Top of CIOs Mind

These days with cloud, consumerization, and BYOD – everyone thinks they are or could be the CIO. To most of you, be thankful you are not. This position is under a lot pressure. The CEO keeps hearing costs are dropping, the CMO’s purview is suddenly all things digital, hackers and purbs feel entitled to anything they can get, and the end users are discovering credit cards means there is no reason to take “no” for an answer. Oh yeah, the lifespan of technical products is now measured in months.

I recently came across a few articles that hit some of the top issues among CIOs, and was disappointed to see how few were comms related. They were long and intimidating lists with broad scopes including development, big data, and compliance issues. It is easy to see how something like the ownership structure of Dell, even if it’s a big a supplier, just doesn’t matter to most CIOs. I can list 25 trends impacting the office of the CIO, but why? Instead, let me focus on some key issues within the narrowly defined space of communications and collaboration.

• Mobility is shifting to device management. The CFO says why should we buy hardware and software when the employees want to use their own? The conversation in 2012 was BYOD, now it’s a matter of getting this under control. It’s 2013, do you know where your data is?
  

• Virtualization: VoIP allowed us to converge the wires, but why stop there? We need to converge the entire physical infrastructure including servers and networks. Virtualization enables economies in operations and disaster recovery. Multiple levels of virtualization exist including calling servers, applications, desktops, and now software defined networking.
  

• The Cloud: Cloud vs. premises isn’t a single decision any more. Increasingly, the UC suite involves lots of specialized capabilities – contact center, call recording, analytics, API services, IVR, and so on. Each of these now has a cloud or premises decision point. It is less premises versus cloud and more premises and cloud.
  

• Social Business. Social networking is the inverse of email. If you cc too many people on email, they get annoyed, and reply-alls are even more annoying. The alternative is exclusive emails to a small distribution list, but that stifles communications. The new solution is public conversations where participation is optional – that’s called social business and if you didn’t get the memo, you didn’t look for it properly.
  

• Video, video, video: Skype changed the world – video communications don’t have to be complex or expensive. If you don’t have video, get it. If you have it, then expand it and ensure it is intuitive, cheap, and collaborative. The space is rapidly shifting to software-based and SVC – are you?
  

• WebRTC. This is a new technology that has potentially big implications. For most CIOs, it’s just a matter of staying current. In some cases, it’s already turning into projects, pilots, and development efforts.

Those items are at the top of the long list. The CIO must also be constantly focused on security, morale, costs, disaster preparedness, and remain current on existing and potential solution roadmaps.

1 Responses to "Top of CIOs Mind" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 4/19/2013 9:56:13 AM

Dave,

Things are indeed getting complex, which is affecting our old terminologies.

For example, when we talk about business communications," it's not just about "person-to-person" contacts, but business process applications that can be accessed by people and vice versa, where an applications needs to notify a recipient about something in a timely and flexible manner. Mobility is driving both form of interactions and requiring UC flexibility to meet the dynamic needs of the individual end users. I will be discussing this perspective and its opportunities at the upcoming UC Summit.

I certainly agree with you about the role of "social networking," but I am now inclined to call it more descriptively as "social messaging," which will expand the old role of "unified messaging." Yes, they are using a "network," but it is to post messages, be notified about
those posts, reply directly to the author of those posts, and also include more than text (pictures, videos, voice messages).

Like all forms of messaging, whether it is used for "business" or "social" contacts is a matter of user choice.