From the desk (and BlackBerry) of Keith Parnell

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In an article for CIO.com, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that employees will force companies to move to Windows 7.

He said even though Windows XP is hugely popular, the ‘why old technology’ questions will force IT upgrades and roll outs to include Windows 7.

What do you think? Will companies embrace Windows 7 that easily and quickly?

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/479102/Ballmer_Enterprise_XP_Holdouts_Will_Get_Hell_from_Consumers

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

CIO UK picked up on a survey conducted by Harvey Nash asking Chief Information Officers and IT Executives what they thought about themselves and their colleagues having a strong personal brand.

67% of CIOs and IT execs believe having a strong personal brand is very important to the IT division. Although most say they are falling short on developing their personal brand, 65% of respondents say they are getting out and visiting within their office so their face and views become well-known.

CIO UK says, “CIOs told us that they believe the most important asset from having a strong brand is board level influence, followed by their brand giving the IT department a figurehead that can be identified with.”

How is your IT Chief’s Personal Brand?

Read the full CIO UK article here.

Need some guidance for doing your job better? CIO Insight says, check out these 15 new and upcoming books for insight into leadership, management and technology.

IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain
By Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross
The heads of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research offer a roadmap for business executives to better understand IT strategy and investments.

Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity
By Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan
McGrath, a Columbia management professor, and MacMillan, a Wharton professor, team up to deliver a treatise on delivering growth while mitigating risks

What Would Google Do?
By Jeff Jarvis
The BuzzMachine.com blogger uses Google to describe the new worldview of the Internet, with insights into how businesses must involve to succeed in it.

The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know About Information Technology
By Adam Kowala
A blueprint for CIOs for improving their organization’s productivity while reducing operating costs, and urges business executives to emulate their CIOs.

Strategic Innovation: New Game Strategies for Competitive Advantage
By Allan Afuah
The Michigan strategy professor offers reviews of traditional innovation strategies and case studies along with a framework for evaluating innovation opportunities.

How to Manage in a Flat World: 10 Strategies to Get Connected to Your Team Wherever
By Philip Whiteley and Susan Bloch
Whiteley, a columnist, teams with Bloch, a leadership coach, use interviews and surveys to explain how business leaders can make the most of their multinational teams.

Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It from Happening to You
By Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell
The business professors explore why talented managers make the wrong decisions, and deconstructs those decision-making models to help managers avoid them.

Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y
By Bruce Tulgan
In a time where recruiting and retaining top talent trumps all, this book debunks myths about the Millennial generation and explains their true value.

Transnational Leadership Development: Preparing the Next Generation for the Borderless Business World
By Beth Fisher-Yoshida and Kathy D. Geller
Two consultants offer a guide for understanding the motivations of workers from different geographies and backgrounds to capitalize on global growth.

The Innovation Zone: How Great Companies Re-Innovate for Amazing Success
By Thomas M. Koulopoulos
The president of Delphi Group uses cases from prominent companies to illustrate the power of effective innovation strategies.

Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership
By Steve Farber
A look at three key ways leaders can develop their own competencies, both during office hours and in their personal lives.

Getting China and India Right: Strategies for Leveraging the World’s Fastest Growing Economies For Global Advantage
By Anil K. Gupta & Haiyan Wang
Two business strategists examine the realities of globalization and how big-name companies like GE, IBM and Accenture have grappled with them.

Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign
By Barry Libert and Rick Faulk
A quick look at how personality, technology and marketing helped Obama reach the White House, with lessons for business executives on how to mimic those strategies.

The Catalyst: You Can Crack the Code and Become an Extraordinary Growth Leader
By Jeanne Liedtka, Robert Rosen and Robert Wiltbank
The authors use a groundbreaking, three-year study to identify 50 successful leaders and illustrate the skills that led to their success.

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
By Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten
Two book-retailing executives put into context the best business tomes and explain the lessons leaders can take from them today.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about whether Chief Information Officers should have experienced technology, business or both backgrounds.

I made a statement that our CIO in 2009 must be the go-to person at the C-level conference table for social media topics. It went something like this -

… the role of the CIO, in 2009 we will be adding a specific requirement that satisfies marketing initiative requirements. The CIO must understand and must support social media. Period.

To further elaborate, I believe it is the CIO’s responsibility to be all over social networks for their company, to be knowledgeable in the environment and understand them architecturally. This means experience. This means active participation.

The CIO must know, in enough detail, the relationship between architecture, strategy and innovation. And must be able to establish goals for the IT division that will satisfy marketing on social platforms like JASEzone.

Over the course of my career, I’ve been deeply engaged in many different concepts, projects, visions and environments within the IT community. Each of them is unique in its purpose, direction and outcome. And each has a specific aim at definitive accomplishments.

Sometimes IT is the sole foot soldier and sometimes IT rides the horse of another organizational department such as marketing, accounting or human resources. Regardless of the team’s involvement, IT functions daily under a certain (sometimes unspoken) mission or creed.

As I see it, here is the mission or operational purpose of IT teams:

1. To automate labor intensive tasks to assist in making employees more productive and efficient.
2. To automate processes with a goal of reducing overhead expenses.
3. To improve the productivity of employees in order to achieve better results.
4. To assist management in making better decisions by providing tools to efficiently gather, organize, merge and report information.
5. To improve the profitability of the IT technical division, the IT business division and the organization as a whole.

If a project of any IT team does not or cannot succeed in accomplishing these mission statements, the project should be rethought as far back as budgetary placement or visionary brainstorm sessions.

Essentially, IT should be the smart support department of the organization.

Every advance or innovation seems to come with both benefits and risks, improvements and (often unexpected) complications. Whether you chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences, hype, hubris, passivity, karma or whatever cosmic force, the best-intentioned and most-benign-seeming tech initiatives and developments frequently seem to backfire in some way.

Although I have been a part of many successful implementations, everyone knows about ventures that went awry. The point is not that innovation and transformation should be avoided, but rather that an understanding of the potential risks needs to go beyond technical analysis and expense tracking. The human element often sabotages the best-laid plans.

My guess is that the next big occurrence of these kinds of contradictions will come out of our well-planned and well-executed efforts to adopt and leverage the catch-all technology known as web 2.0 — wikis, blogs, portals and other Web-based services based on user participation. With so much focus on customer experience, loyalty and retention - not to mention efforts to keep up with demographic change and the implications of the youth market in terms of both customers and employees - we should expect to see more really innovative web 2.0-related initiatives coming soon.