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Decades of technology and business journalism experience in news, features and website management; reporting, writing, assigning, editing and packaging high-impact stories for both online and print. Familiar or expert with content management systems, blogging, traffic monitoring, photo editing, HTML, social media (Twitter, LinkedIn) and other types of tools. Equally at home with content strategy and hands-on contributions. 10-plus years of management and mentoring experience.
Another plus is to have inspirational speakers, like Sabina Ewing, the global CIO at Abbott Laboratories, or Danielle Brown, CIO at Whirlpool, "people I'd pay to be in the room to hear from," Wagoner says.
Budget planning during uncertain economic times is never CIOs' favorite activity. But the next eighteen months aren't shaping up to be as challenging as some may fear. For the most part, budgets are holding steady or growing in the single digits, with continued investments in security, analytics, and the cloud, among other areas.
CIOs need to try a lot harder these days to find IT talent, particularly when it comes to the most difficult-to-fill positions. Strategies most IT leaders are deploying include offering signing bonuses and more paid time off, being open to hiring people with different types of life experiences, and looking for cultural fit in addition to - or instead of - specific technical know-how.
The most interesting shapeshifter around today isn't in the movies. It's something that you keep tucked away in the server room: your company's mainframe and the COBOL apps it runs. Mainframes, and the overall COBOL environment, are changing to accommodate cloud workloads.
Your grandmother's advice still stands: Don't quit your current job until you have a written offer in hand. Yes, it is a job-seeker's market, with more perks and flexibility on the table than in past years. But it can take months, requiring multiple rounds of interviews with several levels of signoffs, to actually land a new position at a different company.
If you approach the self-evaluation portion of your annual review like many people do, you give it only perfunctory attention - and start thinking about it a half-hour before the review meeting with your boss. That's exactly the wrong way to go about it, experts say.
Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company, is essentially building a human on wheels, says Dmitri Dolgov, the company's co-CEO. The goal: for the company's automated vehicles to see, reason, and drive like a person, only completely safely. Doing so successfully, however, involves multiple types of machine learning (ML) and much other technology.
Seeking out executive coaching can be a great move for ensuring your success as an IT leader. But you need to be prepared to do some difficult work, which can include dealing with negative feedback, engaging in serious introspection, and making changes to how you work and lead.
The pandemic will continue to influence IT budgets in the next 12 months in ways both large and small. Organizations will rely on technology to improve remote work infrastructure, expand digital transformation initiatives, and create or enhance a variety of customer services.
The lineup of toughest IT jobs to fill hasn't changed much since last year, but one new factor might ease the situation in the months to come. Thanks to the work-from-home phenomenon, more people are now available for jobs that were once restricted to a candidates from a specific geographic area.
Luckily, more options exist to help both companies and their individual employees get up to speed on new IT skills quickly. Given the mega-shortages in today's job market, savvy IT leaders are turning to a source of talent they already have: existing employees.
If you believe shadow IT is no big deal, or that it will go away on its own, you'd best stop that magical thinking. The implications for IT operations, and IT in general, are too dire to continue doing nothing about it.
Strategies for recruiting IT talent are changing rapidly, and it's not just about challenges. There are opportunities and benefits as well. Katrina Roberts, senior vice president and CIO of the Global Commercial Services Technology unit at American Express, takes IT recruiting and retaining top talent very seriously.
Hiring IT pros these days calls for new approaches to get closer to candidates and to make your company stand out as the best option. Some CIOs may pine for years gone by, when they posted an IT job, qualified people lined up to take it, and they had their pick of the lot.
In today's market you'll need to find experienced IT people differently than you have in the past. IT leaders and other experts talk about how they do it. Time-tested ways of finding IT newbies still apply, but when it comes to luring experienced software engineers or DevOps leaders, today's hot job market means you need to get creative in who you look for and how you look for them.
Managers hiring DevOps talent are shifting their focus from demanding specific technical skills to specific tools to how a candidate thinks and works. Tools come and go, but it's a candidate's mindset that is most important when hiring for DevOps positions. This is according to Conor Delanbanque, head of DevOps for MThree Consulting.
When the competition for IT job candidates with specialized skills gets tough, look for experience but also be ready to pay a premium and toss some perks into the offer basket. Finding IT staffers with specific skills isn't necessarily difficult -- given the bevvy of tools and techniques available today -- but locating the right specialist can be painful.
Greg Hoffer, vice president of engineering at GlobalScape, says that sometimes customers get so caught up in the cloud's fast-and-easy mantra they don't fully think out the security implications for their data. Don't forget about your data in the rush to take advantage of the cloud's benefits.
Greg Newton, vice president of technology at Asurion, says his company is now producing five, or even more, software releases each week - all thanks to a new development approach. It's not something you see every day in IT: A team member was walking down the hall and got a "giant hug" from an end-user who was thrilled with the new software being used in the call center.
If you want more respect from your business community, spend more time and energy on enterprise architecture (EA) planning. That's the bottom line of a recent survey from industry association CompTIA. Seth Robinson, the organization's senior director of technology planning, says that improved EA planning is required these days because of the increasing number of computing models, from cloud to the Internet of Things and continuous app delivery.
Andi Mann, chief technology officer at Splunk, is a big proponent of 'observability' - knowing what's happening with all systems, services and apps to be able to fix and, eventually, prevent problems. Don't rely on third-party services to keep your customers happy.
Working in the ever-changing security field, in a multinational setting, and dealing with cutbacks in resources driven by world events and geopolitics - now that's a disruptive situation. But it doesn't seem to faze Paul S. Raines, chief information security officer of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which runs economic development, quality of life and energy programs in 177 nations and territories.
ORLANDO -- It's time to rethink a bunch of security truisms, Gartner analysts said at the company's annual Symposium/IT Expo here this week. The security rules companies have relied on for decades are ready for retirement. These include: Prevention is better than cure, humans are the weakest link, and access should be limited to just an employee needs to do his or her job.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Businesses and individuals had better brace themselves for new security realities as society moves away from traditional data sharing equations that have worked well for a couple of decades. To date, users have agreed to give away certain discrete pieces of information -- such as a name or email addresses -- in exchange for something -- a product or a service, for instance.
This week marked the annual Computerworld Premier 100 conference, where IT leaders from around the world gathered in Tucson, Ariz., to hear from peers about innovative projects and be honored for their own work. Several of these leaders took some time to speak with Computerworld editors about their projects and trends affecting the IT industry.
American Airlines was well into a simultaneous revamp of its Passenger Services System (PSS) and Flight Operating System (FOS), its two most mission-critical families of applications, when the airline changed course last January. The plan still calls for a gradual migration off of an inflexible and outdated mainframe architecture in favor of a modern, distributed computing platform.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - IT leaders say they enjoy working with startups, but doing so successfully requires understanding the level of risk, managing that risk and setting reasonable expectations. That was the consensus during a panel discussion among four IT executives held Wednesday at the DEMO show here.
Okay, I'll admit it -- I've been working in the computer industry for, um, well over 20 years, and have covered or attended at least 100 tech-related conferences and confabs. But I had yet to get to a DEMO show in any of its 22 years of existence.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no matter how old the person is.
Forget artificial intelligence; researchers at MIT say they've figured out how to mimic the real deal. The goal is to replicate how the brain learns new tasks. To do that, an MIT group has created a 400-transistor processor that's designed to model a single brain synapse.
As CEO and founder of the Cheezburger Network, a family of 47 comedy sites that's growing by an average of one site per week, Ben Huh is a funster with a serious mission: to make people laugh and make money, too.
ORLANDO -- Some IT leaders are bridging the generation gap in their companies by revamping older applications with snazzier user interfaces and by creating new communication platforms that include the best of all the ages. Baby boomers and later generations of employees prefer different means of communication, the thinking goes.
Business dashboards will be the next big thing in data centers, making the perception of IT more relevant and understandable to the end-user community. This will take both technology and a cultural shift to pull off; here's what you need to know.
Early adopters say IP storage is fairly easy to set up and manage, and performance is fine for many types of applications -- assuming the networks and other components are implemented properly.
BAM helps execs sift seas of changing data. But it also means taking on tough integration issues.
The emerging Model Driven Architecture steers clear of the pitfalls that killed Its predecessor, CASE. Its backers note that emerging MDA tools do work as promised, clearing a key hurdle in the effort to gain developer support.
Most developers already know about XML- based Web services, but the XML tools category is actually much broader than that. It ranges from full-fledged IDEs to point tools that do one thing, like edit and transform many different types of schema, for example.
The most leading-edge users -- those working at genomic research and energy exploration organizations -- are starting to build storage architectures that can be truly shared among multiple users in a distributed network.
Conference hears impassioned stories from those who have battled mental illness
There's no shortage of business and technical details to measure when determining technology's value to the business. The trick is picking the right things to quantify.
Family tries to recover from devastating loss
To help build a great website, IT pros need more than technical smarts. Here's how you and your people can ramp up quickly on the softer skills you'll need for a strong web presence.
Security is often pushed aside as a priority, but here is how a few managers handle it.
A look at one of the earlier generations of mobile computers.
For students from foreign countries, an accounting education has added difficulties.
Most security breaches go unreported as law lags far behind technology