CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices

Introduction

As a way of eliciting comments on the most pressing issues facing CIOs, IT managers, and their business clients, I often ask them, “What keeps you up at night?” The range of the typical answers—from data security, to shrinking budgets, to technical complexity, to just keeping basic services running—reflect not strategic but survival-oriented concerns. Some responders indicate their anxiety quite directly, perhaps relieved to be able to tell someone that “I'm not sure where to invest our time and money” or “I don't know what IT's role is in the company” or “I can't quite tell where the industry is going and what my career path should be.” Such stress about IT, especially when articulated by IT professionals, is why Nicholas Carr's ...