaged, and they make things happen," Minear says. <P> The biggest challenge in achieving Stage 7 was meeting "the scope of expectations," he says. Going truly paperless, for example, doesn't just mean scanning all paper into the system eventually; staff must scan it the same day the paper appears. So IT gave people scanners on carts. <P> Minear's background is in finance, but he shifted to IT in the early 1980s. He feels particularly lucky to be a CIO at UC Davis because it allows him to be involved in clinical care and also in research and education. "In most academic healthcare systems, those roles are still siloed," he says. <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P><a name="Reese"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Bert Reese</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Sentara</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Bert-Reese.jpg" alt="&#65279;Bert Reese" title="&#65279;Bert Reese" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Bert Reese</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Sentara</div> </div> Eight of the 10 Sentara Healthcare hospitals across Virginia are at Stage 7 -- the highest level -- of the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model. "The other two will be over time," promises CIO Bert Reese, as Sentara converts one it acquired in 2009 to its Epic electronic health record and advances analytics at one that opened in 2011. <P> Less than 2% of U.S. hospitals have reached Stage 7, but the honor is trivial compared to what Reese wants to accomplish: convert Sentara into an accountable care organization that de&#173;livers better care, improves population health and reduces costs -- the so-called Triple Aim. &#173;Analytics is at the center. "We believe healthcare is a data-driven event," Reese says. <P> Sentara has a dashboard that draws on products from Epic, Microsoft and SAP. The analytics infrastructure takes feeds from clinical departments, materials management, payroll and sources outside the organization. "It's sort of like a blender," Reese says. <P> Data is one of three flavors: retrospective, based on historical records; dynamic, such as clinical decision support that updates as new information comes in to provide advice at the bedside; and predictive, the most difficult type to harness but with potentially the greatest impact on Triple Aim goals. <P> "The trick is to convert data to information and knowledge to action," Reese explains. "You want to speed that information to the point of care." <P> Sentara's road to becoming an ACO is eased because the company has a health insurance plan, so financial incentives are more aligned with outcomes goals than many of its noninsurance competitors. "We can get to the at-risk [payment] model quicker than most," Reese says. That only happens, however, with ready access to clinical intelligence and the right data to feed the intelligence engine, he says. <P> <em>-- Neil Versel</em> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="ORourke"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Michael O'Rourke</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Catholic Health Initiatives</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Michael-ORourke.jpg" alt="Michael O'Rourke" title="Michael O'Rourke" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Michael O'Rourke</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Catholic Health Initiatives</div> </div> &#65279;Michael O'Rourke has a daunting task. As senior VP and CIO of Catholic Health Initiatives, he leads the effort to bring up electronic health records in 76 acute-care hospitals and more than 300 ambulatory care clinics in 19 states. His deadline: complete most of the job by the end of June so that the majority of CHI's facilities and clinics can meet Meaningful Use standards in time to get government EHR incentives for this year. <P> Here's where things stood when we interviewed O'Rourke earlier this year: With ambulatory care EHRs installed in CHI facilities in Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Tacoma, Wash., about 70% of CHI clinics had EHRs certified for Meaningful Use. O'Rourke expected the majority of CHI hospitals, which started the process later than clinics, to be online by June. <P> Like many in health IT, O'Rourke is nervous about the timing of Meaningful Use Stage 2, which begins for hospitals in October. "Much of the industry is in a scramble to get the first stage up for Meaningful Use," he says. "And Stage 1 is fairly straightforward; Stage 2 is a lot more rigorous." He already has teams preparing for Stage 2, while others work on EHR deployment and Stage 1. <P> While it isn't easy to run an IT department in such a far-flung operation, O'Rourke had plenty of experience working in multihospital systems such as Catholic Healthcare West and Triad Hospitals before joining CHI in 2007. Reporting to him are regional CIOs who supervise the work in each region. CHI ties it all together through an IT steering committee that includes C-suite execs from all divisions. <P> O'Rourke's challenge is ensuring that the pace of implementation is as fast as possible while making sure clinician adoption doesn't fall behind. <P> <em>-- Ken Terry</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="KMarx"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Kara Marx</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Methodist Hospital of Southern California</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Kara-Marx.jpg" alt="Kara Marx" title="Kara Marx" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Kara Marx</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Methodist Hospital of Southern California</div> </div> &#65279;Methodist Hospital of Southern California, in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia, is steadily working through its many regulatory requirements. But CIO Kara Marx isn't looking just to meet the minimums. "We want full adoption when we roll these things out," says Marx, referring to systems such as bar-coded medication administration. "We just think it's the right thing to do." <P> The hospital attested to Stage 1 Meaningful Use for Medicaid in 2011 and for Medicare in 2012, and it's looking to reach Stage 2 as soon as the measurement period opens for inpatient care in October. It's moving quickly on Stage 2 to free up resources for ICD-10 in 2014. Getting to Stage 2 of the federal electronic health record incentive program will &#173;require some "heavy lifting" at Methodist. <P> Marx is a registered nurse, a fact she believes helps her talk with clinicians as a peer and not an adversary, and to gain buy-in more quickly than if she had come solely from the IT world. "Having a clinical background allows the conversation to be a lot more fluid," Marx says. <P> Communication is crucial because IT teams for the 596-bed hospital are managing a menagerie of IT systems. Methodist has used an Eclipsys (now Allscripts) Sunrise clinical system since 2008, and also runs QuadraMed billing software, and a picture archiving and communication system from DR Systems. <P> "We feel very comfortable. We're not making any major changes," says Marx, who previously worked for EHR vendor Cerner and for First Consulting Group. Still, as Meaningful Use and other healthcare reforms advance, Methodist must be able to share data with organizations that use different vendors. "We have to learn to live in that environment," she says. <P> Methodist also is learning to live in an era of &#173;patient engagement by making its IT more accessible by consumers. Marx sees patient engagement "as a strategy that has many different layers to it." The hospital already has a portal, which addresses a specific requirement in Meaningful Use regulations, as well as a centralized scheduling and preregistration system. It's considering a social media component. <P> A mobile app also is on the list. The hospital hasn't started on the app yet but is looking to offer it first for the emergency department and outpatient services. "We think that will be a really critical part to patient engagement," she says. <P> <em>-- Neil Versel</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P><a name="Tegethoff"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Gretchen Tegethoff</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Athens Regional Health System</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Gretchen-Tegethoff.jpg" alt="Gretchen Tegethoff" title="Gretchen Tegethoff" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Gretchen Tegethoff</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Athens Regional Health System</div> </div> After not quite 18 months on the job as VP and CIO of Athens Regional Medical Center in Athens, Ga., Gretchen Tegethoff is feeling comfortable in the role. Mostly. <P> The toughest challenge? "Having to balance organizational needs with federal responsibilities," she says. <P> It has been a hectic time since Tegethoff came to Athens in February 2012 after six years as CIO of George Washington University Hospital. Athens Regional has begun its 90-day measurement period for its first year of meeting Meaningful Use Stage 1 standards and plans on attesting this spring. <P> The IT shop also is installing a patient portal to its Allscripts inpatient electronic health record in preparation for Stage 2 and is selecting an ambulatory records system, while also preparing for the switch to ICD-10 coding in October 2014 and adjusting to other realities of healthcare reform. <P> Tegethoff took a patient approach to understand the job and organization. "After six to eight months, you probably have a good idea of what the job is like," Tegethoff says. "I'm glad I gave myself an extra few months and found clarity on roles and responsibilities." <P> Another major challenge is finding enough qualified talent. <P> Athens is a city with a population of about 115,000, and Athens Regional competes for tech pros with hospitals in the Atlanta area, 70 miles away. Tegethoff hopes to connect the medical center to the University of Georgia, also in Athens, possibly to educate students about health IT and tap into the school's work-study program, grooming candidates for possible future employment. "I'm encouraged every time I see a new [training] program out there," Tegethoff says. <P> <em>-- Neil Versel</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <a name="Kopetsky"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Ed Kopetsky</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Ed-Kopetsky.jpg" alt="&#65279;Ed Kopetsky" title="&#65279;Ed Kopetsky" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Ed Kopetsky</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital</div> </div> Lucile Packard Children's Hospital has been around for more than 20 years, but it's facing major change to keep up with the times. The hospital was created as a very high-end inpatient and research hospital -- meant to advance pediatric medical science and manage very severe and complex cases. But healthcare is evolving to put more emphasis on accountable care and the full continuum of treatment before, during and after a hospital visit. <P> Ed Kopetsky arrived as CIO of the hospital four years ago as this change was gaining momentum. The hospital was addressing the needs of patients once they returned to their communities by partnering with other health systems and building its own physician community network. Kopetsky realized Packard Children's IT would become a problem in this new model, because the systems were geared toward inpatient care. <P> So the hospital decided about 16 months ago to overhaul the entire IT system. The restructuring includes adding new analytical tools and replacing human resources, supply chain software and billing software. It includes conversion from Cerner to Epic for clinical systems and electronic medical records. That will allow Packard Children's to better exchange patient data with other hospitals in the region, since most are now Epic shops, Kopetsky says. <P> It adds up to much more than a typical IT project. "It's complementary to and critical to the transformation of the overall business," says Kopetsky. The next step will include telemedicine capabilities so the hospital can monitor very sick children and pick up on early indicators that may signal the need for escalated care. "Getting to the right level of care fastest" is critical to achieve the best possible outcomes and deliver quality care, says Kopetsky. <P> Kopetsky is no stranger to such megaprojects. Prior to joining Packard Children's in 2009, he was a partner in IBM's services business, and executive VP with the consulting firm Healthlink. He has also served as senior VP and CIO for Centura Health and Sharp HealthCare. <P> Kopetsky and his team also plan to implement a personal health record system to let parents enter data about the patient as things happen. If families choose to share that data with the hospital, clinicians will have more up-to-the-minute data on each child's condition and needs. <P> <em>-- Paul Cerrato</em> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Smith"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Michael Smith</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Lee Memorial Health System</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Michael-Smith.jpg" alt="&#65279;Michael Smith" title="&#65279;Michael Smith" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Michael Smith</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Lee Memorial Health System</div> </div> &#65279;As CIO of Lee Memorial Health System, Michael Smith is in charge of more than just IT. He also oversees health information management, biomedical engineering and diagnostic technology for the public health system in southwest Florida. <P> Biomedical engineering means Smith oversees the operation of medical devices. "More and more CIOs are involved in the biomedical engineering side these days because everything needs to be connected," Smith says. <P> There's no shortage of conventional IT work, with an implementation of an Epic Systems electronic health record in multiple stages. "It's been all hands on deck with putting in Epic," Smith says, on and off for six years. Lee Memorial has had an Epic ambulatory EHR since 2007 and has been replacing legacy inpatient systems in phases since 2009. That project slowed as the health system completed two hospital acquisitions. <P> The organization now has nearly 1,500 beds across four acute-care hospitals and two specialty hospitals, and also a long-term care facility and a network of outpatient clinics. IT brought the new hospitals live with clinical documentation in stages. Smith is leading a "big bang" rollout of computerized physician order entry this month. <P> Lee Memorial plans to replace its children's hospital in 2016, and other facilities are under renovation. "There is more to do than there is funding or time to do it," Smith says. He also sees a shortage of qualified health IT professionals. "I think the tension is going to get worse." <P> Prioritizing takes strong communication among senior leaders and operational units. "The good news is, we're efficient," says Smith. "The bad news is, it's a fairly tight margin." <P> <em>-- Neil Versel</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P><a name="Steltenkamp"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Carol Steltenkamp</strong><br /> <strong>CMIO, UK HealthCare</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Carol-Steltenkamp.jpg" alt="&#65279;Carol Steltenkamp" title="&#65279;Carol Steltenkamp" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Carol Steltenkamp</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CMIO, UK HealthCare</div> </div> &#65279;I am not a techie," concedes Dr. Carol Steltenkamp, chief medical information officer of &#173;University of Kentucky HealthCare. Yet she has positioned the academic health system as a leader in IT since she arrived in 2006, carrying on a legacy that predates her tenure. <P> In January 2011, UK HealthCare became the first organization in the U.S. to get a bonus Medicaid check for Meaningful Use. Years earlier, in 2003 and 2004, the health system took the then-daunting step of installing computerized physician order entry at a time when the Leapfrog Group was touting CPOE as one of its four key "safety practices." <P> "The very first thing we did on the inpatient side was CPOE," Steltenkamp says. CPOE usually is one of the toughest pieces of clinical IT -- the medical staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles rebelled against a poorly implemented system in 2003 -- but UK HealthCare got it done and has been refining it for years. <P> But the order sets at UK had gotten unwieldy. "We have too dang many," Steltenkamp says. So UK is updating its technology as a beta customer of Elsevier's InOrder cloud-based system for creating and managing order sets. For example, the health system had nine order sets related to stroke care across its main UK Chandler Hospital, the adjacent Kentucky Children's Hospital and the UK Good Samaritan Hospital. It has condensed those to two. A pediatrician who practices part-time, Steltenkamp sees her clinical background as helpful in understanding how to cull order sets and build useful ones backed by proper medical evidence. <P> As a CMIO, her challenge is to apply data to deliver actionable knowledge at the right point in the workflow to help clinicians make "judicious decisions," she says. Steltenkamp looks at the multitudes of clinical data UK HealthCare has compiled and deems it "untapped." <P> <em>-- Neil Versel</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Kaul"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Rebecca Kaul</strong><br /> <strong>President, UPMC Tech Development Center</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Rebecca-Kaul.jpg" alt="Rebecca Kaul" title="Rebecca Kaul" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Rebecca Kaul</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">President, UPMC Tech Development Center</div> </div> &#65279;Having every possible bit of information about a patient, says Rebecca Kaul, "is equal to having nothing." Kaul's point is that health IT only helps the industry if it lets people use all that data to solve problems. <P> The need for practical health IT was one reason the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 2010 created its Technology Development Center, with Kaul as president. The other was the chance for UPMC to cash in when it helped hone a new technology. TDC finds a problem UPMC faces and makes an equity investment in a startup trying to solve it or creates a joint venture with an established vendor. UPMC's edge, Kaul says, is that it can provide insight into the problems vendors can't get on their own. <P> TDC is investing in three main areas: visualization to help physicians make sense of data; collaboration to help groups involved in care use the same data; and data transformation, such as projects with Nuance and Optum to use natural language to pull insights from verbal notes. Kaul also is looking at decision support systems for potential investments. <P> <em>-- Chris Murphy</em> <P> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P> <a name="Garber"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Lawrence Garber</strong><br /> <strong>Director for Informatics, Reliant Medical Group</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Lawrence-Garber.jpg" alt="Lawrence Garber" title="Lawrence Garber" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Lawrence Garber</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">Director for Informatics, Reliant Medical Group</div> </div> &#65279;Medical school could not have prepared Dr. Lawrence Garber for this. <P> In 2005, Reliant Medical Group (then known as Fallon Clinic) decided to switch from a homegrown medical record system it had used since 1992 to Epic electronic health records. The company's leadership knew the value of historical data and wanted to keep its records. So Garber personally mapped more than 100,000 terms used in the legacy system to Epic terms. "It took a year off my life," Garber says with a laugh. "But it was absolutely worth it." Reliant transferred more than 100 million records, such as lab tests and medications. Reliant got its modern EHR, but with data as if it had been on Epic for 15 years. <P> Garber is an internist who spends about a quarter of his time practicing medicine and the rest as director for informatics at Reliant, the 250-physician group where he has worked for 27 years and which is part of the Atrius Health Group of practices. <P> In retrospect, Garber sees three pillars that were critical to the Epic rollout: value, meaning all stakeholders get something out of moving to the system, since it did take a lot of money and time; usability, which meant spending a lot of time on interfaces and workflows so the EHR helps in the care of patients; and trust, which came from factors such as getting many clinicians involved in the implementation and relying on staff instead of consultants to implement it. Clinicians including Garber spent three weeks at Epic's Wisconsin HQ to become certified, as did in-house IT pros. <P> <strong>Hassle Free</strong> <P> Today Garber is putting a major emphasis on automation and connectivity -- what he calls "hassle free" health information exchange. <P> For example, there are the interfaces Reliant built with five hospitals, so that when patients are discharged, their follow-up instructions and medications are automatically sent to physicians with an alert. A decision support system looks at new medications and sends an alert three days after discharge, flagging possible tests -- say, a potassium test if the patient was prescribed a diuretic. <P> In addition, if the patient is 65 or older, the physician's staff gets a message to schedule a follow-up visit, since those visits have proven effective in preventing readmissions. This kind of automation "is the key to health information exchange," Garber says. <P> Reliant in the coming months will start using the Mass HIway HIE, which will allow interfaces to be built once and used for many area hospitals. <P> When Garber isn't practicing, he sits near fellow members of a team focused on applications. While big decisions go to a governance committee, many changes and fixes happen based on quick conversations among that small team. Garber hears a lot about analytics, and he doesn't doubt the importance of looking at historical data. But "what's most important is to get the actionable data right to the front lines," he says. At Reliant that means loading claims data into the EHR, since that might show a person got a tetanus shot while on vacation in Florida that otherwise wouldn't hit the record. <P> <em> -- Chris Murphy</em> <hr size="1" color="#CCCCCC" /> <P><a name="Moriarty"></a> <a name="Lee"></a> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Dan Moriarty</strong><br /> <strong>CIO, Atrius Health</strong> <P> <strong style="font-size:1.3em;">&#65279;Michael Lee</strong><br /> <strong>Director of Informatics, Atrius Health</strong> <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Dan-Moriarty.jpg" alt="Dan Moriarty" title="Dan Moriarty" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Dan Moriarty</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">CIO, Atrius Health</div> </div> &#65279;In the years ahead, more healthcare providers will get paid based on whether they keep people healthy. Atrius Health is "already very deeply into the new world," says CIO Dan Moriarty, with more than half of its revenue coming from this risk-based model. <P> Atrius Health is Massachusetts' largest independent physician group, and it's one of 32 pioneer accountable care organizations, working with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to test the ACO model. As an ACO, Atrius Health has financial risk because "if we have low cost and low quality, or high cost and high quality, we will end up losing money on the deal," says Dr. Michael Lee, Atrius Health's director of informatics. <P> Health IT plays a strategic role in helping Atrius Health meet its ACO goals. One important way is improving information sharing with the many hospitals Atrius Health works with. <P> As CIO, Moriarty has led a standardization effort that now has all 50 of Atrius Health's locations on the same platforms, including Epic electronic health records and common practice management, imaging and radiology systems. Standardization makes data sharing easier within Atrius Health and with the 35 hospitals to which Atrius Health has 200 or more admissions in a year. <P> If an Atrius Health patient goes to a hospital, physicians can use a Web portal to look the person up; they can click one button and data from the hospital stay will be added to the Epic record. Atrius Health created the first such link with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and now has them with 16 pro&#173;vid&#173;ers, about half of which let the hospital bring data in from physician records as well. Five more are in the works. <P> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/hc/018/Michael-Lee.jpg" alt="Michael Lee" title="Michael Lee" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">&#65279;Michael Lee</div> <div class="storyImageCaption">Director of Informatics, Atrius Health</div> </div> The next leap is automating data exchange without a patient lookup; the first attempt went live this year. Using the state's new Mass HIway health information exchange, a patient arriving at the emergency room automatically triggers a message to the primary care doctor's inbox in the Epic EHR. That inbox is the place "every one of our doctors go every day to do their jobs," Moriarty says, so it's part of their routine. Using the HIE protocol standards means Atrius Health can use the same Epic integration to the HIE with other state hospitals. <P> In his informatics role, Lee focuses on giving clinicians data to make better decisions at the point of care. Lee, a pediatrician, is one of several clinicians at Atrius Health who practices medicine and helps shape technology strategy. He helps set the priorities and designs for clinical support systems, and Moriarty's IT teams does the technical work, project management and training. <P> Measuring outcomes takes a lot of work documenting what Atrius Health does, Lee says, and some of that data entry falls on already-busy doctors. Lee acknowledges that tension as one of the most difficult elements of health IT. Also difficult are regulatory re&#173;quire&#173;ments, such as mov&#173;ing to ICD-10 and meeting Meaningful Use standards, which dominate today's priority list. But Lee sees healthcare pros accepting the digital future: "Though people complain about electronic records, no one wants to go back to paper." <P> <em>-- Chris Murphy</em> <P>2013-05-07T09:30:00ZAs part of a strategy to modernize its IT, FedEx offered a voluntary buyout to IT and select other workers as it gives more work to service providers.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/fedex-makes-strategic-shift/240154316?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioFedEx is moving a larger percentage of its IT work to service providers as it looks to cut costs and shift to more "variable capacity" amid a strategic modernization of its applications and tech infrastructure. <P> FedEx CIO Rob Carter, as part of a broader discussion with <em>InformationWeek</em> editors and his senior executive team at the company's Memphis headquarters, estimated that IT service providers will handle 25% to 30% of the company's IT needs, compared with less than 10% today. As part of the shift, FedEx offered voluntary buyouts to its entire IT team and those taking the buyout will spend a month to as much as a year transitioning work to outsourcers. FedEx offered buyouts to select employees in other departments as well. <P> FedEx has long used IT services vendors such as Wipro, Infosys and IBM for project work, but "we were going from zero to 60 to zero with these providers," Carter said. By giving a group of service providers more steady work (he didn't disclose which specific vendors FedEx will now be working with), including ongoing operations of some IT systems, those outsourcers will have the incentive to invest in staff with expertise in the systems used by FedEx and the broader transportation industry, he said. <P> FedEx gave managers the choice to let people leave in one of three waves. The first wave will end on May 31, the close of FedEx's fiscal year. The second will end on Nov. 30 and the third on May 31, 2014. "It's more costly to do it this way," Carter said of the staged departure and voluntary buyout, but it's more "people-friendly," it's non-discriminatory and it protects the business from disruption by allowing for an orderly knowledge transfer. <P> The buyouts are structured to be more lucrative based on how long a person has been with the company. FedEx had hoped that IT pros who have managed IT systems the company is sunsetting would take the buyout option. CIO peers warned Carter against offering the buyout to everyone, he said, since the risk is that the best people will leave. But Carter maintains that the buyout couldn't have gone better. "We just aren't very mercenary around here," he said. "People weren't just taking the money and running." <P> FedEx is facing cost pressures from weak international air freight markets and tough price competition, and its executives have told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to increase profit $1.6 billion over the next three years in large part by cutting costs from its Express business, including cutting air capacity and retiring older, less efficient aircraft. FedEx posted $361 million profit in its most recent quarter on $10.95 billion in revenue. FedEx's core businesses are Express, Ground and Freight, along with its FedEx Office chain of stores. <P> <b>Big Shift To Private Clouds</b> <P> FedEx is several years into an overhaul of its IT applications and infrastructure. Two major elements stand out: a move to a service-oriented architecture that allows for more sharing of software code across business units; and a shift to a private cloud data center architecture. <P> Technology has been core to FedEx's operations for its entire 40-year existence, based on founder and CEO Fred Smith's philosophy that the information about a package is as important as the package itself. But four decades as an early tech adopter have left FedEx with lots of legacy systems, which the company's IT leadership has been looking to modernize and simplify for the past four years. For example, FedEx is replacing the airline operation system (it operates about 660 aircraft) that it has used for 24 years. <P> "We're looking at every single thing we've ever done," said Kevin Humphries, the senior VP in charge of FedEx's IT infrastructure. "You have to think 'clean sheet' without doing a clean sheet." <P> FedEx has created what it calls its "purple core" of IT services. These are software-driven tasks such as looking up a package recipient's address that dozens of its applications must do. In the past, those functions were coded for every application that needed them. Today, they're shared software services that an application calls on to do a common task. <P> This "purple core" is meant to make development and support easier and cheaper because the code is written once and used by many applications. It should let FedEx retire legacy systems and move faster as it expands and develops new services. When reusing software services, the big change for developers isn't "the thing they do differently, it's the things they don't have to do at all," said Eric Keane, FedEx senior VP for operations IT.FedEx needed that development speed when its main rival, UPS, launched a new service, called My Choice, in October 2011 to let package recipients redirect their packages en route. Creating such a service is a big challenge for package-delivery companies because most of the information they have and the services they provide focus on the shipper, not the receiver. FedEx launched a competing service this quarter called Delivery Manager. "We had to step on the gas, no doubt," Carter said. Delivery Manager would've been almost impossible to do without a single address look-up service, he said. <P> Another fundamental change at FedEx IT is its move to a private cloud architecture for its data centers. A private cloud in FedEx terms means that all its servers, storage and networking configurations are designed for what Carter calls "general-purpose computing," so that they can run any application workload rather than be dedicated to one function. <P> FedEx began this private cloud effort after the IT organization mapped out the company's future data center needs several years ago, and the board of directors balked at the capital cost. Using a private cloud architecture instead, FedEx built a data center in Colorado Springs, Colo., that consumes about one-third the power as was originally planned, in about one-fifth the physical size. <P> Before moving an application into the Colorado data center, which opened in early 2011, the applications were rewritten to run on a common software stack to allow for workload shifting. While some of the software used to run FedEx's data center continues to be proprietary, "we will be OpenStack compliant in a short period of time," Humphries said, referring to the open-source private cloud platform. <P> The Colorado data center is located at an elevation of 6,000 feet, letting FedEx cool the building using the outside air instead of costly air conditioning. The design is modeled on the ultra-efficient, standards-based data centers that Internet giants such as Amazon.com, Facebook and Google have built. And that infrastructure will let FedEx move some computing capacity to public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Rackspace and Verizon in the not-too-distant future. FedEx is set to convert a data center based on the same private cloud architecture near its Memphis headquarters. <P> FedEx faces significant risks from the scale of its change. Carter knows he's losing important technology expertise by cutting staff, but he said he's convinced that the voluntary, staged buyout will help transfer that expertise gracefully to third-party service providers. <P> While Carter downplays any negative impact from the transition, he doesn't downplay the scale of the change the FedEx IT leadership team is trying to pull off. Said Carter: "People, organization, processes, technology, platforms -- everything that we were doing is being reset." <P> <strong>Editor's Note:</strong> After further discussions with FedEx CIO Rob Carter, the editors made a few minor changes to the headline and story.2013-04-25T12:10:00ZBeth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka blogs on risk planning and data sharing in wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/boston-hospital-cio-reflects-after-bombi/240153643?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioBeth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was in the thick of events following this month's Boston Marathon bombing. BIDMC clinicians treated people injured in the bombing, and they treated the <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/boston/press-releases/2013/update-on-condition-of-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-3">bombing suspects</a> after police shootouts in the days following. <P> All that activity has BIDMC CIO John Halamka thinking -- and blogging to share his thoughts on what the hospital might need to do differently. <P> Read his blog post "<a href="http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2013/04/reflections-on-tragedy-in-boston.html">Reflection on the Tragedy in Boston</a>." What Halamka's doing shows what it really means to be a "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/cios-on-twitter_b_2474768.html">social CIO</a>." He's taking a risk by putting ideas out for reaction before they've been filtered through planning committees, and raising problems that aren't yet solved. He's sharing ideas right away, even as the city mourns and recovers, rather than in a month or two when doing so would be safer but also less relevant. <P> <strong>[ For another take on the Boston bombings, read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/when-tragedy-strikes-its-not-social-busi/240153152?itc=edit_in_body_cross">When Tragedy Strikes, It's Not Social Business As Usual</a>. ]</strong> <P> Halamka (whose team earned BIDMC the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/beth-israel-deaconess-medical-center-emb/240006766">no. 1 ranking</a> in the 2012 <em>InformationWeek 500</em>) raises five lessons learned -- mostly tough problems yet to be solved. I'll only briefly note them here (read the blog). <P> 1. Risk planning is "forever altered." He had most of the people from one critical IT team volunteering at a relief tent close to the explosions. None of them was harmed, but it got him thinking about risks. <P> 2. The hospital limits remote access for security reasons -- but what if Boston's "shelter in place" order -- which restricted local people from leaving their homes -- lasted for days? <P> 3. Same issue with access to the data center: What if people couldn't enter or leave for days? <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> 4. The hospital tracks every single record lookup. Should there be real-time alerting in such a crisis -- letting someone know if a record's being accessed that shouldn't be? <P> 5. There's a clear need for a healthcare information exchange in such mass casualty situations. <P> This last point was Halamka's most definitive one -- and one he has devoted much of his career to solving. He and many Boston-area peers have worked for years to make slow, steady progress on the sharing of health data. <P> He noted that BIDMC, Massachusetts General, Brigham and Womens, and Children's Hospital all treated people injured in the bombing, and often did so with "incomplete medical information." He points to late 2014 as the target to complete a more complete medical record look-up and exchange system, which he says "would have been helpful" in treating the bombing victims. <P>2013-04-24T10:50:00ZWork-life balance is a myth, risk-taking is vital and other lessons women (and men) must learn.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/women-in-tech-career-advice-from-elite-e/240153543?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio"Risk is the key element around planning successful careers," said Wal-Mart CIO Karenann Terrell. Thus began one of the most candid, practical career-advice discussions you'll ever hear for women in the IT field and the executives responsible for developing and retaining that talent. <P> The panel was the highlight of an event on Monday organized by the <a href="https://www.mcwt.org/">Michigan Council for Women in Technology</a>. It was sponsored by Detroit's Big Three automakers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and featured a discussion with the CIOs of those three companies. I served as emcee of the event. <P> The panel with Wal-Mart CIO Terrell also included Boeing CIO Kim Hammonds, IBM senior VP Bridget van Kralingen, Cisco senior VP Sheila Jordan and Michigan CIO David Behen. My colleague <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/authors/Laurianne-McLaughlin">Laurianne McLaughlin</a> led the discussion. <P> Given what these leaders have achieved, their career moves don't look very risky. If you end up as the CIO of Wal-Mart or Boeing, your choices look pretty smart in retrospect. <P> But these leaders shared how their journeys came with moments of deep doubt about whether they had made a disastrous move or even gotten in over their heads. "Those moments, driving in your car and thinking 'What have I really done?'-- I've had those moments," Boeing's Hammonds said. <P> Jordan recalled nine months after leaving Disney for Cisco, how she came out of a marketing meeting so overwhelmed by the new industry jargon that she thought, "Oh my gosh, they don't speak English. What are they talking about? I used to be smart." She urged the 500 or so attendees, at least two-thirds of them women, to "be patient with yourself" and to trust that you'll learn your new environment just like you did your last one. <P> Van Kralingen, who leads IBM's 100,000-strong consulting army, urged the audience members to "make sure you go for the hard jobs," such as those with revenue and profit responsibility and front-line management involving customers. <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/news/2013/04/Kim-Hammonds-Boeing-CIO-at-MCWT_500.jpg" width="500" height="277" alt="Boeing CIO Kim Hammonds speaks at the MCWT leadership event" title="Boeing CIO Kim Hammonds speaks at the MCWT leadership event" style="margin-bottom:7px"/><br /> <span class="storyImageCaption">Boeing CIO Kim Hammonds speaks at the MCWT leadership event.</span></center> <P> <P> While the career advice messages were aimed at women, I found plenty in here for men as well -- and for any business leader to use in thinking about how to recruit, develop and retain tech talent. Here are some highlights: <P> <b>Work-life balance "is a myth created to make us feel a bit guilty,"</b> Jordan said. It's unrealistic. Has any parent of a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old felt in balance every day, whether they're working or not? So Jordan strives for work-life integration, blending work as part of her life so there isn't a sense that working is depriving a personal life. All the panelists embraced this idea of integration rather than balance. <P> If a manager or executive works in a client-facing, high-intensity role, there will be "weeks or months" where work dominates your time, van Kralingen said. "None of us is going to push back that tide," she said, so you must carve out time for what's important. Flexibility means you might not be home by 7 every night, but it's perfectly OK to leave in the middle of the day for a child's preschool music concert. <P> Said Hammonds: "It's all about blending, and it's about getting peaceful with that blending." <P> <b>It's OK to give up what you're great at.</b> Too often, women stay in roles where they've thrived instead of taking a risk on a role where they're no longer the expert. Van Kralingen trained as a psychologist, so she faced this fear when she was asked to move from doing organizational development to managing large-scale reengineering and cost-reduction consulting jobs. "When you get really good at something, it's hard to give it up," she said. "... What I've seen in many women's careers is they hang onto something too long in order to be expert." IBM addresses this by pushing people to do what it calls "lily-padding" -- moving people to a lateral area outside their expertise. <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Women might need a push forward. "Women have networks and very, very often have mentors," Terrell said. "They need sponsors." She didn't stop there, challenging business leaders to take action: "Do you have a woman, whether you're a man or woman, you actively advocate and sponsor for?" <P> Boeing's Hammond said that for women and men, sometimes it takes a "double promotion" to move them through the talent pipeline to a challenging position for which they might not have all the career-track boxes checked. "We take risks on people," Hammond said. <P> <b>Take credit for what you do.</b> "There's a strange dynamic of credit deflection that takes place with women," Terrell said. Even when she asks women directly about their contributions to a project or other initiative, they'll default to discussing the team. "There's a feeling of dirtiness that exists with women about taking credit even when directly asked about it," she said. <P> That deflection can lead managers to conclude that maybe those women didn't do more than facilitate. Terrell suggests the following tactic: Ask your people to fill in the blank: I'm really proud of _______.IBM has a program to teach women how to network and showcase their capabilities, because the company's research showed that women are less active than men in doing that internally and building their influence. Success is "both about our work output, and how you're seen as collaborating and leading," van Kralingen said. <P> Hammonds warned women against keeping their heads down while doing a job and then not telling the story of what they and their teams achieved. <P> <b>Push for the flexibility you need.</b> Flexible work environments are a hot discussion topic, fueled by Yahoo CEO <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/yahoo-flap-should-it-leaders-ban-work-at/240149814">Marissa Mayer's decision</a> to no longer let employees work at home. <P> Hammonds said about half of Boeing's IT workforce works virtually in some way and noted that employees' needs change over time. "Men and women are going to go through life phases -- sicknesses, elderly parents, children -- so allowing that flexibility is very important," she said. "And they'll be better performers if you stick by them in that time of need." <P> Flexibility goes beyond work-at-home options, Terrell said. If members of a small project team want to schedule their own time for how they need to work, employers need to figure out how to let them. "It behooves us all to look at flexibility because it draws talent, and it enhances innovation," she said. <P> Lack of flexibility might keep women from doing that self-advocating noted earlier. "People might hold themselves back because they don't want to work the way they see us working," Jordan said. If a company can show that there are flexible alternatives, more women may push to advance. <P> <b>Make mentoring a two-way street.</b> Wal-Mart has created "mentoring circles," as opposed to one-on-one mentor-mentee relationships. Those groups of 15 to 20 women, including at least one senior leader, get together monthly to discuss what it's like to be a woman in technology. Wal-Mart created the circles because so many employees wanted access to effective mentors that it became impractical to do that one-on-one. Plus, it then becomes more about creating a group of people leaning on each other. "It's probably the most meaningful element of retention that I can see between those we lose and those we keep," Terrell said. <P> But don't make the mentoring a one-way street, van Kralingen advised. If you're the junior person, work on providing feedback that's valuable to the business leader.2013-04-23T14:00:00ZThe city's IT team is using open source to build an analytics platform aimed at predicting and preventing big city problems.http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/chicago-cio-pursues-predictive-analytics/240153231?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- Apr. 22, 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/042213gov?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/government/020/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Apr. 22, 2013" title="InformationWeek Green - Apr. 22, 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/042213gov?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a><br /> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/042213gov?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire April 2013 issue of <em>InformationWeek Government</em></a>, distributed in an all-digital format (registration required).</strong><br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / Apr. 22, 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/government/020/020GOVcoverart_flat_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Future Cities" title="Future Cities" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> <P> Alongside big-city problems like lowering the murder rate, cutting the number of stolen garbage carts may seem like small stakes. But lost garbage carts actually cost Chicago a lot of money and time -- it takes scarce resources to field the complaints, acquire new carts and pay staff to deliver them. What if data analysis could help the city minimize the number of lost carts? </p> <P> Evaluating garbage cart losses with mapping software and comparing that information to streetlight failures, city staff confirmed what they had suspected: In certain neighborhoods, if the alley lights go down, garbage cart thefts spike. That intelligence gives a new sense of urgency to getting lights repaired. </p> <P> "Government has been very good at collecting data, but not as good at using the data," says Brett Goldstein, the city of Chicago's CIO. So Chicago is in the process of building a predictive analytics platform that will do more analysis and much more sophisticated analysis. That work is being funded in part through a $1 million grant the city received in March as a runner-up in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, a competition to fund innovative ideas in city government. </p> <P> The city still has far to go in completing the predictive platform. Goldstein has spent the past two years laying a foundation for this analytics work, including hiring experts from the private sector and academia with experience in big data and open source. His team has also created a single database on the MongoDB open source platform, into which data is fed from dozens of legacy IT systems, providing better visibility into municipal operations across departments. </p> <P> The database is linked to mapping software to create an application called WindyGrid that lets city employees call up public data on a building or section of the city. WindyGrid, which went live in the past year, can be used for simple cause-and-effect tests, as in the streetlights-and-garbage-cart analysis.</p> <P> Developing a full-blown predictive analytics capability is much more ambitious. As envisioned, the system will flag for city leaders leading indicators of coming problems, including those that, unlike the out-of-commission streetlights, they hadn't considered. </p> <P> The goal is to apply historical analysis to predict and prevent future problems. "We have the bones of this," Goldstein says, referring to WindyGrid. The next step is "taking it and saying, 'If we're seeing this in a given neighborhood, what's likely to happen next?'"</p> <P> Goldstein's team talks of ways to prevent graffiti, rodents and garbage cart thefts. But what about Chicago's more serious scourges, like its alarming homicide rate (at 506 homicides in 2012, it had more than any U.S. city, though the rate has dropped so far this year) or struggling schools (the Chicago schools CEO has proposed closing 54 underutilized schools and moving students to better-performing schools)? </p> <P> Graffiti and rodents are mere starting points, says Brenna Berman, an ex-IBMer who's now first deputy CIO. "This is the approach for how this department will be part of the answer for tackling the murder rate or addressing complex emergencies like snowstorms or improving the water infrastructure," she says. The harder-to-solve problems will take more data and analysis of more variables, but "it's the exact same story for how you figure out which water mains are going to explode this year, so that we use our limited budget to improve the water infrastructure the right way over the next 10 years." </p> <P> <strong>Open Source Approach</strong></p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- inline Report Promo --> <div class="inlineReportPromo right"> <div class="reportHeader"><a href="http://www.ubmfuturecities.com/" target="_blank">What's Next For Cities</a> </div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/government/020/ubmsfuturecities_top_logo.jpg" width="175" height="104" alt="Future Cities" title="Future Cities" class="reportCover" /> <div class="reportInfo"> Future Cities is the first global, online, multimedia community for 21st century city decisionmakers focused on sustainable urbanization. </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://www.ubmfuturecities.com/" target="_blank">Click Here</a></strong></center> </div> </div> <!-- / inline Report Promo --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> The Chicago team is using open source software for much of the predictive analytics platform. In addition to the MongoDB database for WindyGrid, the system will likely include Hadoop for some analytics processing. The team is doing its development work with the R data-analysis language. </p> <P> The philosophy is to leave legacy systems in place while copying data into the single shared database for analysis. "In government, often when we want to do something big and different like this, we replace everything," Goldstein says. Since the team launched the WindyGrid project in late 2011, the approach has been to "leave everything in place," he says. </p> <P> Using open source saves the city money on software and lets it start without a big investment. "This is a project that began on my laptop in the mayor's office," Goldstein says. Rather than issuing a multimillion-dollar request for proposals, he adds, "we sat in a dark room and started to build things." </p> <P> There are still plenty of proprietary systems in Chicago's data center, including an Oracle Exadata system that will continue processing city transactions and commercial business intelligence software used for tasks such as creating reports and giving employees their daily assignments. </p> <P> Those systems will remain as the city does its new analytics work with open source software. The city plans to share what it develops with the open source community. </p> <P> <strong>Challenge Of Being Predictive</strong></p> <P> Going from today's WindyGrid data visualization to a predictive model is a step into the world of big data. "We've done really well at the multihundred-million-rows- of-data problem for spatial," Goldstein says. "I don't think we've solved the 10 billion rows of data. That is part of our plan." </p> <P> Tom Schenk, Chicago's director of analytics, came to the city from nearby Northwestern University, where he did analysis of medical research. Now he's collaborating with researchers at the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon on the algorithms needed to make sense of many data sources. A major challenge is to build a framework that's general and flexible enough so employees can ask questions of the data. Goldstein is pushing to have something completed within 18 months, and the Bloomberg grant covers a three-year project. </p> <P> One of the advantages cities have compared with private-sector companies in working with academic researchers is that cities can more easily release large swaths of data, since it's generally public information. Chicago cranks out many data sets for public consumption, providing APIs that let people access data and setting up internal systems to automatically update information as the city does. For example, the city releases through its data portal the location and speed of city buses that it tracks in half-mile increments, providing a picture of traffic congestion. </p> <P> "Back in the day, if we wanted to have an academic relationship, it would take a year to execute an NDA," Goldstein says. "Now, I put it out through the data portal." </p> <P> Chicago's predictive analytics and open data initiatives try to use the city's varied data sources to answer questions officials can't know today. What's the next water main that might break? What's causing robberies to rise in a neighborhood? What mashup apps would citizens use if they had access to the data? The planned predictive analytics platform is by far the city's most ambitious attempt yet to deal with such uncertainty. </p> <P> <P>2013-04-18T09:06:00ZLatest crowdsourced contests aim to attract data scientists with $100,000 prizes -- not yesterday's millions.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/as-innovation-competitions-grow-prize-mo/240153106?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-medical-records/7-big-data-engines-look-to-reinvent-medi/240144641"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/930/Opener_image_tn.jpg" alt=" 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare" title=" 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Is the market price dropping for crowdsourced, industry-shaking ideas, even as demand for them grows? Where companies once thought they needed to dangle million-dollar prizes to get people interested in crowdsourced big-data challenges, lately we're seeing more-modest sums. <P> The latest innovation challenge was announced on Tuesday, setting the ambitious goal of solving the most daunting data problems in U.S. healthcare. Called the <a href="http://www.caretransformationprize.com/ ">Care Transformation Prize</a>, the competition will award at least three quarterly sums of $100,000 each, with the prospect of more after that. <P> A hundred grand isn't couch change, but it's far from the $3 million on offer for the <a href="https://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp ">Heritage Health Prize</a>. That two-year-long competition -- sponsored by the Heritage Provider Network and its founder, Dr. Richard Merkin -- challenged people to examine a set of data and predict which patients will end up in the hospital in the next year. The thought is that HPN could use such predictions to prevent hospitalizations. The winner will be announced in June. Dr. Merkin and Heritage are leading the Care Transformation contest as well, in collaboration with the Advisory Board and the Bipartisan Policy Center. <P> In today's innovation contest market, $100,000 is looking like the high end. At Kaggle, an online platform used to run many company-backed crowdsourcing initiatives, <a href="http://www.kaggle.com/competitions">many prizes</a> are in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. Passionate contestants often are as interested in the glory and the competition as the cash prize. It's like "fantasy football for data scientists," says HPN senior executive Jonathan Gluck. <P> <strong>[Read more about crowdsourcing platform provider <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/kaggle-winners-tapped-as-data-analytics/240150254?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Kaggle</a>.]</strong> <P> Netflix, another believer in open innovation, also has deflated its prizes. Back in 2006, Netflix made a splash with its $1 million prize for the team that devised the best predictive algorithm for recommending movies people would like. But <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-beyond-5-stars.html ">Netflix never fully implemented that recommendation engine</a>, deciding that the gains weren't worth the engineering effort, and just as importantly because it had moved from a DVD-centric model (order a movie to watch later) to a streaming model (pick a move to watch now) that required subtly different recommendations. <P> Netflix still has faith in the open innovation model, though, and it's back most recently with <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/how-netflix-is-ruining-cloud-computing/240151650">a contest</a> for improving the open-source tools it uses to manage application development on Amazon's cloud infrastructure. The prize: $100,000. <P> <a href="http://www.gequest.com">GE</a> is another big proponent of open-innovation challenges. Its <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2JfKizxtsc"> healthcare group </a> ran a challenge for people to suggest apps to improve hospital operations. The winners pitched an app that makes the hospital discharge process more useful. Total prize pool: $100,000. <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --><div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"><div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a><div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div><span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span></div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Another GE quest put up a $100,000 top prize to the team that could take a mound of flight data and write the best algorithm for predicting flight arrivals. The <a href=" http://www.gequest.com/c/flight ">winner</a> improved industry standard predictions by 40% -- in part by ignoring about three-fourths of the available data to focus on what's most relevant to arrival times. A second round of that challenge is underway. <P> Big data isn't your thing? There's two weeks left to write a <a href="https://heritagechallenge.openmhealth.org/heritage/">mobile healthcare app</a> using data on the Open mHealth platform, a development architecture designed to make data-sharing and code reuse easier. The prize: Yep, $100,000 (and Heritage Provider Network is again among the sponsors). <P> Why have the million-dollar prizes given way to $100,000 or less? I suspect one reason is that it's really hard to set the right mega goals, as any manager can relate to. There just aren't that many clearly-stated, burning questions (like the historic <a href="http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/info_sheets_john_harrison.htm">Longitudinal challenge</a>) that merit a company awarding a mega-prize. Which data-based business problem would you pay $1 million to understand better or predict more precisely? <P> For the Care Transformation challenge, the organizers are even crowdsourcing the questions, asking the public, particularly those in healthcare, what the industry's biggest problems are. A group of experts will look at those questions, and pick one to be the first $100,000 challenge problem. They'll do the same thing for the next two challenges -- and more beyond that if the organizers see intriguing problems to solve and a community stays active around the problems. <P> A second reason for smaller prizes might be a reality check: Crowdsourcing gets us only so far. Americans like to think there's some genius out there with the answer to our problems. Yes, companies are often well served searching for answers and new ideas the way GE, Heritage Provider Network and Netflix are, and more should try. But whether it's $3 million or $5,000 spent on the idea, it's still up to each company to put it to valuable use.2013-04-15T08:00:00ZIT salaries begin to thaw, with median pay for staffers at $90,000 and managers at $120,000.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/it-salary-survey-2013-11-career-insights/240152665?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio <P> IT is consistently cited as one of the most-promising U.S. careers, even with the rise of offshore outsourcing. As with most professions, however, compensation is rising only modestly. The IT field still pays well, with staffers earning $90,000 in median total compensation and managers earning $120,000, the 2013 InformationWeek U.S. IT Salary Survey finds. But compensation for staffers is flat compared with last year and up only 3% for managers.</p> <P> Compensation varies substantially by skill and industry. Staffers focused on enterprise application integration earn a median $110,000, those in general IT earn $73,000 and those on the help desk earn $55,000. A few staff specialties such as cloud computing ($130,000), Web security ($118,000) and mobile ($111,000) pay even higher, though our survey sample sizes are small for those areas. Staffers with the IT architect title make a median $130,000.</p> <P> IT managers earn six-figure median compensation in 22 of 23 job categories -- help desk managers are the exception, earning $83,000. Among IT staffers, 13 of the 23 functions pay more than $90,000, eight of them more than $100,000. </p> <P> This marks the 16th year of our Salary Survey, so we have data to track long-term trends. Compared with 10 years ago, few IT employers have dropped health insurance and 401(k) match benefits -- the percentage of respondents receiving those benefits declined only a few points, to 81% and 70%, respectively. The one plunge is in "further education/training," down from 45% for staffers and 46% for managers in 2004 to 29% for staffers and 28% for managers today. And people are our most important asset? </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- inline Report Promo --> <div class="inlineReportPromo right"> <div class="reportHeader"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/10415/Professional%20Development%20and%20Salary%20Data/research-2013-us-it-salary-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_2013422" target="_blank">Get Salary Data By Role And City In Free Report</a> </div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1363/363CSreportcover.jpg" width="175" height="110" alt="Report Cover" title="Report Cover" class="reportCover" /> <div class="reportInfo"> Our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/10415/Professional%20Development%20and%20Salary%20Data/research-2013-us-it-salary-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_2013422" target="_blank">in-depth report</a> contains our data from more than 14,000 IT pros. It is free with registration<br /><br /> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/10415/Professional%20Development%20and%20Salary%20Data/research-2013-us-it-salary-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_2013422" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> <!-- / inline Report Promo --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Here are some other data points that should serve as a warning for IT leaders looking to find and keep talented people. </p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Paychecks are barely thawing, but don't take your talent for granted.</strong></strong></p> <P> Our Salary Survey shows IT pros getting small raises and only average bonuses despite signs that hiring is picking up. IT staffers report a median rise in total compensation of 1.1% and managers a rise of 2%. As recently as 2010, both staffers and managers reported a change in median salary of 0%.</p> <P> Bonuses are at best average across industries. The typical manager gets 8% of pay ($10,000) from bonuses and other cash compensation beyond salaries, which is exactly the average bonus percentage over the past 14 years. Manager bonuses are significantly higher in some industries -- as a percentage of total comp, bonuses in the financial, biotech, distribution, food and banking sectors all average in the low teens. Government, education and nonprofit employers pay their tech managers bonuses that average 2% or less of total comp. As for IT staffers, bonuses represented 3% of their total pay this year, a notch below the 5% historical average. </p> <P> IT hiring appears to be on the rise, even though we aren't seeing enough demand to drive pay spikes. IT accounted for 13% of the 88,000 net new jobs in the U.S. economy in March, according to a Foote Partners analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Monthly IT job growth in 2013 is 53% ahead of the pace last year, Foote finds.</p> <P> A warning for managers: Even though salaries are growing slowly, don't kid yourself into thinking that your "great place to work" office environment will be enough to keep your most talented people if you're not staying competitive on pay. In our survey, staffers cite base pay as a bigger priority than any other, and it's a close third for managers. More than two-thirds of IT pros cite higher pay as the reason for seeking a new job, and nothing else is cited by even half. </p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Don't learn wrong lesson from Yahoo's no-telecommuting flap.</strong></p> <P> What matters most to IT pros about their jobs? We asked survey respondents to pick seven priorities from a list of 24. Staffers cite "flexible work schedule" third most often (43%), tied with benefits and trailing only pay (48%) and job stability (45%). Just 26% of staffer respondents cite working at home, putting it in the middle of the pack. Managers put a lower priority on job flexibility (35% cited it) and working at home (15%).</p> <P> In February, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer issued the decree that launched a thousand outraged blog posts: No working at home. Inconceivable, the critics cried. Without offering such job flexibility in this day and age, employers won't be able to recruit a talented, diverse workforce, they said.</p> <P> If Mayer had said that all employees must be stationed at their posts at 8:30 a.m. and can't leave before 5:45 p.m., I'd agree. Employers must recognize that employees have earned the right to come in late or leave early some days in exchange for working long hours other days. And I suspect that even Mayer, once she has Yahoo's culture (and company size) where she wants it, will become more flexible as time goes on. Our data suggests that the ability to work at home isn't necessarily the deal breaker for most IT professionals that the howling outrage about Yahoo's policy would have you think.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Not all analytics is created equal.</strong></p> <P> For staffers, the analytics/business intelligence function lands in the mid-range of compensation. At a median of $93,000, it earns a modest 3% premium over the typical IT staffer pay despite the hoopla over big data. But this category covers a huge range of skills. There's a big difference between the true data scientist and analyst who can tease out insights from huge data sets, or specialists who can create and manage big data infrastructure to let others do that analysis, and those who are building static reports. </p> <P> Analytics/BI managers earn much higher median total comp. At $132,000, it's tied for fifth among the 23 job categories in our survey and 10% higher than typical IT manager pay. </p> <P> The pay premiums are much higher in the data integration/warehousing category, with median total compensation of $109,000 for staff (a 21% premium over typical staffer pay) and $130,000 for managers (an 8% premium).</p> <P> As my colleague Doug Henschen writes in his in-depth <i>InformationWeek</i> report on salaries for analytics and BI pros, the highest salaries among analytics pros go to "difference makers" who can pull together the right data and make sense of it to meet a business need. Writes Henschen: "The trouble is, there are not enough of these visionaries to go around, particularly with the rise of the so-called big data era driving up demand for the most-gifted employees."</p> <P> <P><strong>&gt;&gt; Application development is surviving against outsourcing.</strong></p> <P> Staffers who classify themselves in an application development function earn a median $100,000 in compensation, ranking this function eighth out of 23. Among managers, application development ranks fifth, at $132,000, tied with business intelligence/analytics and enterprise application integration. </p> <P> IT pros in the U.S. have gone through wrenching change over the past decade as programming jobs went to India and other lower-cost countries. In our 2003 survey, we asked unemployed IT pros what job they did most recently, and 16% -- the No. 1 answer -- said application development. Nevertheless, app dev salaries have held up reasonably well. In our 2003 Salary Survey, for example, app dev compensation, at a median $73,000, also ranks seventh. </p> <P> We're seeing growing interest in in-house app dev teams as software becomes a more crucial part of the customer experience companies deliver. Think of mobile apps. Most companies started by outsourcing that development function, but as mobile apps have become vital to retail and other companies, they're bringing that expertise in-house.</p> <P> Outsourcing shows no sign of abating. Half of the companies represented in our survey use onshore and/or offshore IT outsourcers, about the same share as in 2004. IT pros aren't quite as discouraged about outsourcing's impacts as they were a decade ago. </p> <P> Just over half of staffers and managers say it has led to fewer IT jobs, compared with 75% who felt that way in 2004. Two-thirds of the IT pros in our survey say outsourcing hasn't impacted their careers, and 13% of staffers and 20% of managers say it has led to expanded or new responsibilities. </p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; The gender gap persists.</strong></p> <P> Across our survey, female IT staffers earn 13% less in total compensation than male IT staffers; female IT managers earn 10% less. That gap is nearly identical to what it was 10 years ago.</p> <P> <!-- Image Aligning Right --> <div style="margin:0; padding: 0 0 10px 10px; width:258px; float:right; text-align:center;"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1363/363CS_salary-stats.jpg" width="248" height="1296" alt="same as caption" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" /> </div> <!-- / Image Aligning Right --> <P> However, our data doesn't explain why that gap exists, and whether women are being paid less for comparable roles in similar industries. For example, we haven't looked at whether women in our survey are underrepresented in high-paying industries such as finance or overrepresented in lower-paying ones such as state and local government. (In total, 13% of the respondents to our survey are female, 87% male.)</p> <P> Our data does show that the pay gap can vary significantly by industry. In healthcare, for example, the gender pay gap shrinks to 1%. But healthcare is a relatively low-payer field -- IT staffers earn $5,000 less in total comp than the typical IT pro. In securities and banking, among the highest-paid industries, female IT staff earn almost 10% less ($92,000 compared with $102,000 for male staff), while female managers earn 20% less -- $109,000 compared with $137,000 for males IT managers.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; A sizable minority of IT pros are embedded in business units.</strong></p> <P> One-third of the IT managers in our survey report to someone outside of the IT organization for at least half of their time, and one in five IT staffers do. </p> <P> We asked this question for the first time this year because there's so much discussion about business units controlling more of the IT budget -- fueled by Gartner's prediction that the CMO will control more tech spending than the CIO by 2017.</p> <P> When IT pros are embedded in a business unit, that function tends to consume most of their time. When we asked if staffers are embedded in a business unit, 19% say it applies to more than half their time, and 72% say it doesn't apply at all. Just 9% say it applies to less than half their time. The lesson for IT leaders is that IT pros embedded in marketing or manufacturing won't be able to keep a "day job" supporting ERP applications or balancing data center workloads. </p> <P> With the answers to another question, we find that about one-third of IT staffers and half of managers have formal responsibilities outside of IT, even if they're still part of the IT organization. The most common areas are business development, R&amp;D, non-IT support and marketing. Anecdotally, we see more IT pros are spending time with marketing and product development teams, as technology becomes a bigger part of these customer-facing disciplines. </p> <P> In which roles outside of IT have the respondents to our survey held full-time positions? Marketing/sales (20% of staffers, 23% of managers), non-IT support (19%, 14%) and operations/supply chain/manufacturing (18%, 19%).</p> <P> Don't fear the fact that IT roles and spending are drifting outside of the IT organization. It simply means the value of applied IT knowledge and skills is rising. The people who should be worried are the 46% of IT staffers and 30% of managers who say "spending time with peers in a business unit outside of IT" doesn't apply to their jobs at all. </p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Bay Area salaries are hot, even for the Bay Area.</strong></p> <P> The median base salary for IT staffers in the San Francisco area is $120,000 -- 38% higher than the median salary nationwide and 10% higher than in the No. 2 metro area, Washington, D.C. ($109,000). OK, it's no shocker that tech pros in the Bay Area are highly paid, but the gap between it and the No. 2 market is up to 10%, compared with 3% last year. Bay Area IT managers earn a median $140,000, 27% more than the national median and 4% more than area No. 2, New York. </p> <P> The rising IT pay in the Bay Area appears to reinforce its place as the center of U.S. tech innovation. We're seeing a steady stream of big tech venture funding deals. We've seen companies such as Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce.com, Google and Facebook become destination employers, while stalwarts such as Oracle and Apple still anchor the region. We've also seen established companies on the outskirts of the tech industry, the likes of GE and Ford, open offices in the valley to tap into its innovation ecosystem.</p> <P> On the flip side, it will be interesting to see if more companies take the General Motors approach. As it sets up tech centers and hires thousands of IT pros in its shift away from outsourcing, GM has decided to eschew Silicon Valley for metro areas (Atlanta; Austin, Texas; and Phoenix among them) where the talent is more affordable and the competition for that talent is less fierce. </p> <P> In terms of median IT manager pay, Atlanta ranks 16th, Austin 17th and Phoenix 19th among 20 metro areas covered in our survey. Detroit, where GM also is expanding and hiring, ranks 18th. Austin and Atlanta rank higher for staff salaries (eighth and 12th), but Austin's median pay is still $22,000 a year less than in the Bay Area. Railroad Union Pacific is another company opening a new office in Austin looking for talent.</p> <P><strong>&gt;&gt; Working for a big-name employer goes only so far.</strong></p> <P> This is probably the most unequivocal statement I can make from our Salary Survey: IT pros aren't impressed by your fancy company name. In our survey, prestige/reputation was rated dead last on the list of job qualities that matter, the third year in a row it came in last. Just 9% of managers and 6% of staffers put it among their top seven priorities.</p> <P> This finding is important as companies chase the same scarce talent in fields such as analytics. Granted, competing on pay with a Goldman Sachs or Facebook isn't easy, so offering a competitive paycheck is step one. But employers that can bundle up competitive pay, challenging projects and recognition for work done well -- factors that rank at the top of our list -- can go toe to toe with flashier and more established companies.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; IT career optimism is rising.</strong></p> <P> Forty-five percent of IT staffers and half of managers think IT is as promising a career as it was five years ago. Of course, when 44% of staffers and 42% of managers say it's not as promising (the rest are unsure), the overall outlook might still seem bleak. But consider that two years ago just 33% of staff and 40% of managers considered the career as promising as it was five years prior. And in 2004, just 15% of staffers and 21% of managers considered it as promising. That 2004 nadir came at the tail end of the tech recession, with offshore outsourcing wiping out jobs and the memory of dot-com bonuses still fresh enough to hurt.</p> <P> Almost two-thirds of IT staffers and managers in our latest survey say they're satisfied with their jobs overall, including the pay. In 2004, less than half of staffers said they were satisfied, while 56% of managers did. About 90% IT pros say they're very secure or somewhat secure in their jobs; about 10% feel insecure. </p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Managers aren't that important in the quest to retain good people. </strong></p> <P> Conventional wisdom often holds that people leave or stay in jobs based on the quality of their direct managers. But when we asked in our survey about the top job factors that matter, only 14% of respondents said the effectiveness of an immediate supervisor is among the most important. That finding surprised us, so we went back 10 years: Our survey then found a single-digit-percentage response.</p> <P> So are managers off the hook for people retention? Well, no. Managers who lose their best people for whatever reason won't succeed. Instead, the message for IT leaders is that they need to understand what matters to their staffers and pick the right fights to get their people what they need. Lobby for raises for top people, or for other one-off financial rewards if base pay is stalled. If company policies limit job flexibility, collaborate with HR to make changes. "Knowing my opinion is valued" is a top-five priority for staffers and managers, and that factor is firmly in a manager's control. "Challenge" is also highly rated -- No. 2 for managers. A talented IT pro might leave in search of more challenge and not blame it on an ineffective manager. But a great leader finds new challenges to keep that person excited and provides recognition when he or she succeeds.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Most managers aren't thinking strategically.</strong></p> <P> Twenty-nine percent of the IT managers in our survey cite "seeking new business opportunities" among the critical skills they need to develop. That puts it last on a list of 15 skills, and it's the same last-place ranking it has held for the past five years. No. 1 is aligning business and technology goals, at 84%, also the same perch it has held for five years. Fifty-two percent of managers cite preparing reports, which is only slightly less than the 58% given the more-strategic role of analyzing data. </p> <P> Compare these findings with what we saw earlier about embedded IT -- where one-third of tech managers report to a manager outside of the IT organization at least half of the time, and half of IT managers have formal responsibility outside of IT. Don't those marketing, R&amp;D and business development teams want their embedded IT people helping them think of new business opportunities, not just knocking out data reports they ask for? One positive finding here is that more than half of IT staffers and managers consider interacting with customers critical. For anyone looking for a spot as a highly valued, well-paid IT pro, combining a deep understanding of the customer with sharp technical skills is a strong place to start. </p> <P>2013-04-15T08:00:00ZAn app isn't a strategy.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/have-you-really-started-a-mobile-strateg/240152742?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio <P> You probably have an app. We have an app. But do you really have a mobile strategy for how those apps fit into your business model? Is there a plan for keeping the creative energy focused on your apps so customers drool instead of mock? How are you building the in-house skills and collaboration to meet expectations that get higher with every smartphone and mobile game that's launched? Are you giving employees mobile capabilities that make them anywhere near as efficient running their business lives as their personal lives?</p> <P> Apps aren't a plan. </p> <P> "The mobile experience at any company is driven by the first person who claimed it," said Gaston Legorburu, chief creative officer for digital marketing agency SapientNitro, speaking at the Wells Fargo Tech Transformation Summit earlier this month. Often it's marketing or customer service that grabs that lead role. Or it's pretty much everyone. "In a lot of organizations, you have 27 mobile apps with different corporate sponsors with no cohesive strategy," Legorburu said. </p> <P> I heard several other things at the Wells Fargo summit that got me thinking about how companies need a new sense of urgency in embracing mobile computing for their customers and employees. Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris talked about how the vendor is now thinking mobile first, and even phone first, when developing new features. It struck me that Salesforce -- whose customer base of sales and market pros is among the most mobile at any company -- is only now putting mobile at its center, even if it's ahead of most other enterprise software vendors.</p> <P> Consultant and author Vinnie Mirchandani, writing on his Deal Architect blog, reacted to Salesforce's upcoming SDK and API updates this way: "It occurred to me, compared to the highly organized and plentiful shelves of the iOS and Android (Google Play) app stores (and smaller ones at Amazon, Verizon, Microsoft and others), how empty the mobile enterprise apps landscape looks."</p> <P> Another person who got me thinking about mobile was BigMachines CEO David Bonnette. BigMachines software helps salespeople configure, price and quote deals. By setting price parameters, the software can help salespeople close deals with less back-and-forth for approvals with managers. And it can help prevent salespeople from offering would-be customers deals that are too good to be true -- or profitable. </p> <P> Bonnette cited a customer that put BigMachines on its tablets to let salespeople close deals while the prospect's still in front of them. He made this point: Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff "convinced everyone to put their sales data in the cloud." The point Bonnette left unsaid: Are companies doing enough to take advantage of that mobile-accessible data?</p> <P> <strong>Mobile State Of Mind</strong></p> <P> More companies need Walgreens' "mobile first" mindset -- which (stay with me here) doesn't actually mean always making mobile projects the first priority.</p> <P> Walgreens has gone through what I'll characterize as the "throw an app against the wall" strategy. It wouldn't put things so harshly, but CTO Abhi Dhar says that when the drugstore chain first started working on mobile apps, it focused, like most companies, on cost-effectiveness, since Walgreens didn't have in-house mobile talent. As a result, those apps underwhelmed. </p> <P> So Walgreens quickly set a goal: Every mobile app it develops will earn at least four stars in Apple's app store. It looked to mobility to solve customer problems it couldn't before. Achieving that goal would require the company to hire or groom talented mobile developers. It moved one of its most senior e-commerce pros to oversee mobile. It put everyone working on mobile -- engineering, customer experience, product development, marketing, finance -- in one space. People are "probably going to have a drugstore app on their phone, probably on the first page of their phone," Dhar says. "Let's be that." </p> <P> So Walgreens evolved to what he calls a "mobile first" approach to development. That doesn't mean Walgreens always develops the mobile app before a Web app, but it's an expectation that teams at Walgreens consider mobile possibilities at the first step of any initiative, whether online or in-store. "Mobile will blur the lines between store and online," says Walgreens e-commerce president Sona Chawla. </p> <P> Walgreens still has far to go. You can't use a mobile phone to easily tell Walgreens you've arrived at a store and are open to getting a coupon, or open to seeing updates on new beauty or health products the store has added. But it has the mobile-first mentality that just might make such advances possible. </P> <P>2013-04-04T09:59:00ZSalesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris sees customers using smartphones more than tablets for the vendor's CRM apps.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/salesforcecom-takes-smartphone-first-app/240152262?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioThe most interesting thing I heard while listening Wednesday to Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris is just how important smartphones are to the SaaS vendor -- getting development priority over tablets and desktop computers. <P> "The percentage of usage is moving more and more toward the phone," Harris said at the Wells Fargo Tech Transformation Summit in San Francisco. "So we're doing a lot of work internally at Salesforce to try to figure out how can we transfer all the IP and user experience to a phone experience. It's very challenging." <P> Having talked with a number of companies that have deployed tablet apps to their <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/ipads-for-all-one-sales-teams-story/232500087">sales teams</a>, I've been taken with the tablet as a tool for sales, service and other mobile, interactive tasks. Harris sees things a bit differently. <P> <strong>[ Sounds like a great plan -- if the battery holds up. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/mobility/smart-phones/smartphone-battery-life-back-to-the-futu/240151953?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Smartphone Battery Life: Back To The Future</a>. ]</strong> <P> Tablets have a lot of great uses for people who need access to rich data remotely, Harris said, but as Salesforce watches the usage data, it's seeing more and more customers using smartphones to access its application services. Harris praised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's effort to get Facebook teams thinking <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/30/3934052/mark-zuckerberg-q4-earnings-myth-that-facebook-cant-make-money-on-mobile ">"mobile first"</a> and said Salesforce is taking much the same approach. "Now we're going more into phone first then tablet then desktop," he said. Salesforce will be finalizing its own mobile transformation over the coming year, Harris said. <P> Salesforce is focused right now on its touch interface. Harris acknowledged that in six to 12 months, it'll face the challenge of how to translate touchscreen tasks such as swipes to a desktop. <P> <b>HTLM5 vs. Native Apps</b> <P> Any company doing mobile development knows you face a religious war in deciding whether to go with <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/">HTLM5</a> or write apps natively for a specific mobile operating system. Harris sounds like the <a href="http://www.ushistory.org/us/30d.asp ">Henry Clay</a> of this debate inside Salesforce, advocating a blend of the two. <P> He acknowledged that it's a lively debate, mentioning that CEO Marc Benioff has made the case for native apps. But the argument for purely native apps, he said, sounds a lot like what he heard 14 years ago from those saying Salesforce couldn't build enterprise software for the browser. "People are saying you'll never, ever build a cloud-based solution that will work on a phone. You have to write native solutions," he said. "It's the same as saying you have to write client server code 14 years ago." <P> He acknowledged the need for a bit of native code, but he clearly favors HTLM5 where possible, in part because it allows easier, automated updates of new features. "You need both," he said.2013-03-28T09:06:00ZUniversity of Pittsburgh Medical Center CIO Dan Drawbaugh shares his thoughts about what the next health IT opportunities will be. http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/5-underrated-healthcare-trends-from-a-to/240151865?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-medical-records/7-big-data-engines-look-to-reinvent-medi/240144641"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/930/Opener_image_tn.jpg" alt=" 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare" title=" 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->There is a small group of healthcare providers that have big brands and big ambitions when it comes to pushing healthcare and health technology forward. Think of places such as the Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and Johns Hopkins. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is right in that mix. <P> So I sat down with UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh recently to discuss what looks exciting on the technology horizon and where his organization is investing. UPMC is a $10 billion nonprofit company that crosses many lines in healthcare -- it's a huge care provider, a 2-million-member insurance company, a research institution, employer of 55,000 people and even an investor in technology companies. <P> Here are some of the emerging areas that are high on Drawbaugh's list, and that struck me as underappreciated: <P> <strong>1. Healthcare Reform And Risk Management Technology</strong> <P> Healthcare providers are going to need software systems that help them manage their risks -- that help them act more like health insurers, Drawbaugh says. Accountable care organizations will be responsible for the health of a certain patient population, and they'll get payments based on people's wellness and health improvements. Doing so means healthcare providers -- hospital and physician groups -- bear more financial risk if patients get sicker than expected. <P> <strong>[ Should seniors put their game faces on to stay healthy? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/patient/gaming-technology-meets-elder-care-in-eu/240145779?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Gaming Technology Meets Elder Care In Europe</a>. ]</strong> <P> UPMC has a joint venture with the Advisory Board Company called <a href="http://www.evolenthealth.com/whatwedo_OurModel.php">Evolent Health</a> that markets UPMC's platforms for providing this kind of care along with consulting developed through the Advisory Board to help caregivers manage this new realm. Providers will have to focus more on managing chronic diseases such as diabetes, and they'll have to process payments in new ways -- based on wellness metrics rather than doctor visits and treatment procedures. <P> Will companies pay up for another software platform for this effort, after having invested in electronic records, physician order entry software, practice management systems, etc.? The management challenge and financial risk may be one reason more than half of healthcare providers aren't sure if they'll pursue accountable care organization (ACO) status, a recent <em>InformationWeek Healthcare</em> IT Priorities survey finds. <P> <strong>2. Analytics</strong> <P> It's hard to say analytics is underappreciated, given today's big data frenzy, but you could say analytics is under-<em>implemented</em>. Only 15% of providers in the <em>InformationWeek Healthcare</em> IT Priorities survey have implemented big data analytics initiatives. (We will publish the full survey Monday at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare">informationweek.com/healthcare</a>.) <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --><div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"><div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a><div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div><span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span></div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Most providers are focused on getting their electronic health record systems in place, and then making sure the data can be shared among systems. The next step, though, will be making sense of that data. That will mean using it in support of clinical decision making, and increasingly, combining health records with personal genetic information to personalize decisions. <P> UPMC is part of a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/pittsburgh-healthcare-system-invests-100/240008989">$100 million, five-year effort</a> with IBM, Oracle, Informatica and dbMotion aimed at advancing analytics' use in healthcare for personalized medicine. <P> UPMC's efforts don't only focus on the patient. It's also looking at analyzing doctors and understanding who gets the best results at the lowest costs. That's difficult today, says Oscar Marroquin, a practicing physician who's directing UPMC's efforts to measure physician effectiveness. If a doctor's cost or outcomes compare unfavorably, "most of us will say, 'My patients are sicker than someone else's,'" says Marroquin.<strong>3. Joint Provider-Vendor Development</strong> <P> Drawbaugh sees more interest than ever among big healthcare providers such as UPMC, Kaiser Permanente and Mayo Clinic to do co-development projects in which a provider brings industry knowledge and works closely with a vendor to push a technology forward. Look at UPMC's analytics work, or Memorial Sloan-Kettering's development partnership with IBM related to Watson. UPMC invested in data-interoperability specialist dbMotion in 2006, implemented and helped refine the product and then saw it <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/leadership/allscripts-dbmotion-deal-speaks-to-large/240150265">sold to Allscripts</a> this month. <P> One reason for increased interest in joint development is simple: healthcare margins are getting squeezed, while tech vendors are known to enjoy margins of 30% or more, Drawbaugh says. Getting into the tech business is a potential new revenue source for some providers. "There's a lot of opportunity to leverage the knowledge base that's out there" among healthcare providers, he says. <P> <strong>4. Technology Convergence</strong> <P> Drawbaugh is just starting to see what he calls a convergence of certain technology areas. Where images such as CAT scans used to be stored using file formats unique to the device that took them, you're starting to see more vendor-neutral archives (VNA) for such images. That could open new avenues for connectivity and analysis. <P> Likewise, combining analytics software with better natural language processing, to understand data such as clinician notes, could open new opportunities to inject decision support into caregiving routines. <P> If this area sounds fuzzier than the rest, it is. Drawbaugh says they're just seeing this convergence begin, so UPMC is looking for the opportunities it might create. <P> <strong>5. Gaming And Consumer Devices</strong> <P> I spoke to Drawbaugh at the HIMSS healthcare IT conference, and observed that I didn't see many consumer-focused devices -- I had expected more tech around home monitoring and other patient-focused gadgets. <P> Drawbaugh agrees, but predicts that's coming. Three years ago, you didn't see a lot of vendor activity at HIMSS in data interoperability, because CIOs weren't feeling that pain yet. Now they are, and vendors have responded. And the same will happen with patient-centered innovation -- simpler mobile apps for patient monitoring, gaming techniques applied to disease management, and electronic messaging, from social networks to email, that replaces traditional doctor visits. That will drive new technology requirements. "You come [to HIMSS] in another two, three years, and the floor will look very different," Drawbaugh says. <P> <i> As large healthcare providers test the limits, many smaller groups question the value. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/021813hc/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Big Data Analytics</a> issue of InformationWeek Healthcare: Ask these six questions about natural language processing before you buy. (Free with registration.) </i>2013-03-20T14:15:00ZFrom customer relationships to cloud, and why mobile isn't one of them.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/accentures-7-tech-trends-driving-digital/240151275?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioWhen I bought my super-hip minivan a few years ago, I thought the color was unusual. Now I see the color everywhere almost every time I drive. <P> I'm starting to feel the same way about digital business, having immersed myself in the subject to write our March 18 story <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/goodbye-it-hello-digital-business/240150200">"Goodbye IT, Hello Digital Business</a>." I'm seeing digital business trends everywhere. <P> The latest comes from Accenture, whose just-published <a href="http://www.accenture.com/technologyvision">2013 Technology Vision </a> sports the theme "Every business is a digital business." I talked with Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty about the seven tech trends the consulting firm sees making digital business an executive priority. Here's his list, plus some of my thoughts and examples: <P> <b>1. Relationships At Scale.</b> Mobile apps, loyalty programs, social networks and e-commerce help companies connect with customers, but are you just milking them for data so you can throw more ads at them? "A lot of companies have thought about their customer as the cookie," Daugherty says. Or companies have looked at "digital" only as a way to cut costs, through online self-service, for instance. <P> Daugherty suggests this measure for raising the bar: Will the digital experience so dazzle customers that they make sincere social media recommendations for your company? (See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/vail-resorts-app-links-the-mountains-to/240006824 ">Vail Resorts'</a> 2 million social media mentions for proof it can be done.) <P> <strong>[ Which tech trends do you find more hype than happening? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/7-tech-trends-cios-call-overrated/240150822?itc=edit_in_body_cross">7 Tech Trends CIOs Call Overrated</a>. ]</strong> <P> <b>2. Design For Analytics.</b> The industry talks about big data, but companies lack the data they need for about 40% of the analytics they would like to do, Accenture estimates. That data doesn't exist, or people who need it can't find it. Daugherty refers to data "as a supply chain instead of a warehouse" -- less about storing data and more about delivering it where it needs to be for an employee or customer to make a decision. <P> There are two big action areas here: Check whether new networked, sensor technology can fill data gaps, and make the collection of data needed for analysis a bigger part of the requirements process when building software. (Our example: <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-sears-is-going-all-in-on-hadoop/240009717 ">Sears</a> embracing Hadoop while trying to sort out how best to use that newfound analytical speed to improve its business.) <P> <b>3. Data Velocity.</b> Technology advances such as Hadoop, in-memory processing and flash memory mean companies can run in minutes calculations that had taken days or weeks. That ability means predictive analytics -- say, using the sensor data mentioned earlier in No. 2-- might be done in time to actually prevent a breakdown or a customer defection. <P> The key: Where does faster analysis have a measurable impact in boosting sales or cutting costs? Plenty of CIOs are wrestling with how Oracle Exalytics or SAP Hana systems will improve the margins of their existing businesses, but speed will open new opportunities. (Doug Henschen's interview with a <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/facebook-on-big-data-analytics-an-inside/240150902">Facebook insider</a> reveals a lot of emphasis on real-time analytics.) <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> <b>4. Seamless Collaboration.</b> I'm surprised to see Accenture make collaboration such a high priority. Daugherty says IT organizations have focused on automation over collaboration. He compared today's opportunity to inject social collaboration models into work processes with the re-engineering efforts of the 1990s. <P> Collaboration is important, but it feels to me like collaboration and enterprise social tactics have been high on the agenda for years. Our report on the shortcomings of <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/10/10116/Social-Networking-Collaboration/Why-Enterprise-Social-Networking-Falls-Short.html">enterprise social networking</a> finds that nearly all companies have internal social networks in place, and most have some ties externally. But a slim minority considers them a great success. And IT pros think social tools have helped companies a whole lot more than non-IT pros do: 89% of IT pros think social tools have improved collaboration among business units, for example, but just two-thirds of non-IT pros agree. Maybe this speaks to the opportunity Accenture sees -- make social collaboration more relevant to employees' jobs. <P> <b>5. Software-Defined Networking.</b> Accenture calls SDN the "last mile" of virtualization, the last piece of the data center to get virtualized. What's most interesting here is that a pure technology movement makes Accenture's list of mostly business concepts. Count on the acceleration of virtualized networks.<b>6. Active Defense.</b> Daugherty thinks companies are moving away from just monitoring and understanding cyberattacks and quickly reacting to minimize the damage. Active defense tactics include knowing employee tendencies and restricting access if a person suddenly starts downloading sensitive data or hitting files he normally wouldn't. This isn't full-blown <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/012113">offensive security</a>; we warned earlier this year about the risks of striking back at hackers with countermeasures. But Daugherty sees more companies taking more cautious offensive steps, such as identifying attackers and delivering "honeypot" files and the like that are meant to look like valuable assets and thus alert a company of a security problem. <P> <b>7. Cloud.</b> Accenture says the debate is over and declares cloud "enterprise-ready." CIOs now need to focus on changing their architectures and staffs to make hybrid cloud/on-premises software environments the standard model, according to Daugherty. Most IT shops haven't done that, he says -- they've treated cloud projects on a one-off basis. <P> The big missing piece from Accenture's list is mobile. Daugherty says mobile's no longer a trend -- it's an element in most of the seven factors above. Want a closer digital relationship with customers? Better collaboration among employees? Analytics that salespeople, repair staff or factory workers can actually use? Mobile is part of the answer. No debate there. <P> But in terms of IT's readiness, I'd say Accenture's a bit ahead of the market in not making mobile its own priority. Most companies are still in the early stages of crafting a strategy for ongoing development and support of mobile apps -- and each app is even more of a one-off effort than their use of cloud software or infrastructure is. <P> <i>Attend Interop Las Vegas May 6-10 and learn the emerging trends in information risk management and security. Use Priority Code MPIWK by March 22 to save an additional $200 off the early bird discount on All Access and Conference Passes. Join us in Las Vegas for access to 125+ workshops and conference classes, 300+ exhibiting companies, and the latest technology. <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register today</a>! </i>2013-03-15T09:06:00ZIT leaders share their opinions on "the most overrated IT movement."http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/7-tech-trends-cios-call-overrated/240150822?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity-applications/8-linkedin-donts/240149086"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/952/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="8 LinkedIn Etiquette Mistakes" title="8 LinkedIn Etiquette Mistakes" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">8 LinkedIn Etiquette Mistakes</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> The beauty of any tech buzzword is that its time will pass. Remember when it was "e"-everything? Much of that nonsense fell away, leaving reasonable options such as e-commerce and e-books. Or how about "Web services?" For people now railing against how bad a name "big data" is, Web services was even worse. <P> The ugly side of tech buzzwords, of course, is that something new always steps up to replace them. People are getting fed up with big data and cloud computing lately -- many believe in the concept but are irked that the terms cover so much landscape that they become meaningless. Having just posted an article this week touting the importance of "<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/goodbye-it-hello-digital-business/240150200">digital business</a>," I fret that "digital" might be in line as a new catch-all. <P> For <em>InformationWeek's</em> CIO Profiles series, we always ask tech leaders what they consider to be the most overrated IT movement. Their answers offer some good, quick perspective on these trends. Here are seven areas these leaders cited: <P> <strong>1. Cloud Computing ROI</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-anthony-decanti-of-unigroup/240142201">Anthony DeCanti</a>, UniGroup CIO: "It's not that I don't support or believe that [cloud computing is] going to happen, it's just that there are so many case studies that are simply not true. Let's face it, there is still a lot of work to be done to make it easier and more affordable." <P> <strong>[ Nobody's perfect. See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/global-cio/interviews/232700431?itc=edit_in_body_cross">10 CIOs: Career Decisions I'd Do Over</a>. ]</strong> <P> <strong>2. Outsourcing</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-kenneth-shulman-of-broadvie/240009242">Kenneth Shulman</a>, Broadview Networks CIO: "Outsourcing is overrated, though we've leveraged it in certain areas with great success. If you read the trade press uncritically, you'd conclude that if you're not outsourcing help desk, support or development, you're missing the boat. Frankly, it has its place and offers benefits, but there are hidden costs that are often overlooked." <P> <!-- Image Aligning Right --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1350/350CIO_ZackHicks.jpg" alt="Zack Hicks" title="Zack Hicks" class="img175" /> <div class="storyImageCaption">Zack Hicks<br>Group VP & CIO, North America Toyota</div> </div> <!-- / Image Aligning Right --> <strong>3. Business-Tech Misalignment</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-zack-hicks-of-toyota/240012639">Zack Hicks</a>, Toyota CIO: "I hate hearing complaints about not having a business strategy. Businesses do have strategies, but they don't exist in a leather-bound book. You just have to spend time with your business leaders and you'll find out their plans and needs."<strong>4. Big Data Over Small Data</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-ken-harris-of-shaklee/240147842">Ken Harris</a>, Shaklee CIO: "I'm not convinced that big data for most companies is a promising investment right now. We haven't learned how to handle small data well, let alone throw big data on there. That isn't to say there aren't some companies for whom big data could be a game changer, but most companies don't even effectively handle small data." <P> Or, for another take on where big data's overrated, here's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-john-tonnison-of-tech-data/240146541">John Tonnison</a>, Tech Data CIO: "The idea of 'big data' being a new, breakout discipline and movement. We've all been capturing, storing, mining, tuning and looking for patterns in masses of data from the moment we started to measure disk space in terabytes." <P> <!-- Image Aligning Right --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1360/357CIO_SteveMills.jpg" alt="Steve Mills" title="Steve Mills" class="img175" /> <div class="storyImageCaption">Steve Mills<br>CIO, Rackspace</div> </div> <!-- / Image Aligning Right --> <strong>5. Consumerization Of IT</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-steve-mills-of-rackspace/240150198">Steve Mills</a>, Rackspace CIO: "People use technology more in their personal lives than they did a decade ago, but this feels like a consequence of Moore's Law applied over a few decades. The fact that people can now use the same tools at home and at work is a big opportunity. It's up to the IT shop to stay ahead on relevant technologies and keep updating tools and approaches to make the workplace productive and fun." <P> <strong>6. Cloud Computing Ease Of Use</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/cio-profiles-richard-thomas-of-quintiles/240008403">Richard Thomas</a>, Quintiles CIO: "The cloud is still too complicated. Anything that's as hyped as it has been is unlikely to meet expectations. The cloud has tremendous possibilities -- and I'm a huge proponent -- but we need a reality check." <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> <strong>7. Tech Panaceas</strong> <P> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/leadership/cio-profiles-keith-j-figlioli-of-premier/240149734">Keith J. Figlioli</a>, Premier CIO: "The IT industry tends to come up with a big, sexy term to try and get the mainstream to adopt all the things that term can solve, when it usually can't. The industry needs to walk a fine line on over-marketing IT compared with what we're actually trying to accomplish."2013-03-11T08:00:00ZDelighting customers is job No. 1. Everything else is secondary.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/goodbye-it-hello-digital-business/240150200?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio It's not about information technology anymore. It's about digital business. The new description is a testament to IT's advancement from a back-office, support-the-business role into a developer of products and apps that customers use directly. It's also a reflection of the central role of data analytics in letting companies see and anticipate customer tastes more quickly than ever before.</p> <P> This digital business movement is becoming an imperative in the retail industry. Retailers have been doing e-commerce for years, but they now face a more intense customer expectation for a digital relationship that crosses store, Web and mobile channels. How important is that integration? Drugstore giant Walgreens finds that a shopper using mobile, Web and store channels spends six times more than the typical store-only shopper.</p> <P> But the digital business trend goes well beyond retail, to manufacturing, healthcare and other industries where technology is becoming a vital link to the customer. That link might be through an online app -- in healthcare, for instance, "Meaningful Use" rules give doctors subsidies based in part on having a percentage of their patients access their medical records online. Or the customer tie might come directly through a tech-based new product, such as Nike's fitness-monitoring FuelBand. What does Nike know about writing apps? It's learning fast, including hosting a dozen development startups in Oregon in a three-month "accelerator" to bring in new ideas. </p> <P> Digital business calls for a customer-facing CIO. One finding of our fifth annual <i>InformationWeek</i> Global CIO Survey suggests that about one-third of IT leaders are embracing this customer-facing role. The big question is whether the other two-thirds will follow suit or sit on the sidelines as other executives drive toward the digital business goal line. </p> <P> "I raised my hand," says Bentley Curran, CIO of $1.3 billion-a-year manufacturer Brady Corp., who added VP of digital business to his title a year ago. Brady is a classic business-to-business company, a maker of industrial supplies from reflective vests and safety signs to cleanup products for chemical spills, and its executive team realized it needed to improve its digital ties to end customers. </p> <P> Brady's surveys found that more than 90% of its direct customers in the U.S. and U.K. prefer a digital entry point to start a purchase, but far fewer actually used the digital channels Brady offered, relying instead on paper catalogs or call center reps. "Marketing said, 'We need more out of IT. We need the engine to go faster,'" Curran says.</p> <P> That realization led to Curran's new digital business role. It also put Brady's IT pros into some new roles. For example, they've worked with business unit colleagues to create "customer journey maps" of five prototypical customers, laying out their current and future digital needs. </p> <P> Forty percent of Curran's budget is now focused on sales and marketing initiatives. He has eight Scrum teams, trained in agile development, focused on six areas: mobile, search, analytics, product content, platform and custom content. Each team consists of four to five people who deliver code to business units in two-week sprints. Teams from IT, marketing and other areas are looking at the first 60 days of a new customer's experience to map out every interaction and whether the technology supports it well. Sometimes, that amounts to 20 touch points. "We've got to be a customer-facing IT organization," Curran says. </p> <P> Variations of Brady's digital business story are playing out at companies as different as Walgreens, Vail Resorts, Kaplan, Procter &amp; Gamble and True Value. But before we get into those stories, let's look at our research to see where a broader spectrum of technology leaders are. </p> <P> <strong>CIO Focus</strong></p> <P> Only 23% of the 118 CIOs and VPs of IT we surveyed say they regularly visit customers; a third have other key IT leaders doing so. More promising, 41% have leaders on the team shaping mobile strategy, and 38% have IT intimately involved in product development. </p> <P> One trend we've watched closely in the Global CIO Survey is where CIOs expect to innovate in the coming year. Back in 2010, 36% put "new IT-led products and services" among their top three priorities. Three years later, it's stuck at 35%. The concern is if a majority of IT execs see the tech-as-product trend applying only to certain kinds of companies, when in fact examples are sprouting across industries. </p> <P> While cutting costs is still the area of innovation cited most by survey respondents (39%), that percentage is the same as a year ago. Next come two kinds of growth initiatives: introducing an IT-led product (35%) and creating a new business model or revenue stream (31%). The fourth highest innovation priority among IT leaders, another cost cutter, is making processes more efficient -- though at 28%, it's down 11 points from a year ago. Rounding out the top five is a customer-centric priority -- engage customers in new ways -- cited by 20% of the execs in our survey, up from 13% a year ago. </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1360/360CS_Chart1.jpg" width="585" height="568" alt="chart: Which platforms are important to building customer ties? " title="chart: Which platforms are important to building customer ties?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P><strong>What A Digital Business Looks Like</strong></p> <P> Becoming a digital business changes how a company interacts with its customers, but it also requires companies to break down old operating silos and bring in new expertise.</p> <P> A Walgreens app now lets a customer order a prescription refill from home by scanning the bar code on the bottle using an iPhone or Android smartphone. More broadly, the company made a conscious pivot in late 2009 to make mobile central to all its development, CTO Abhi Dhar says. That meant moving one of its most senior e-commerce people to lead mobile development and putting people from mobile engineering, mobile consumer experience and mobile marketing together with financial planning in one location. </p> <P> Starting this month, Nike is hosting 10 tech startups in Portland, Ore., to spark innovation around its digital platforms, including its Nike+ FuelBand, a wristband that tracks movement throughout the day. Kaplan, the college exam prep company, is using the same accelerator model -- both are run by Colorado-based TechStars -- to attract startup developers to its digital platforms and bring in ideas company developers wouldn't consider. "It's an opportunity to give us a little bit of fresh air," says Bernardo Rodriguez, chief digital officer at Kaplan's Test Prep group. The risk with mobile, he says, is that "we tend to apply our old models to the new experience." </p> <P> Disney is working on an RFID wristband system it plans to launch this year at its theme parks. Called MagicBands, it will let guests pay for goods, check in at rides to map their day's activity and even send data to characters in the park -- so that Snow White or Mickey Mouse can address a child personally. </p> <P> Disney's following the work of Vail Resorts, which for the past three years has used RFID in its lift tickets to let people track where and how much they skied during the day and share their achievements on Facebook. Vail CIO Robert Urwiler warns other IT leaders that customer-facing apps face a much higher standard of performance and style than employee-facing apps, and he's had to add talent to meet that standard.</p> <P> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 10px; width:235px; float:right;"> <div style="border:1px solid #000000; padding:0;"> <div style="margin:0; padding:4px;text-align:center; background-color:#fff;"> <strong><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/logos/IWK_logo_145.jpg" alt="InformationWeek CIO Summit" title="InformationWeek CIO Summit" width="145" height="17"></strong> </div> <div style="margin:0; padding:4px; font-size:1.2em; text-align:center; color:#ffffff; background-color:#CC0000;"> <strong>CIO SUMMIT</strong> </div> <div style="margin:0; padding:8px;"> &#9;&#9;Gather in Las Vegas for this <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/cio.php?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKBOD" target="_blank">Summit within Interop</a> to discuss the CIO's critical role in driving innovation <div style="margin:10px 0 15px 0; padding 0; border-bottom:solid 1px #666666;"></div> &#9;&#9;&#9; <center> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/conference"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1284/iwk500rank_logo.jpg" width="200" height="20" border="0" alt="InformationWeek 500" title="InformationWeek 500"></a></center> Customer-focused digital business will be the theme of our marquee conference, Sept. 8 to 10 at the Montelucia Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz. Email <a href="mailto:rob.preston@ubm.com">Rob Preston</a> if you're interested in speaking or attending. </div> </div> </div> <P> At United Stationers, the office supply wholesaler, CIO Dave Bent has led IT into digital business by becoming a service provider. It acquired a marketing services company and launched a business to help its retailer customers provide a digital platform to reach their customers. At the same time, Bent added the title of senior VP of e-business services.</p> <P> The emergence of digital business is even changing how some companies talk to Wall Street. Last month, Macy's stopped breaking out online sales as a separate financial category, saying the channels are too blurred. "It's getting so hard to know what's a store sale and what's a mobile sale and what's Internet," Macy's CFO Karen Hoguet told analysts last month while discussing the retailer's 2012 results. "... Sometimes, it's being bought on a mobile device sitting in a store. So I'm not sure how to define that."</p> <P> Mobile is the most powerful force blurring business lines (more on that later), but it takes advanced data analytics to make sense of this digital business world. Increasingly, the focus of analytics is on customer understanding -- assessing the sentiment of comments on Twitter, Facebook and Web pages to know if a product is a hit or flop, or using clickstream data to understand customer behavior. </p> <P> When we asked in our survey what the main opportunity for CIOs is, 32% -- the largest single percentage -- cited using customer or business data to influence new products and drive growth. That's up 8 points over last year, when the data answer ranked second after driving company-wide process innovation.</p> <P> Procter &amp; Gamble is one of the most sophisticated users of analytics. CIO Filippo Passerini says there's "nothing more important" to P&amp;G than being able to predict the customer response when it launches a new product, package or marketing campaign. Passerini thinks analyzing the online discussion around new products should let P&amp;G predict sales well before actual sales data comes in. While "we haven't cracked this nut yet," he cautions, he considers this type of customer-focused analytics to be the next "breakthrough opportunity." </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1360/360CS_Chart2.jpg" width="585" height="567" alt="chart: What is the main opportunity for CIOs today? " title="chart: What is the main opportunity for CIOs today?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P> <strong>Walgreens Goes Mobile</strong></p> <P> Almost 70% of the IT executives we surveyed see mobile apps as important to building customer ties. </p> <P> Walgreens decided in 2009 to make a concerted mobile push. First came a simple text message service: Text me when my prescription's ready so I can roam the store rather than sit and watch the pharmacist count pills. More ambitious was the smartphone app to let people order a prescription refill from home and then pick it up in the store. </p> <P> But initial adoption lagged. "The worst sound is silence," says Dhar, the CTO. The problem, the team decided, was that the app required customers to log in. Why? Well, because that's what apps do. But people don't need to log in to anything before they phone in a refill. "We said, let's make it ridiculously easy," Dhar says. Gone is the refill login, and today 52% of Walgreens' online refills come via its mobile app. </p> <P> Photo printing is another place where mobile has blurred the lines between channels and spurred new approaches for Walgreens. Last summer, it released an API and SDK to let independent developers embed Walgreens' printing service in their photo-editing smartphone apps. Developers get a cut when an app user sends a photo for printing at a Walgreens store. In 2010, less than 1% of Walgreens photo prints came from mobile devices. Today it's 15%. </p> <P> Sona Chawla, Walgreens' e-commerce president, has a "digital customer experience" team looking at what people want in this store-online-mobile world. Walgreens is testing a service that lets people order online and pick up at a store within an hour. But there's more to do. As at most retailers, there's no simple, automated way for customers to "tell" the store they're there, perhaps to receive a customized promotion or reminder on their smartphones. Walgreens has experimented with Foursquare check-ins, donating flu shots for people who checked in to say they were getting vaccinated at a Walgreens.But Chawla knows that the company needs to do more to build digital ties with customers using customer data. "If you know me, show me you know me," she says.</p> <P> Brady's first mobile app, which is in pilot tests, again shows the blurring of new and old sales channels. A customer can order a product just by snapping a picture of it, and the app sends that picture to a Brady call center rep, who can quickly find and order it. The app doesn't need to link to a product catalog. And if the customer is ordering a rival's product, the rep can suggest an alternative that Brady carries. </p> <P> <strong>The People Challenge</strong></p> <P> Brady's experience shows how a more customer-focused IT organization often requires retraining as well as new hires, and often layoffs of people who don't make the transition.</p> <P> Among our survey respondents, hiring is on the rise: Just over half say their companies expect to staff up across many areas (20%) or for specialized skills (32%) this year. Just 3% are more likely to lay off than hire, while 29% have frozen hiring. </p> <P> Brady went to the cloud for many of its enterprise applications -- Salesforce.com CRM, Workday HR, Google Apps collaboration -- in order to move people from app support roles to more innovation work. But it still needs people with expertise in SAP. If it's going to expose inventories to customers through Web and mobile apps, it's on-premises SAP applications become customer-facing systems. Still, some people will feel like they're doing yesterday's IT instead of the new and cool customer-facing tech. "It's hard," Curran admits. </p> <P> Walgreens, which has its headquarters in the north Chicago suburb of Deerfield, opened a downtown Chicago office to attract the creative talent it needs for its digital initiatives. "You want to be where the talent is," Chawla says. </p> <P> True Value has been moving from a wholesaler mindset to a retail focus, and IT is part of that cultural shift, says CIO Rosalee Hermens. It lets shoppers buy online and ship to the store, since the retailer's research finds that online shoppers will typically spend three times more money if True Value can get them to visit a store. Now its IT team is working on being able to tell customers the inventory in each store. </p> <P> To do all this, Hermens needs people who understand the True Value customer and are comfortable getting out and working with store owners to learn what they need. That work is different from the IT development for store owners and employees. "We operate in this realm of our work like a software development company," Hermens says.</p> <P> Across industries, companies are learning how different developing software for customers is from developing software for internal users. Employees "have an obligation to use your software," Walgreens' Dhar says. "There's something very different when there's no obligation to use your software."</p> <P> Is IT up to this customer-centric challenge? Sixty-one percent in our Global CIO Survey say their companies have a rising number of growth-oriented projects, compared with 13% who see a declining number or no such projects. In terms of total IT spending, 57% of execs expect to spend more this year than last, while only 14% expect to spend less. What's changing is where companies spend those tech dollars. "We're in the customer age," Curran says. "The 'standardization of process' and the 'upgrade of ERP' age is past." Those activities are still necessary, of course, but the energy is around customer-facing tech. </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1360/360CS_Chart3.jpg" width="585" height="385" alt="chart: How does your IT team interact with customers?" title="chart: How does your IT team interact with customers?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P>2013-03-07T11:48:00ZHealthcare and other companies will have to push more development of the technology they'll need for the challenges ahead.http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/leadership/allscripts-dbmotion-deal-speaks-to-large/240150265?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-medical-records/7-big-data-engines-look-to-reinvent-medi/240144641"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/930/Opener_image_tn.jpg" alt=" 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare" title=" 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> 7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Allscripts' <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/dbmotion-allscripts-idUSL6N0BX62O20130305">$235 million acquisition</a> this week of Israeli software company dbMotion is interesting on its own. But even more interesting is the story behind dbMotion's development, a story that healthcare and other industries will need to replicate more often to solve some of their knottiest problems. <P> dbMotion lets healthcare companies take data from two (or more) different electronic records systems and normalize it so the different sources can be used together. That data normalization helps hospitals analyze the quality of their care versus the cost, and it lets patients access their data from the many places they've been treated. Allscripts, a top electronic medical record vendor, bought dbMotion because that kind of data analytics and sharing is where the value and growth will be in healthcare tech, now that most hospitals and big physician practices have a core electronic record system in place. <P> The story behind dbMotion's involves University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC was dbMotion's biggest shareholder, having <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/upmc-inks-multimillion-dollar-co-develop/193400758">invested $35 million in dbMotion</a> in 2006. Why did UPMC invest? <P> <strong>[ How much can technology really help? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-medical-records/healthcare-it-savior-or-sinkhole/240146137?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Healthcare IT: Savior Or Sinkhole?</a> ]</strong> <P> One, UPMC itself had a big problem with data interoperability, so its technical teams poured a lot of their knowledge and time into making dbMotion better to solve the hospital group's problem. And two, it knew many other healthcare providers would have the same problems, making dbMotion a solid business investment if the team could make the software work. <P> Strategic investments such as this one are nothing new. Companies in a range of industries -- retail, transportation, logistics, financial services, consumer goods -- regularly invest in technology companies to boost their core businesses and reap financial returns. Often they join in alongside pure financial investors, as was the case with dbMotion. <P> UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh sees more interest than ever among big healthcare providers such as UPMC, Kaiser Permanente and Mayo Clinic to do these kinds of co-development projects. "Across the industry we're seeing more [providers] pushing the IT envelope," says Drawbaugh, who was CIO back when UPMC decided to invest in dbMotion. "The discussions around partnering are greater than I've ever seen." <P> One factor is the economics. Healthcare providers of all sizes are feeling the squeeze on profit margins, so big research institutions in particular are looking at strategic investing as another profit source. <P> Institutions also know they need breakthrough technologies to meet the demands of healthcare reform, which will push providers for better care at a lower cost. These institutions have an intimate knowledge of the problems and could help speed up new technology development. <P> And third is the opportunity. Health records are (or soon will be) mostly digitized, which provides the foundation to do new things in analytics and data sharing. There's a surge of investment in health IT, and these providers hope to cash in for contributing their know-how to new products. UPMC, IBM and Oracle have pledged $100 million to an ambitious healthcare analytics initiative, for example. <P> Other industries are also pursuing new models for faster, smarter tech development. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-cio-theres-a-better-way-to-create-sof/240148492">Procter & Gamble CEO Filippo Passerini</a> recently brought together a roster of marquee companies, including Boeing, FedEx, GE and Goldman Sachs, to brainstorm on ways they could speed up vendors' development of analytics software. P&G last month entered a co-development deal with a small startup, Verix, that does data integration for consumer goods and life sciences companies, similar to what dbMotion does for healthcare. <P> <strong>Formalizing The Co-Development Model</strong> <P> In 2010, UPMC assembled a team of people focused on this kind of development work, called the Technology Development Center. It now employs about 90 people, ranging from financial analysts to engineers and designers. <P> UPMC could just give vendors closer access to its clinicians. But TDC director Rebecca Kaul makes the case that its team can bring a more nuanced understanding of UPMC's needs and influence development to meet them. "It always starts with a problem we have to solve at UPMC," Kaul says. It's currently doing projects with Nuance and Optum related to natural language processing to understand unstructured data, for example. <P> TDC is working on three main problem areas: <P> <strong>1. Visualization:</strong> As data volumes grow, physicians need tools that hone in on the data that matters most to their decision-making. <P> <strong>2. Collaboration:</strong> UPMC is focusing here on providing the right data to an entire group of people involved in care -- to understand a patient's total health and relevant history, not just his knee if you're the doctor doing a knee replacement. (It recently completed a development effort with Alcatel-Lucent on this front.) <P> <strong>3. Data transformation:</strong> This is where it's working with Nuance and Optum, trying to pull insights from verbal notes to contribute to electronic record data. <P> A fourth area it would like to work on is decision support, giving clinicians the right data and decision frameworks at a point of care to help them make tough calls on diagnoses and treatments. <P> We're always going to need disruptive tech startups to rattle industries from the outside. And entrepreneurial leaders continue to be the power behind companies such as dbMotion, so I don't mean to overstate the role of established companies. But industry knowledge can be vital in driving a startup's product and speed of development. Particularly in areas such as improving analytics and in gathering data through an "Internet of Things" of connected devices, co-development projects will be indispensible.2013-03-06T15:43:00ZGeneral Motors puts the last of its four new U.S. tech development centers in Arizona. No Silicon Valley?http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/gm-hiring-1000-it-employees-in-phoenix-a/240150197?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/8-ways-an-smb-makes-most-of-salesforceco/240148303"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/947/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com" title="8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">8 Ways An SMB Makes Most Of Salesforce.com</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->General Motors has chosen the Phoenix area for its fourth and final new U.S. technology development center, with plans to hire 1,000 people there. <P> The center is part of GM's plan to staff up to about 9,000 IT employees as the automaker shifts from relying on IT outsourcing vendors for 90% of its tech work to doing 90% of that work in-house. A year ago, when Randy Mott was named CIO of GM, the company had about 1,500 IT employees. <P> The Arizona development center will be in Chandler, just outside of Phoenix. Since Mott came onboard, GM has opened development centers in the greater metro areas of Atlanta, Austin and Detroit as well. GM also has a data center in Warren, Mich., and is looking for a second site as it consolidates more than 20 data centers to two. <P> <strong>[ Curious about IT hiring trends? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/6-surprises-about-it-hiring-plans/240012679?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Surprises About IT Hiring Plans</a>. ]</strong> <P> With the metro Phoenix pick, GM has opted not to put one of its new development centers in Silicon Valley. GM considered cost of living and overall quality of life, Mott said, along with the ability to recruit from top universities. "I don't think there's one place you have to be to accomplish [tech innovation]," he said. <P> Mott cited universities, including the University of Arizona, Arizona State, UCLA, USC and Stanford, as a focus of GM's recruitment. About 30% of the employees in its development centers will be recent college graduates, the rest being more experienced professionals. <P> Mott said the veterans-plus-new-grads formula worked well in the 1990s during his time at Wal-Mart, where Mott launched his IT career and advanced to CIO. Wal-Mart's environment melded the energy and fresh thinking of newcomers with the experience of retail IT pros, he said. <P> When I asked Mott if, culturally, GM is ready for a distributed environment where critical tech work is spread out among these development centers, he said these centers are a consolidation compared with GM's former IT outsourcing model. "The suppliers were in 50 locations in 20 countries doing work on behalf of GM," Mott said. <P> Because GM's development centers will work on a range of projects, the company is recruiting people across tech disciplines. GM has about 400 active IT projects right now. Having the four centers spread over only a few time zones will make collaboration easier, Mott said. <P> The development center hiring plans GM has announced so far include the hiring of: 3,000 former Hewlett-Packard employees who had been working on GM projects for HP; 500 people in Austin; 1,000 in the Atlanta area (Roswell); and 1,500 in the Detroit area (Warren). <P> <i>Attend Interop Las Vegas, May 6-10, and attend the most thorough training on Apple Deployment at the NEW Mac & iOS IT Conference. Use Priority Code DIPR03 by March 9 to save up to $500 off the price of Conference Passes. Join us in Las Vegas for access to 125+ workshops and conference classes, 350+ exhibiting companies, and the latest technology. Register for <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/?CID=MP_ILV_IWK_Article_TL&_mc=DIPR03">Interop</a> today!</i>2013-03-05T09:33:00ZSuch a comparison says not only that the healthcare industry must change, but also that those changes will be dramatic and gut wrenching.http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/leadership/himss-should-healthcare-be-more-like-air/240150017?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioThe boldest thing I heard at my first day at HIMSS 13, the big healthcare IT event this week in New Orleans, was that the healthcare industry needs to be more like the airline industry. What could healthcare learn from a financially strapped industry that people love to hate? <P> It's the fact that U.S. commercial airlines carried 52% more people in 2010 than they did in 1995, and yet they employed 2% fewer people. It's that airlines did away with unprofitable luxuries such as meals in coach and filled excess flight capacity. It's that airlines shed lots of jobs at front counters and reservation call centers and replaced them with kiosks and online bookings. <P> "We do a bunch of their work for them -- and we like it," said Warner Thomas, CEO of Louisiana's big Ochsner Health System, during his HIMSS opening keynote. People today would howl in protest if they lost the ability to look online for their own flights and could do it only by phone, Thomas said. "How do we get people to make more of their own appointments for us, to check their own results?" he said. <P> <strong>[ In related news from HIMSS, some major EHR vendors are moving to break down walls between products. See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-medical-records/ehr-vendors-form-alliance-on-data-sharin/240149948">EHR Vendors Form Alliance On Data Sharing</a>. ]</strong> <P> Comparing the airline industry to the healthcare industry was an inspired choice by Thomas. It says not only that the healthcare industry must change, but also that those changes will be dramatic and gut wrenching. Thomas also pointed to banks' use of ATMs to let customers do self service, and to retailers such as Amazon.com and Wal-Mart using analytics to acquire a better understanding of their customers and their own operations. <P> Thomas laid out the big number: Healthcare must be 15% to 20% cheaper. That's not going to happen without pain and radical change. "It's going to take changes in how we do business," he said. <P> One example of this radical change I saw on the HIMSS show floor was the startup HealthSpot. It offers a telemedicine kiosk for remote patient-doctor interaction that includes not only video, but also a blood pressure cuff, thermometer, stethoscope and other tools a patient could use on himself with the supervision of a remote clinician. As I walked the HIMSS floor, though, I was struck by how few ideas like HealthSpot I saw that involved really radical changes to the way customers interact with their healthcare providers. <P> In his keynote Thomas laid out three results he expects healthcare IT to deliver: safer, higher-quality care; lower costs; and happier, more productive physicians and other caregivers. <P> I doubt that last one will always be possible. Getting to that future state of healthcare, one that costs as much as one-fifth less, won't always make people working in the industry -- or getting service from the industry -- happy. The airline industry has had to make some very hard choices about what services it can and can't provide. Healthcare has many more of those sometimes unpopular decisions ahead of it. <P> <i>Attend Interop Las Vegas May 6-10 and learn the emerging trends in information risk management and security. Use Priority Code MPIWK by March 22 to save an additional $200 off the early bird discount on All Access and Conference Passes. Join us in Las Vegas for access to 125+ workshops and conference classes, 300+ exhibiting companies, and the latest technology. <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register today</a>! </i>2013-02-27T14:03:00ZSalesforce.com CEO focuses more on the customer and less on social. Here's why that should resonate with CIOs.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/marc-benioff-gets-back-on-track/240149567?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioSalesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is one of the IT industry's great communicators, and he's No. 1 on my list of people who made <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397">cloud computing legit</a> for business software. But his message of recent years, hammering away on the importance of social media, always clanged a bit in my ears. <P> I never miss Benioff's Dreamforce presentations (remotely), and it was easy to agree with his take that social technologies are changing our world. He has talked with passion about how social media fueled the Arab Spring, or how the likes of fashion house Burberry are embracing Facebook. But ... what is it that I'm supposed to do back at my company? What does a "social enterprise" actually do? And how does Salesforce help me do that? <P> Yes, Salesforce has products tied to social. It acquired Radian6's social monitoring tools and Buddy Media's social marketing platform, and it developed Chatter for Twitteresque collaboration, but the social enterprise message lacked the same in-your-face call to action that Benioff's original No Software message had. Digital business leaders, including CIOs, got that story: Dump on-premises software, get cloud-based sales management up in a few weeks, and shift people from running servers to helping salespeople. <P> Benioff sounds back on target with his new message focused simply on the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/salesforcecoms-new-message-its-the-custo/240149492">customer</a>. <P> Back in November, <i>InformationWeek</i> challenged IT teams to set just <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/a-proposal-for-it-set-just-one-goal-for/240142445">one goal for 2013</a>: Be measurably more relevant to customers. IT teams that aren't looking at their work through a touch-the-customer lens are falling behind. <P> <strong>[ Are your customers satisfied with the service you're giving? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/5-steps-to-superior-customer-experience/240147720?itc=edit_in_body_cross">5 Steps To Superior Customer Experience</a>. ]</strong> <P> Mobile and analytics technologies, in particular, have changed the relationship between customer and company. Shopping, driving, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/vail-resorts-app-links-the-mountains-to/240006824 ">skiing</a>, farming, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/ups-empowers-package-recipients/240006802">shipping</a>, traveling, healing, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/how-gallo-brings-analytics-into-the-wine/240006776">winemaking</a>, generating energy -- we've detailed examples of how mobile plus analytics is changing those worlds. For salespeople, mobile and analytics can change the conversations they have. Tablets can help them have different interactions with would-be customers, but <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/ipads-for-all-one-sales-teams-story/232500087">salespeople</a> need a new toolset that fits mobile. That's where IT organizations need practical help from vendors such as Salesforce and its rivals. <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> <i>InformationWeek</i> will keep pounding this notion of customer-facing IT. We'll seek out the CIOs and other business technology leaders on the front lines and ask them what they need from tech vendors to get results. Our upcoming feature story based on our Global CIO survey (look for it on <em>InformationWeek.com</em> and in our March 18 print magazine) will show why customer-facing technology is so critical for digital businesses. Our <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/conference"><em>InformationWeek 500</em> Conference</a> in September also will drive forward this theme of the customer-facing CIO. <P> Most businesses are becoming digital businesses, with new ways to connect with and understand customers. Social is part of this picture, but it's only one means to the end.2013-02-14T09:06:00ZProcter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini thinks cooperation among the likes of Disney, FedEx and Goldman Sachs could push software vendors to build more relevant analytics software --and build it faster.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-cio-theres-a-better-way-to-create-sof/240148492?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/slideshow-unexpected-big-data-uses-use/240144221"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/925/image1_tn.jpg" alt="Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA" title="Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA" class="img175"/></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Procter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini is charming, polite, gracious -- and incurably impatient with the status quo. The current target of Passerini's dissatisfaction is the way in which software gets developed to meet the needs of businesses such as P&G. <P> Passerini describes business software development today as a "hub and spoke." The software vendor pitches what it's selling and what's possible with technology, then a would-be customer tells the vendor what they really need. FedEx, Boeing, BP, Disney, Goldman Sachs, GE -- they all go through the same exercise as P&G, one-on-one with the vendor. <P> Today, companies such as P&G have a screaming need for better analytics software to help them make sense of their growing mountains of data about sales, supply chains and customers. The conventional hub-and-spoke development model is still driving software innovation, but Passerini isn't confident it will produce the analytical software to meet future needs. <P> <strong>[ Big data has value that's often not reflected in the books. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/whats-your-big-data-worth/240144449?itc=edit_in_body_cross">What's Your Big Data Worth?</a> ]</strong> <P> "With the inflection point we are at, in a couple of years it will run out of steam," Passerini said at a P&G event at its Cincinnati headquarters that included those other big technology buyers as well as technology vendors. "The opportunity is now to do something dramatically different." <P> Passerini stopped short of proposing what replaces today's hub and spoke. "We don't have a solution," he said. "We don't have an answer. That's why we're here." <P> P&G has held a similar meeting each year showcasing the company's own technology, but this is the first year P&G brought in other big technology buyers and centered the meeting, called Goldmine, on one topic: analytics. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-ceo-shares-3-steps-to-analytics-drive/240148065">P&G CEO Bob McDonald</a> addressed attendees and set the need for better analytics: "We have to move business intelligence from the periphery of operations to the center of how business gets done." <P> Silicon Valley had better <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/silicon-valley-needs-to-get-out-more/240143972">listen closely</a> to what the likes of Passerini, FedEx CIO Rob Carter and Boeing CIO Kim Hammonds have to say about whether they need a different model for developing business software. Companies like them spend billions of dollars on IT every year. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are trend seekers, and the IPOs of <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/the-enterprise-cool-kids/">enterprise IT companies</a> such as Workday and Splunk have put more focus on business software. <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --><div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"><div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a><div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div><span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span></div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> So, what might a new approach to software development look like? That's where you come in. <P> <strong>Collaborative Software Innovation?</strong> <P> Passerini, by design, didn't lay out a plan for how software development should change. He's trying to spark a discussion. He met privately with IT leaders at the meeting and said he thinks there's interest in exploring the idea. <P> So that leaves it up to us to envision a faster and more relevant way to develop software. Please share your ideas in the Comments section below. <P> Meanwhile, here are some of my thoughts on the challenges of a more collaborative software development process, to get things started: <P> <strong>Openness:</strong> A collaborative customer effort to spur new software ideas will still face the same question a company faces on its own: Which vendors should we work with most closely? Would a new model involve, say, six non-competing companies picking one analytics vendor to collaborate with? Or would this group come up with a set of needs and broadly publish them, to let big and small companies go after them? <P> One option is an open innovation platform -- this small group of CIOs publicly lays out their needs for big vendors and entrepreneurs alike to tackle. InnoCentive offers a marketplace for such ideas, and P&G is among the companies that have used it. But those innovation challenges tend toward R&D efforts.Another variation of this "challenge" approach is what <a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20121129005448/en/GE-Announces-&#8216;Industrial-Internet-Quests&#8217;-Challenging-Developers">GE has just done</a> by releasing two months worth of flight data as part of a challenge to come up with better flight management algorithms. But neither of these approaches seems focused enough to guarantee the results buyers want. A P&G wants to know that a vendor is working on its problem, not just throw it wide open and hope something innovative comes back. An alternative might be a hybrid of the hub-and-spoke model: The CIOs agree on a common set of needs, and then each goes off to their preferred vendors. <P> <strong>Speed:</strong> Industry standards groups are a dime a dozen. A number of them are competing right now to create standards for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cloud-standards-bottom-up-not-top-down/240146392 ">cloud computing</a>, for example. But standards groups tend to emerge after a flurry of innovation and implementations have happened already and companies start to feel the pain of supporting heterogeneous environments. "Speed" isn't the rallying cry of standards bodies. Getting consensus quickly on business needs and doing agile iterations along the way will be tough with any cross-company effort. <P> <strong>Agreement:</strong> A related tension point is sure to be how industry-specific or company-specific software needs are. One startup at P&G's Goldmine event, analytics software vendor Verix, illustrates this tension. P&G is partnering with Verix to develop <a href="http://www.verix.com/business_intelligence_resources-news/news/the-procter-gamble-company-and-verix-business-intelligence-announce-initiation-of-a-strategic-partnership/">the Israeli company's</a> software. Verix's early success is driven in part by its industry focus -- bringing domain expertise in life sciences and, through close work with P&G, consumer packaged goods. <P> During a panel discussion at the P&G event, I asked two private-equity investors how they assess analytics companies. Are they more attracted to industry specialists or broader providers? Both leaned toward focus for the startups they back. <P> So could companies in very different industries -- such as consumer goods, aerospace, investment banking, media, hospitality, logistics, transportation and energy -- agree on what they need in new analytics software? Passerini ultimately thinks businesses are more alike than different, so there's room to collaborate. "It's all business," he said. <P> <strong>Energy:</strong> Sustaining any cross-company, collaborative effort is hard, especially around technology development. Remember RFID in the supply chain? <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/tag-line/10700078">Wal-Mart in the mid-2000s</a> tried to turbo-charge a huge, cross-industry effort to spur development and use of radio-frequency ID technology, in which tiny chips are placed on goods to make it easier to track them. That industry-wide momentum foundered, even with Wal-Mart's enormous supply chain influence. <P> I asked Passerini about that example, and he said one lesson is that companies pushing for better analytics all need to see a clear payoff; with RFID, the return wasn't clear to everyone throughout the supply chain. <P> <strong>Urgency:</strong> We're back to Passerini's impatience. Do other companies -- both buyers and builders of software -- share his sense of urgency that we need a new way to develop software? At P&G, Passerini has shaken up the IT strategy every few years for a decade -- outsourcing much of the daily operations to Hewlett-Packard, then creating a service approach where business units can take or leave what IT offers, then pushing to give 60,000 employees <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-turns-analysis-into-action/231600959">analytical tools</a> on their desktop. <P> "We use change as a strategy," Passerini said. "We obsolete our current model. We think it's important to do that when we're in a position of strength." Translation: Passerini thinks today's software development business model is working, but we should change it now before there's a crisis. Often it takes a crisis to drive change. <P> So that leaves the door open to you to articulate what's needed. Share your comments below. Is there a need for a better way to build software? What will work and what definitely won't? <P> <i>Can data analysis keep students on track and improve college retention rates? Also in the premiere all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/012813ed/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Analytics' Big Test</a> issue of InformationWeek Education: Higher education is just as prone to tech-based disruption as other industries. (Free with registration.) </i>2013-02-07T09:40:00ZCEO Bob McDonald makes the case that analytics needs to move from the periphery of operations to the "center of how business gets done."http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-ceo-shares-3-steps-to-analytics-drive/240148065?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioProcter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald is very clear about the critical role for technology at P&G: He thinks better data analytics is at the heart of how P&G will improve productivity and make more innovative products. <P> To McDonald, the change that's coming is a "cultural revolution" -- instead of reacting to historical business results, P&G is trying to use more <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-turns-analysis-into-action/231600959 ">real-time data and predictive analysis</a> to make better decisions. "We have to move business intelligence from the periphery of operations to the center of how business gets done," McDonald said. <P> But to do that, companies need better analytics software. And that's why McDonald spoke Wednesday night at P&G's Cincinnati headquarters to a gathering of a few dozen top IT leaders from companies including Boeing, BP, Disney, FedEx, GE and Goldman Sachs. <P> P&G's executives, as evidenced in an effort led by <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/procter-gamble-cio-filippo-passerini-20/228500182 ">CIO Filippo Passerini</a>, think analytics software can get better, faster, if companies together push for software that's more relevant to companies' real business problems. That idea prompted P&G to get IT leaders from different industries together to discuss how they're using analytics. "We want to build a learning consortium of companies who are making business intelligence and analytics a strategic choice, and therefore transforming their business operations," McDonald said. <P> Any such cross-company cooperation is difficult to sustain. But a number of factors are coming together today to fuel the intense interest in analytics by top executives -- soaring data volumes, new techniques for managing that data, new visualization tools for making sense of data, and more. Through open collaboration among companies, "we have a real opportunity to drive a step change in business intelligence," McDonald said. <P> P&G has credibility in part because the company has made such a big bet on analytics. McDonald has told his executives they need to "digitize" all P&G's business processes -- think of that as getting rid of paper-based processes across the company, an effort that provides a lot of raw data for use in analytics. <P> From there, McDonald laid out three broad steps that a company needs to take to put analytics at the center of how a business runs: <P> <strong>1. Get The Right Tools And Technology</strong> <P> Don't expect this technology to come off the shelf, McDonald warned. It may be off-the-shelf elements, but putting them together in a way that's exactly what employees need is the real tech innovation. He offered the example of P&G's Business Sphere, a meeting room that uses data analytics and visualization with videoconferencing to let managers hammer out decisions while looking at the same data and drilling down as needed. That effort used components from many tech vendors, and P&G's team brought them together into what executives needed. P&G has more than 50 of those spheres around the world. <P> <strong>2. Put The Right People In The Right Places</Strong> <P> P&G is pretty well known for <a href="http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/news/companies/1111/gallery.top_companies_leaders.fortune/3.html ">grooming managers</a> and training people for its future needs. Analytics is now a skills area of particular focus. <P> In addition to building skills, McDonald said companies need to put those people with data analysis skills close to business operations. An example is an analytical team that P&G charged with using analytics and data visualization to find new ways to tackle the timeless problem of unproductive inventory -- finding excess inventory, figuring out why it was made and looking for viable ways to get rid of it. The effort has saved about $250 million so far, he said. <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <strong>3. Build The Right Culture</strong> <P> McDonald calls this more analytical approach to business a "cultural revolution." Tools like Business Sphere can support that culture, since it puts data at the center of discussions. But external forces such as social networking also drive the need to make more real-time, data-driven decisions. <P> McDonald pointed to P&G's greater use of social media to spread its tear-jerker "thank you Mom" ads that it created for the Olympics. Understanding the ads' impact meant monitoring which videos were taking off on YouTube in which countries, and measuring the sharing of the ads on Facebook, which are new analytical challenges. Then employees needed to decide what action to take based on how often people liked, tweeted, discussed or posted the ads. "I hear a lot about big data," McDonald said. "It's not about the data. It's about how we're able to use the data." <P> <i>The Enterprise Connect conference program covers the full range of platforms, services and applications that comprise modern communications and collaboration systems. Hear case studies from senior enterprise executives, as well as from the leaders of major industry players like Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, Google and more. Register for <a href="http://www.enterpriseconnect.com/orlando?_mc=IWKPREM">Enterprise Connect 2013</a> today with code IWKPREM to save $200 off a conference pass or get a free Expo Pass. It happens March 12-21 in Orlando, Fla. </i>2013-02-04T08:00:00ZAny ERP change is high risk, but CIOs will look closely at cloud options.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/are-big-companies-ready-for-cloud-erp/240147381?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff didn't invent this whole idea of going around the CIO to pitch software directly to business unit leaders. Back when Sandra Kurtzig founded ASK and was selling its MANMAN manufacturing software in the '70s and '80s, her teams regularly skirted IT to get directly to manufacturing chiefs. Dodging IT was so common that Kurtzig admits it's a bit unsettling how often CIOs are the ones initiating a discussion about her new startup's cloud-based ERP software. "It puzzles us because they were always our enemy," she says.</p> <P> Think of Kurtzig's startup, Kenandy, as marking the outer edge of today's cloud software adoption. Kenandy's software-as-a-service handles manufacturing management, order management, financials and procurement. Its core is the order-to-cash cycle that SAP or Oracle software handles at most big companies. Kurtzig calls it the "heart and lungs" of the business, and she knows it will be among the last tasks transplanted to the cloud. </p> <P> But Kurtzig saw enough potential to come out of retirement in 2010 to start Kenandy -- at the urging of Benioff. They're beach buddies in Hawaii. She says Benioff pitched her on the idea that companies will come around to running something as critical as manufacturing systems in the cloud, and that her ASK experience (CA acquired ASK in 1994) gave her the cred to deliver it. After meeting with Ray Lane -- a Kleiner Perkins partner and Hewlett-Packard's chairman -- and landing $10.5 million in funding, she started Kenandy (named for her two sons).</p> <P> Kenandy's SaaS runs on Salesforce's development and data center platform, Force.com, and is written in Salesforce's proprietary Apex code. </p> <P> Kurtzig notes the typical cloud advantages of not having to invest in hardware or hire as many people to run cloud-based systems. But that's not enough for ERP. Companies get competitive advantage from how well they make use of their ERP systems and features. So Kurtzig's pitch focuses more heavily on advantages like Kenandy's SaaS being more "social" -- it makes it easier to share data on production changes with suppliers and tie the supply chain closely to changing customer orders.</p> <P> <strong>The 'Chiquita Moment'</strong></p> <P> Kenandy has a lot to prove. It needs more than just a couple of dozen customers. The entire cloud ERP segment needs a Chiquita moment. </p> <P> It was in 2007 that Aneel Bhusri, co-founder of cloud HR software company Workday, announced at the InformationWeek 500 Conference that Workday had landed the 26,000-employee Chiquita as a customer. It was Workday's first big multinational customer to put HR operations in the cloud. Soon came a deal from Flextronics, a contract manufacturer that had 200,000 employees worldwide at the time. Those deals let other cloud champions challenge their organizations: What's so special about our HR that they can do this and we can't?</p> <P> Flextronics CIO David Smoley drove the Workday deal, and Smoley's now optimistic about the potential of cloud-based ERP. He's spending time with startups such as Kenandy as well as established vendors such as Infor discussing the idea. </p> <P> As he showed with Workday, Smoley is comfortable on the leading edge of cloud adoption. A lot of companies aren't ready to put something as critical as manufacturing management in the cloud. But the switch has flipped, and cloud is more often the first preference for new software, not a fallback. The boom in marketing technology spending (see "<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/why-cmo-tech-spending-is-good-for-it/240147374">Why CMO Tech Spending Is Good For IT</a>") is riding on the cloud, with software from workflow automation to analytics often bought as online services. Eighty-five percent of 2012 InformationWeek 500 companies are using software-as-a-service.</p> <P> "Heart and lungs" functions such as ERP will be among the last to go to the cloud because of the sensitivity of the data involved. And changing an ERP system -- whether in the cloud or on premises -- is a complex job that risks disrupting business operations, so executives need to see a huge benefit. ERP replacements are to CIO careers what barely submerged shoals are to a sailor: a deadly hazard between you and where you want to go. But if the economy improves, and CIOs think about ERP upgrades, they're going to explore whether phasing in cloud elements makes sense.</p> <P> I don't know if Kenandy has the chops to be a breakthrough startup. Perhaps a more established cloud-based NetSuite, or cloud options from the likes of Oracle, SAP and Infor, will win the day. But I won't be shocked if ERP-in-the-cloud gets its Chiquita or Flextronics moment in 2013. </P> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9964/IT-Business-Strategy/informationweek-february-11-2013.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1357/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: Feb. 11, 2013 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Feb. 11, 2013 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9964/IT-Business-Strategy/informationweek-february-11-2013.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of <nobr><em>InformationWeek</em> magazine</nobr></a><br /> (registration required)</strong></div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2013-01-22T12:15:00ZCIO Bill Martin explains how the cruise line works with Apple, how it's improving on-board Internet access and how it gives new guests a clean iPad.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/why-royal-caribbean-treats-ipads-like-be/240146704?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/12-best-apple-ios-apps-of-2012/240144053"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/921/best2012-1st-screen_tn.PNG" alt=" 12 Best iPhone, iPad Apps Of 2012" title=" 12 Best iPhone, iPad Apps Of 2012" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> 12 Best iPhone, iPad Apps Of 2012</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Royal Caribbean cruise line changes iPads like it changes bed sheets. Really, exactly like that -- take the used iPads out of each stateroom, put a clean one in and take the old one back for cleaning. <P> It's one of the interesting insights I got when catching up with <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-5-ways-royal-caribbeans-cio-t/225702347 ">Royal Caribbean CIO Bill Martin</a>. Royal Caribbean has had iPads in the suites on some of its remodeled cruise ships for the past year. The iPads let guests order room service, make reservations for events on and off the ship, watch movies from the onboard movie library, and receive customized offers for onboard spas and restaurants. <P> Clearing content from those iPads is critical -- who knows what pictures a guest might leave on one of them, right? I had assumed that the remote data wipe would happen over the air, or at least through a docking station in the room. However, it's difficult to access areas such as photos and notes, even using the cruise line's Airwatch mobile device management software, Martin says. IT looked into just turning the camera off, but "a person, if they know what they're doing, can turn it back on," he says. <P> <strong>[ Is IT really on board with BYOD? Or just bowing to pressure from users enamored of their iDevices? Learn <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/mobility/business/why-apple-is-its-arch-frenemy/240146426?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Why Apple Is IT's Arch Frenemy</a>. ]</strong> <P> Plus, Royal Caribbean wants to make sure it wipes each iPad clean. And there isn't a lot of time to get it done. When a ship pulls in, 3,000 to 6,000 people come off and the crew has nine hours or less to get it ready for the next several thousand guests. <P> Thus the swap-out, which the cleaning crews do as part of their "very, very well defined" process for refreshing rooms, Martin says. The "used" iPads are taken to an onshore IT office, where they're completely re-imaged. It's an efficient operation, but "it's also why long term we'll get out of the hardware business and make this an app," Martin says. That is, in the coming years most people will just get these services using an app on their own device. <P> Here are some other insights from Martin: <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <strong>1. Support Is Different With Apple</strong> <P> Apple doesn't pretend to be a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/apple-doesnt-rule-the-school/240146441">conventional enterprise IT vendor</a>, so Royal Caribbean doesn't have a lot of interaction with Apple even on a high-profile project like this one. The support Apple offers "is good, but it's relatively limited," Martin says. Instead, Apple will often suggest a third party to work with. "That's helped a lot, because they do point you to really good people who know what they're doing," he says. <P> <strong>2. iPads Are A Short-Term Strategy</strong> <P> "Our next phase is to put this on the user's device," Martin says. "So many people have these now. And we're starting to see other mobile devices come into the picture, not just Apple's." <P> Guests have liked the in-room iPad because it's an easy-to-use tool to help them manage cruise activities -- a "nice pane of glass that is incremental to the experience," Martin says. But what people will increasingly want is to use their own devices, be they iPads, Kindles or other popular Android tablets. So Royal Caribbean is developing a tablet app that does everything the ship-owned iPad does, on multiple devices. <P> <strong>3. Royal Caribbean Needs More Mobile Development Talent</strong> <P> Martin has been relying on outside developers for tablet apps and development. But the company is "going to have to bring some of that in house," he says, so that it doesn't have to contract outside for every project and can call a vendor's bluff when needed. <P> <strong>4. Tablets Change The On-Ship Bandwidth Demand</strong> <P> With the iPads, Martin's team needed to upgrade the on-ship network to increase the bandwidth and make wireless available everywhere on the ship. Guests can take their room iPad with them around the ship, so if they want to watch a movie on it by the pool, IT needed to make that possible. <P> <strong>5. Guests Will Expect To Be Connected</strong> <P> The iPads connect to the ship's internal network, not to the Internet. Providing Internet access is challenging on a ship because it requires a satellite connection, which is slow and expensive. Guests pay up to 75 cents a minute on most cruise lines, which Martin knows "in 2013 sounds ridiculous." He also knows that tablets and smartphones will only increase the demand for Internet access, and the next generation of guests will just expect connectivity on ship. <P> So Royal Caribbean is working to improve the on-ship Internet experience on two fronts. By mid-year, it expects to have bundled conventional satellite capacity so it can offer flat-rate access. Royal Caribbean will also test the new <a href="http://o3bnetworks.com/media-centre/press-releases/2013/royal-caribbean-cruises-ltd-and-o3b-networks-expand-business-partnership-to-provide-guests-onboard-allure-of-the-seas-cruise-ship-with-ultra-fast-and-affordable-internet-access">O3B satellites,</a> which promise fiber-type speeds. "If all the other bandwidth efforts are evolutionary, this is revolutionary," Martin says. "This means no matter where you are in the world, you can be connected to extremely high-speed Internet access. That is where we want to be." Those satellites have just launched, and Martin plans to test the service on-ship as soon as this summer, on its two newest and largest cruise ships, Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas. <P>2013-01-18T10:38:00ZIf IT doesn't deliver everything a business wants, it's not all IT's fault, readers say.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/5-ways-business-still-fails-the-it-organ/240146582?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cioI've received a lot of responses to my recent column, "<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/6-ways-it-still-fails-the-business/240144288">6 Ways IT Still Fails The Business</a>." Some of you didn't like it. "I believe you are wrong on every point you have made," offered one reader. <P> The most common response was along these lines: "Agree, but the problem is a two-way street." That is, business unit leaders share the blame when IT teams can't deliver everything a company wants. Based partly on your feedback, I offer some of the ways business leaders fail their IT organizations. <P> <strong>1. Treat IT As Irrelevant To Customers</strong> <P> IT's still a back-office function at too many companies. Those companies fail to see IT as critical to serving customers and to creating new, tech-enabled products. Mock the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/peripherals/the-internet-of-pointless-perilous-thing/240146146">Internet-linked fridge</a> all you want, but companies that aren't exploring ways to use the Internet of Things, mobile apps and cloud services with their offerings will miss out. Says reader Terry Bennett: "In far too many companies, IT is used as a cost-cutting engine, and IT's capability of generating revenue or of providing a competitive advantage are pushed to the back." <P> Our <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/iw-500-data-shows-how-it-rules-have-chan/240006825"><em>InformationWeek 500</em> research</a> suggests attitudes are changing. Last year, 46% of <em>IW 500</em> companies cited introducing new IT-led products and services among their top three innovation priorities, up from 37% in 2009. <P> <strong>[ Want more on CIO strategy? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/6-uncomfortable-questions-it-teams-shoul/240007022?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Uncomfortable Questions IT Teams Should Ask</a>. ]</strong> <P> <strong>2. Don't Even Try To Get Marketing Working With IT</strong> <P> Marketing must "stop throwing darts at the wall and have analytics-based marketing campaigns" and improve project discipline, writes one reader. He laments that "marketing will request 50 projects with a few weeks to months of lead time, and then when IT does not deliver, [IT] is not flexible enough or quick enough." <P> Prediction for 2013: more frustration. <P> Marketing, you see, doesn't think it has a technology problem, and if it does, it doesn't see the IT organization as the fix. In its excellent <a href="http://www.cmocouncil.org/current_program_details.php?pid=96">State of Marketing 2012</a> report, the CMO Council asked marketers about the organizational or operational changes they plan for this year. Just 10% cited "improve alignment and collaboration with IT." Yet 43% expect to add marketing or customer analytics, 20% will increase mobile applications and 25% will implement marketing automation systems. <P> Either marketing departments think they have a great relationship with IT to make all of that tech work, or they don't plan to work with IT. <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> <span style="font-size:.9em; font-weight:bold;">Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy.</span> </div> </div> <!-- /GLOBAL CIO GLOBE --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <strong>3. Have No Plan, Or Don't Share It With IT</strong> <P> At <em>InformationWeek</em>, we've bristled at the concept of business-IT "alignment" -- either business units and IT have the same business goals or they're sunk. Some of you feel the same way. "Maybe it is time (actually, has been for a long time) that 'IT' is no longer positioned as being separate from the 'business,'" a reader says. "What an organization needs is a clear priority on what it wants to accomplish, and to organize its resources to do it." Obsession with org charts works against teamwork, the reader says: "Cross-chart teaming of resources is needed to actually do something." <P> Resources are key. Business unit and IT leaders must allocate IT like capital or any other scarce resource. When we asked <em>IW 500</em> companies about their <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/8-it-mistakes-must-have-lessons-from-top/240007998">biggest mistakes</a> last year, one of the most common was an unrealistic IT pipeline, leading to missed deadlines, lost credibility and burned-out staff. If outsourcing or cloud apps are the answer to an IT shortage, IT leaders must be willing and active participants in making that call. <P> <strong>4. Treat Data Security As IT's Problem</strong> <P> The reader who said I got everything wrong was particularly steamed about security risks when I said IT is doing well in embracing cloud apps but poorly in enabling mobile devices: "IT's responsibility is not to give their users every single toy and fun new feature that is released. IT's responsibility is to maintain data security and integrity. Things like mobile devices, cloud services, remote access, BYOD all are security risks." <P> Some financial services companies do treat security and compliance as their own functions, ensuring security isn't just an after-the-fact problem dumped on IT. Regardless, IT can't use security as an excuse for dismissing productivity drivers, such as tablets, as mere toys. <P> <strong>5. Not Hiring, Or Keeping, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/how-to-lose-your-best-it-employees/232900608">Great IT People</a></strong> <P> One reader lamented that his organization can't keep talented young people because they get fed up with the bureaucracy and leave. <P> The best IT jobs will be those that let IT pros look outward and build technology that matters to customers. Leaders in IT or any part of the business should ask reader Terry Bennett's question: "Is it possible that the root cause is that too often we in IT have focused either on the technology itself or on internal operations, rather than on the overall business and the end customer?"2013-01-10T12:25:00ZGM will start interviewing as soon as next week, as CIO Randy Mott continues with plans to rely on staffers instead of outsourcers.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/general-motors-hiring-1000-it-pros-in-at/240146022?cid=SBX_iwk_related_commentary_Executive_insights/interviews_global_cio<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/slideshows/big-data-analytics/7-tips-on-closing-the-big-data-talent-ga/240012658"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/895/01_BigD_Talent_Gap_tn.jpg" alt=" Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win" title=" Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle"> Big Data Talent War: 7 Ways To Win</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> General Motors plans to hire up to 1,000 information technology employees at a new Atlanta-area office, part of GM CIO Randy Mott's plan to rely on staffers instead of outsourcers for tech projects. <P> GM aims to add about 7,500 IT employees in all as part of its <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/general-motors-will-slash-outsourcing-in/240002892">shift away from outsourcing </a>, which GM has relied on for decades to do its IT work. That would give GM about 9,000 IT employees and 1,000 contractors. That mix is a reversal from the 90% outsourced IT formula that GM used in the past. <P> GM already has announced <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/recruiting/general-motors-picks-austin-for-500-job/240006925">new technology centers</a> in Warren, Mich., and Austin, Texas. It has hired about 700 people at those two offices. In addition, GM is hiring about 3,000 people who had been <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/personnel/why-gms-hiring-3000-it-pros-from-hp/240009371">Hewlett-Packard employees</a> working on GM projects under an outsourcing contract with HP. <P> GM plans a fourth U.S. technology center, but it hasn't disclosed the location. Mott says the locations are chosen to give GM a broader geography from which to recruit. Each center will work closely with 10 to 12 universities on recruiting, as well as look for experienced IT pros. GM already has Atlanta openings on its <a href=" http://jobs.gm.com/go/Atlanta-IT-Jobs/365238/"> career website</a>, and Mott says they hope to start interviewing as soon as next week. The center will be in Roswell, a northern suburb of Atlanta. <P> <strong>Tensions With HP?</strong> <P> Separately, HP filed a petition in a Texas court in December to depose two former HP executives who went to work at GM in Austin, <a href=" http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-28/hps-elite-technology-team-moves-to-gm-legal-action-begins "><em>Businessweek</em></a>'s Ashlee Vance reported. HP's filing says that 18 HP workers "resigned en masse and without notice" from HP's Austin facility and went to work for GM. HP has not filed any litigation in the matter but said it wanted to "investigate potential claims" because it expected more departures, and because one executive involved had a contract that prohibited him from recruiting HP employees. Mott is the former CIO of HP. <P> Asked about the petition, Mott said the move "feels very retaliatory and harassing to the individuals. But I think most people will see through that and talent will go where talent sees the opportunity." Mott added: "We're looking for talent, is the short answer, and we're looking for the best talent." Mott said the inquiry had nothing to do with HP's agreement to hire the 3,000 HP employees, and that that hiring was going smoothly. <P> Mott's big strategic bet is that this new IT team can automate more of the day-to-day operations such as running data centers, in order to free up people and money to develop new, innovative projects. <P> Mott said new employees will work across all of GM's technology needs, which include web technology to interact with dealers, customer databases, factory systems and technology that is in vehicles. GM is hiring across technology specialties including software development, databases and project management, he said. <P> <i>Tech spending is looking up, but IT must focus more on customers and less on internal systems. Also in the all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Outlook 2013</a> issue of InformationWeek: Five painless rules for encryption. (Free registration required.)</i>