Whatever the company or industry, sooner or later, we all deal with the various issues that challenge a CIO and IT department to become more effective as well as deliver increased value to the business. The classic case is of a company that might be going through a tremendous change—say, a major merger or acquisition. And, of course, with this major change comes new challenges for the IT department…

Ask people about their IT strategy and you often get a long answer. I’ve looked around a bit, and the definition that appeals to me most is one I found on the CioIndex Website at www.cioindex.com: IT strategy is an iterative process to align IT capability with business requirements. The author adds a few extras to clarify this succinct definition:…

Acquiring and maintaining compliance for Fortune 500 companies may not be easy, but it can be a lot simpler than you think. The secret is simply focusing on information security. Once you do that, government regulation and industry-driven compliance seemingly fall into place. …

Driven in large part by the advent of mobile, device-based, self-service applications, the mainframe has become a more critical component of the modern-day application delivery chain. Today’s mainframes reliably support innovative, high-volume, revenue-generating transactions and services such as online banking and e-commerce. It’s estimated that the average adult instigates 30 mainframe transactions per day, making mainframe data and applications fuel to the business. Today, the once siloed mainframe is increasingly melting into the computer topology of the enterprise. …

As a reader of Enterprise Executive, you’re likely a big proponent of the System z in your enterprise. Your organization most generally runs its mission-critical business applications on System z. However, are you just as big a proponent when it comes to the education/training of the personnel responsible for your System z environment? This article will provide you with some ideas for making the case for education/training your organization’s mainframers and briefly examine several sources of mainframe-related training…

According to technology leaders, it was recently estimated that the world creates several quintillion bytes of data every day—so much information that 90 percent of the world’s data today has been created in just the last few years. This data comes from things such as digital sensors, social media, digital pictures and videos, online purchase information, Internet text and indexing, medical records, mobile devices and online stock trading to name a few…

When evaluating Big Data applications in enterprise computing, one often-asked question is how does Big Data compare to the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)? What does Big Data bring to the organization that the EDW can’t handle?…

Scanning the trade press today, it would be easy to conclude that business IT managers have worked out all the challenges of traditional computing and are now ready to throw more effort toward realizing the benefits of disruptive trends such as Big Data analysis. The potential of burgeoning technology aside, the reality of the situation may be quite different…

Hedging is the practice of taking a position in one market to offset and balance against the risk adopted by assuming a position in an opposing market or investment. The word hedge is from Old English hecg, originally any fence, living or artificial. The use of the word as a verb in the sense of “insure oneself against loss,” as in a bet, by playing something on the other side, is from the 1670s, originally with in; probably from an earlier use of hedge in meaning “secure (a debt) by including it in a larger one which has better security.”…

In IT, we’ve been fixing company problems large and small for decades and meeting the challenges of highly technical demands, whatever they may be. But now we have a major problem of our own. It’s a labor shortage that’s nothing short of a crisis. And it demands the same kind of innovative solutions we’re used to delivering every day in our jobs. …