Nano Tools for Leaders® — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.
A couple of months back, some smart folks at VC firm Andreesen Horowitz wrote a blog post called “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox”. Among other things, the blog made a big splash because it claimed, quote: “[W]hile cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows.” It claimed that cloud overspending was resulting in huge loss of market value, and that developers needed incentives to reduce spending.
Imagine this: You are a CIO at a large, global corporation who is driving the implementation of a new customer experience platform. It went live and then suddenly crashed the following week. You already know the money and time spent on this project and realize any hiccups will be costly or customers might be lost.
When he spoke at the virtual Washington DC Fintech Week conference, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman shared an anecdote he heard when he first got into financial services: It is expensive to be poor. “Unfortunately, that couldn’t be more true.” Developing innovation in fintech that can benefit the broader masses rather than select segments of the population may require more concerted consideration.
Predicting the future is a risky business, particularly in the current environment of huge uncertainty. But once again, Gartner this week announced its Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2022 and Beyond during its virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas event.
Interactions between the chief executive and other members of the top management team appear to follow distinct scripts. Managers who take note can boost their standing or stay out of harm’s way. Top management teams (TMT) have been studied since at least the 1980s for insights into how chief executives and their deputies make the strategic decisions that can make or break organisations.
CIO Paul Blowers describes the past 16 months at accounting firm Plante Moran as “a grand experiment” in getting work done. Throughout, Blowers has flexed, reconfigured, and stress-tested his mostly remote, 120-person IT team to determine how productivity, creativity, and culture would hold up through the pandemic.
Jim Swanson is EVP and enterprise chief information officer at Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest healthcare company. He leads approximately 5,000 IT professionals around the globe, but as he’ll tell you, technology isn’t just the domain of IT at Johnson & Johnson.
I lead the product team at my company and have been working in product-related roles for most of my career. I also count myself lucky that a few past roles have involved working with and selling to developers. This is for lots of reasons, but one of the main ones is that it gave me extensive experience with DevOps principles and practices.
Since the turn of the century, computing has been, in many ways, a massive transfer of methods and technology from the original Internet web pioneers like Amazon, Facebook, and Google to the rest of the world. Many architectures, techniques, and tools to support concepts such as DevOps and scale-out applications, emerged and were perfected by the original Internet pioneers and then later productized and utilized by IT.
It’s a challenging time for IT leaders helping build businesses back better, with some of their biggest challenges being finding the workers, skills, and budget to deal with the workload. That, at least, is what IDG Research found in its just-published study of CIO Technology Priorities.
Where is your organization in today’s digital economy? The pandemic has impacted every organization in one way or another. The unlucky ones have barely survived, or worse (think shopping malls and restaurants), while the fortunate ones witnessed unprecedented demand (think internet retailers and online collaboration tools).
Digital leaders are best positioned to meet disruptive challenges with innovation.
For years, we have heard the story that tech investments drive productivity. But when we further explored this topic, we found that the productivity of tech investments has been steadily falling for the past 20 years thanks to disconnected digital investments and stakeholders, rising technical debt, and pervasive digital sameness.
