As we dive into the New Year, a myriad of IT trends are unfolding — from Amazon’s success with the Kindle Fire, to Facebook’s expected IPO and RIM’s ongoing business challenges — that make it easy to be distracted. But from a macro viewpoint, there are only two key metrics that require your laser focus: keeping pace with technology and staying relevant in your market. Everything else is background noise.

That’s not to say you and your staff should ignore the astounding rate at which iPhones and Androids are entering your workplace. And you should clearly be concerned about the recent security breaches affecting 24 million Zappos customers.

On a daily basis, however, you — like CIO Larry Bonfante — are probably finding ways to incorporate mobile devices and social media into your enterprise and moving back-end systems to the cloud. At the end of the day, as Larry writes, you aren’t just buying technology, you must answer the question: “What matters to our clients and consumers?” (You can re-read Larry’s Smart Enterprise Exchange blogs for other tips on IT leadership here.)

Nowhere is the customer more of a No. 1 priority than in the retail industry — and that mandate is only growing stronger. At the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in January, several speakers addressed ways that social media, business intelligence and mobile devices will make or break retailers in the coming year — and it’s not just CIOs who are involved in these strategies. DSW’s Harris Mustafa, EVP Supply Chain and Merchandise Planning and Allocation, spoke about smart ways to leverage customer data and mobile technologies, as did several CMOs, brand managers and CTOs. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru looked back and ahead at key retail IT trends.

We want to help you stay focused, too, and are offering expert advice on decision making this month and next on Smart Enterprise Exchange. In addition to Pete DeLisi’s thoughtful comments about decision making in the age of speed, book author and Babson Professor Tom Davenport will provide community members with a preview of his upcoming book, Judgment Calls, next month. Tom and co-author Brook Manville discuss organizations that have successfully tapped the diverse and deep knowledge of their people — often using collaborative technologies — to build an organizational decision-making capability.

We also feature an insightful Q&A with Randy Gaboriault, CIO at Christiana Care Health System — another industry sector where IT is making dramatic changes to everyday business. In recognition of this important sector, we've added a Healthcare common interest group to the Smart Enterprise Exchange. Please join it and post discussions, comments and ideas to share with other like-minded IT executives.

How is your business staying relevant in its market and using technology for customer satisfaction? Join the conversation and share your wins and thoughts with your peers on the Exchange.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

Over the years, return on investment has been the economic litmus test for most business spending — and IT in particular: For CIOs, a purchase either can show hard-dollar payback or it can’t. ROI was also the bottom line that brought IT under scrutiny of finance departments and auditors.

Certainly, the “go, no-go” rules loosened up a bit when productivity, competitive advantage and other “soft-dollar” results were considered. These intangibles were always difficult to measure with standard calculations such as net present value (NPV) or total cost of ownership (TCO), but they remained the exceptions — one-off purchases or solutions for individual departments or users.

Today, many old metrics and processes seem to be fading, and exceptions are now the rule. Many believe that with the proliferation of social media, consumer devices and cloud computing, for example, new ways to determine ROI — if such approaches even exist — are needed. And some are even claiming that ROI is not only the wrong metric to use, but that it doesn’t exist in reference to social media. Can this be true? If so, how can sound purchasing decisions be made?

We have discussed the economics of cloud and virtualization on Smart Enterprise Exchange in the past. As I wrote previously, “Most conclude that there is no one-size-fits-all ROI calculator that tells you when to go to a cloud model and how much you will save or pay. The most definitive answer about lower costs seems to be that you probably will see savings; but as with warning labels on medicine bottles, results will vary with the situation.”

My advice at the time was: “Conduct your typical due diligence by analyzing contracts, negotiating with providers and starting small.” But I am starting to realize that this type of traditional approach just may not work in the more amorphous world of social media.

Marcio Salles, who blogs about social media with a Brazilian perspective, recently included a great infographic in his blog on Smart Enterprise Exchange. Provided by MDG Advertising, the graphic addressed the ROI of social media for marketing purposes. In sum, it acknowledges that this is a “contentious” topic and offers several ways to measure effectiveness. Among these: going beyond click counts to include revenue generated, reduced returns, conversion rates, and positive brand mentions or feedback, among others.

Still, the company says that many factors such as closing business deals, encouraging new partnerships, quicker information retrieval (which translates to lower costs) and particularly, recruiting new talent, are “intangibles.” Among specific platforms mentioned, Facebook and Twitter were rated highly, and YouTube holds out the most promise. But how can their use be monetized?

Dozens of other recent blogs and consultants have raised the issue of social media ROI, too, and lots of discussion has ensued. Sean Jackson, Chief Financial Officer of Copyblogger Media, and Sonia Simone, Chief Marketing Officer, treat the subject in a lighthearted blog here but also raise some good points. Specifically, they conclude that revenue should not be a success factor for social marketing efforts. “The real measurement of return lies in the profits created from your culture of marketing.” Another social media executive offered some alternative metrics here, while a marketing strategist says not to worry about ROI — just move ahead with your plans.

But I suspect that marketing has different requirements than IT does. Would CIOs get buy-in for large-scale projects based on this advice? Typically, large global enterprises — especially those in regulated industries or with strict guidelines from their boards — need strong business cases for new investments. Has that mindset changed with social media? Must it change?

I believe that the landscape is evolving, but slowly. Uncertain financial returns are still inhibiting social media rollouts, according to many sources, including a recent InSites Consulting research report from the U.K. And even those who last year created social media ROI calculators are going back to the drawing board to make revisions.

CIOs can’t afford to stall and haggle over every purchase and every departmental request, and I agree that “calculating the ROI of social networks is not rocket science,” as this blog states. Nevertheless, sound decisions are key to good leadership and investment decisions should be based on more than popular trends or gut feelings. That’s the point of view Peter DeLisi takes in an upcoming new blog on Smart Enterprise Exchange next month.

Let’s keep this conversation going. What are your experiences in this rapidly changing market sector? Are your corporate purchasing requirements keeping pace with new media? Are RFPs and ROI finally a thing of the past?

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

Additional resources/ related blogs:

• A Framework for Social Analytics, Altimeter Group http://www.altimetergroup.com/2011/08/research-report-a-framework-for-social-analytics.html
• Social Media ROI http://mashable.com/2011/11/15/social-media-roi-measure/
• Social Media and B-to-B Marketing http://directmarketing.thomsonlocal.com/Win/News-Archive/Marketing-News/?storyId=84622
• Social Media Marketing Use Growing http://www.brafton.com/news/even-with-social-media-marketing-use-growing-implementations-just-beginning

Tablets are immature when it comes to enterprise-level management, security and functionality, according to Paul DeBeasi, Research VP, Gartner.  At best, “tablets will augment, not replace, notebooks,” since tablets are “optimized for consumers of content, not creators of content,” he said at the recent New York Interop conference.

Chris Hazelton, Research Director, Mobile & Wireless at the 451 Group and ChangeWave Research, meanwhile, countered with August data showing that 16 percent of 1,618 corporations were providing tablets to employees — up from 4 percent in May 2010. In a market where IT spending is flat, that’s a significant amount, he said.

The debate over enterprise support of tablets and mobile devices continued on October 5, when the analysts squared off on the topic of whether your next notebook will be a tablet.

DeBeasi agreed that tablets are exciting and growing, and Gartner estimates that 300 million will be shipped by 2015. But tablet growth won’t be primarily in enterprises. The new paradigm, he said, will be a multidevice work model where users will select “the best device (smartphone, tablet, notebook) for the job.” The more important question is: “How do we synchronize our content and context among all of our devices?”

Additionally, DeBeasi said that technology is changing so rapidly that the endpoint devices of today, including tablets, phones and notebooks, won’t be the same in the future. “They are all morphing,” he said.

Hazelton agreed that the “form factors” may change, yet mobile apps are on the rise. At present, most business users employ tablets for checking email (70%), accessing the Internet (70%) and working away from the office (68%), but such uses as customer presentations (44%), sales support (43%) and tablets as replacements for laptops (36%), are gaining speed. Perhaps even more significantly, more than half of 505 businesses surveyed by ChangeWave in March said they will deploy two or more mobile apps in 2011.

While the debate attracted advocates on each side, to my mind, it’s not an either/or question-- each device will have a user base and each is optimal for a given application. Until device nirvana is reached—whatever form that may take-- the larger issue for enterprise IT is how to get through the interim period when multiple devices need support, service and funding. No one disagrees that short term management will be a challenge.

Read more about mobile device sessions at Interop here and more about Mobile-driven businesses here.

Agility — like innovation, productivity and cost-savings — is a must-have at businesses today. If you’re not agile, you’ll succumb to the competition. End of story.         

But achieving agility is an ongoing story, and tactics vary company to company and task to task. Although I dislike the overused word “enabler,” IT definitely enables business agility and even has a starring role to play. At the same time, agility itself enables a business to reach its end goals — faster transactions, better productivity and lower costs. Agility results when business operates more efficiently, and therefore, there is no single solution — whether it’s cloud or virtualization or consumer devices — to attain it in an instant. Agility doesn’t come in a box or over the Web; it’s a combination of approaches measured in many ways.

Many business experts offer theories and examples of how to become an agile business. Mark W.S. Chun, Director of the  Center for Applied Research  and Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at  Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, told me recently that his latest research indicates that, contrary to many beliefs, public-sector IT efforts — particularly in Asia — are often more innovative and agile than those in the private-sector. While lower funding and transient management teams are usually business inhibitors, Chun says that when you’re small and scrappy, you take risks and adopt new ideas quickly — before the next administration, budget cuts or political shift occurs. That may be why mobile technologies and cloud services are being widely embraced by governments and their agencies, he says.

Smart Enterprise magazine will be examining “IT at the Speed of Business” in the latest issue. It includes a profile of Josh Morton, Sprint’s VP of IT Enterprise Services, who must empower its dispersed enterprise to respond faster and with greater agility than ever before. A major re-platforming of the IT infrastructure and a new mobile strategy are under way to meet demands.

At Avis Europe, reexamination of its business processes was a first step toward making effective use of resources and reducing costs to become more agile. Avis deployed CA Clarity™ Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) to manage risk and for visibility of IT service and resource costs.

In the best cases, agility is simply a way of doing business — and it starts at the top level of the organization. In this interview in the MIT Sloan Review, Christian Rynning-Tønnesen, CEO of Statkraft, says: “The ability to create strategies and adapt to changing conditions quickly is critical for maintaining a competitive edge.” Rather than slowing down the company with regulations, costs and overhead, Statkraft is pursuing sustainability to keep it ahead of competitors and its marketplace. “In just two decades Statkraft has grown from a state-owned, Norwegian-focused power supplier to one of the world’s largest renewable power producers,” according to the article.

Look for more articles and blogs about IT-driven agility — including outsourcing trends and the role of Enterprise Architects in making businesses more nimble — in the coming month on Smart Enterprise Exchange. Then let us know some of the ways your IT department is moving rapidly to meet business needs.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

What do recent hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados and other catastrophes around the world have to do with your role as a CIO? Plenty, when it comes to the traditional task of “keeping the lights on” 24/7. Many still consider the business continuity and disaster recovery aspects of IT as the most basic: Keep servers up and running; commission backup sites for emergencies, and replicate everything. That’s still sound advice, but in an age of cloud computing, virtualization, mobile devices and consumer driven IT, the basics are anything but basic.

In the past, when a disaster occurred, business was at a standstill until backup kicked in. Now, as wireless voice and data networks become more reliable, employees are ready to work remotely from their tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices — but only if the email server, VPN and other critical systems are up and access is available.

For example, many people who lost electricity this past week during the hurricane that hit the eastern U.S. were able to stay online via email and social networks and thanks to battery-powered mobile devices, Internet cafes and local libraries. That put extra pressure on IT departments to do their part: ensure that central servers were up and running so that business could continue. Thanks to backup and e-trading, the New York Stock Exchange opened as usual after the storm, and many in the financial industry — although they were unable to go to their offices — used Web access and Wi-Fi near home to participate in the trading day.

It’s clear that the business losses that result without adequate protection are huge. Based on a survey sponsored late last year by CA Technologies, the average global organization annually loses 545 person hours as a result of IT downtime. The survey, of 2,000 North American and European organizations conducted by Coleman Parkes Research firm, also found that “IT outages are frequent and lengthy — substantially damaging companies’ reputations, staff morale and customer loyalty. Despite this, 56 percent of organizations in North America and 30 percent in Europe don’t have a formal and comprehensive disaster recovery policy.”

A Smart Enterprise Exchange article last year also reported that a startlingly low percentage of businesses are actually adopting virtual backup despite the benefits in business continuity/disaster recovery initiatives.

What are some other options? As we reported, businesses are increasingly considering cloud options to help get data back online when disaster strikes. Several new products and services aimed at the need for virtual backup were introduced this week at VMWorld.

Of course some traditional advice still applies — with an updated twist. For instance, make sure you have remote access to your entire business — phones, services and email — even if you use a cloud provider. And be sure that your files, videoconferencing and all other databases and services are completely, and securely, accessible from a computer with a Web browser.

Mother Nature will continue to have her way, so backup protection is critical. When your mobile workforce logs on, will the enterprise be ready? Share your storm stories with your peers on the Exchange.

Paula  Klein

Editor and Community Manager

While highly publicized consumer technologies are top of mind for most CIOs, there are several other critical trends — many of them directly related to mobile and consumer technologies, but not as glitzy — that they must grapple with concurrently.

Chief among these nitty-gritty IT concerns is the nearly out-of-control proliferation of data. This is the result of the huge amounts of information created in cyberspace. As writer Bob Violino tells us in his feature article this month, data centers have always dealt with big amounts of data but now, it’s not uncommon for organizations of all types — not just scientific, number-crunching businesses such as Geostellar — to handle massive petabytes of digital data created on tiny smartphones and tablet computers.

“Clearly,” he notes, “this data blast is on the minds of IT executives.” Dick Csaplar, Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group, says that “managing the explosion of data is usually cited as the No. 1 pressure” among his clients.

Geostellar has two separate infrastructures — an internal infrastructure with powerful, dedicated servers, and a public cloud-based environment — for managing its computational information. But it’s much tougher for smaller, less-sophisticated enterprises to keep pace.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol in Jefferson   City, Mo., for instance, has seen data volume triple in the past decade, from less than one terabyte to nearly 30 terabytes today. Much of this has come from electronic media such as digital video, audio and photos, according to CIO Clifford Gronauer. And with municipal dollars in short supply, it’s not easy to justify the spending.

This trickle-down may be what Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, meant when he told Smart Enterprise Exchange recently that enterprises are not prepared for the fallout from consumer technologies and the “fundamental change” that they are causing. Infrastructure issues — from standardization, to security, to desktops — need new management strategies and governance, he says.

While there are tremendous opportunities for bold leadership and innovation, adoption of consumer IT in the enterprise will be “a hard transition,” Mann says. Many old ways just won’t work any more, and new spending may be required as well.

Data center staffing also reflects the uncertainty that’s afoot. In his blog about IT employment trends, John Longwell, VP at Computer Economics, says that although data center functions largely seem to have survived the worst of the global recession, “it may be too early to see the full impact of current data center technology shifts on IT employment.” Cloud and SaaS models may mean fewer data centers but more jobs for managers and support personnel, according to his current research. What new positions is your IT department seeking and which are on hold?

Look for more coverage about consumer-driven IT in August as well as commentary on big data trends. You can also read Andi Mann’s blog on consumerization here. As always, share your experiences with your peers on the Exchange.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

CIOs have faced criticism in the last year or so for not embracing social media, consumer IT and cloud platforms in their enterprises. Many experts — some quoted on Smart Enterprise Exchange, in fact — were quick to say that CIOs must adapt more rapidly to the demands of their business users, partners and consumers.

Well, that seems to be changing. While challenges remain, the days of the "CI-No" are waning, based on the results of a new research report published by IDC and CA Technologies.

The white paper, titled, “IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?” finds that: “Consumer adoption of the cloud is here, with cloud-based applications and social networking becoming the norm.” Specifically, 19 percent of those whom IDC defines as worldwide leaders are improving agility, gaining competitive advantage and seeing benefits by scaling up consumer technologies.

Follow the Leaders

IDC defines “leaders” as IT organizations that are self-reportedly proactive in their adoption of public cloud, mobile and social technologies. Fully two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents are well on their way to integrating these technologies into their IT strategy, according to the research. Where does that leave the CIO?

According to Crawford Del Prete, IDC's Chief Research Officer: "Today's CIOs have an opportunity to lead both business and IT innovation as they help their organizations decide how to best exploit the trend toward consumerization and personalization of IT."

Although 15 percent of respondents said that consumer technology is brought into the enterprise with no IT involvement, Del Prete sees opportunities for CIOs “to work closely with business decision makers to create safe, secure, well-managed environments that allow the company to communicate and collaborate with customers and employees anytime, anywhere.”

It’s still IT’s job to “lead the charge in order to ensure that customers are engaged, confidential data is protected, employee productivity is enabled, and the enterprise is getting the greatest return possible on every IT dollar it spends," he says.

The report concludes that we are currently at a “tipping point” where mainstream organizations will continue to aggressively embrace the adoption of consumerized technologies for the enterprise, and others must make their move.

Of course, the study notes both opportunities and challenges for IT departments and “CIOs will continue to face tremendous pressure to satisfy the growing demand for data and services from business users within their organizations”, said Dave Hansen, General Manager, CA Technologies. Yet, they are already responding by offering new services and collaborating with stakeholders, he said.

IDC surveyed 804 IT executives from organizations of more than $1 billion in revenue, and separately surveyed 1,040 IT consumers who use the public cloud, smart mobile devices, and/or social networks for personal or business purposes. Taken together, the reports shed light on the state of consumer-driven IT in several ways. Key among these:

• Leaders conduct more interactions with their customers via smart mobile devices (41% compared with 28% of mainstream organizations).
• Leaders are more proactive when it comes to social media. They are more likely to use social networks to capture detailed insights about their customers (44% compared with 24% of mainstream organizations) and are more concerned about providing a consistent user experience to customers via social networks across all devices or browsers.
• Leaders’ use of cloud services outpaces that of their mainstream counterparts. Thirty-four percent use Platform as a Service (PaaS), 32 percent use Software as a Service, and 27 percent use Infrastructure as a Service.
• Leaders’ use of interactive technologies such as video, Skype and chat is increasing.
• Leaders are more concerned about their ability to guarantee an end-to-end user experience via mobile devices (41%, compared with 27% of the mainstream organizations).
• Leaders use public or private cloud to provide remote personal productivity

Want more information? Read our feature article on collaborative tools and Navigating the Social Business. Interestingly, we found that many times IT and CIOs — even at large organizations such as AARP and JetBlue — are supporting social media strategies that are initiated and managed by other business units or social media “owners.”

Where does your business lie on this spectrum? Does IT lead social media or support the initiatives of business units and stakeholders? Share your experiences on the Exchange.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

I love the Dilbert comic strips because they point out the humorous side of our daily business lives. They can be biting at times, and certainly they exaggerate enormously, but like a lot of humor they are funny because they often ring true.

IT has received its fair share of attention from Scott Adams, the creator of the strip, over the years and that seems to be stepping up recently as the disruption accelerates. In just the past week or two, for example, Dilbert’s world has poked fun at IT monitoring employee Web sites, the proliferation of passwords, and inattentive tech support. It’s good to laugh at these caricatures sometimes and see the light side of the bureaucracies we inadvertently create. At the same time, we should be careful that life doesn’t imitate art in this case — and that IT is solving business problems, not creating new ones.

Oddly, perhaps, I thought of Dilbert when I read a recent white paper published by Accenture’s prestigious Institute for High Performance, which raised a very serious question: Can Enterprise IT Survive the Meteor of Consumer Technology?

It’s an excellent position paper that lays forth several premises about the consumerization of IT — something we have all heard about and are experiencing daily. Fundamentally, Accenture says: “As consumer technologies become ever more powerful and useful, IT leaders face difficult questions about how to adapt. While definitive answers are elusive for now, they must be grappled with today if enterprise IT is not to be pushed completely to the sidelines in the next few years.”

I would include cloud computing along with the consumer technologies that line of businesses are adopting on their own, often circumventing traditional IT purchasing processes.

Accenture is not alone in considering these issues, of course. In a report late last year, McKinsey also concluded that “fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share, but [they] also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.” Smart Enterprise Exchange has featured companies that are implementing these practices, as well, such as Procter & Gamble’s e-commerce efforts, and Schumacher Group’s dive into mobile technologies this year.

Yet Accenture’s paper seems most significant to me because it focuses on the CIO and the IT department transformation that’s taking place. Its analysts pose very provocative and direct questions when they ask: “Is it inevitable that IT will become irrelevant over time? For that matter, is it possible that the CIO has already lost the control he was fighting so hard to keep?”

Smart Enterprise magazine and the Smart Enterprise Exchange community will be taking an in-depth look at these critical IT issues in the coming months. Specifically, how are collaborative and consumer platforms disrupting business and repositioning IT in the enterprise, and how can CIOs get ahead of the curve?

We will speak with CIOs at businesses such as Kaiser Permanente, CorePLUS and JetBlue Airways who are not only embracing consumer technologies in their global enterprises, but are finding ways to use them for competitive advantage, revenue-generation and customer satisfaction — exactly the IT topics that Dilbert and others have criticized in the past. Perhaps it is by seizing the opportunities new platforms represent that IT will not only maintain its relevance, but grow even more important to the enterprise.

In addition, we’ll highlight the results of two in-depth, global research studies that CA Technologies conducted with IDC. The first, with more than 1,000 consumer-tech user responses describes “the booming adoption of mobile and online/cloud technologies for personal and business use and consumers’ expectations of much higher usage going forward.” The second, surveyed more than 800 enterprise IT executives to get their perspective and strategies in light of the rapid pace of consumer tech usage. The key recommendations? Offer support and focus on automation, management and security. [See related article here.]

We also invite you to help lead our online discussion and offer your experiences, opinions and solutions foryour peers.You can begin by taking this poll and also by leaving a comment on this blog. You can also create a discussion thread on the site’s Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Group or on our Linked In group.

Paula  Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange