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Business intelligence strategy guide

Enterprises increasingly are turning to business intelligence (BI) technology to analyze the data they have created and stored. The quantity of that data can be so large that sometimes it's referred to as Big Data.

What impels companies to turn to BI technology? What kinds of data do they store, and what do they hope to learn from it? How is BI itself being adapted to new kinds of data, and what new forms do those adaptations take? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this business intelligence management and strategy guide for CIOs.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

CIO Innovators profiles

The SearchCIO.com CIO Innovator Profile Series highlights how CIOs use technology to meet both IT and business leadership objectives. The CIO has become the key in aligning both sides of the organization, creating a socially responsible and efficient IT infrastructure.

Each of these leaders has used technology in an innovative way, managed technology in a way that helped change the business, or developed technology that created new business and profits for the company. Read more about today's -- and tomorrow's -- IT leaders in the profiles below. If you know an innovative CIO who should be featured here, drop me a line at spetersen@techtarget.com.

Enterprise CIO Decisions Ezine Archive

Enterprise CIO Decisions Ezine offers IT and business strategies and insights on the latest technologies. Catch up on past issues focused on spending, automation, business continuity, disaster recovery and more.

Enterprise innovation management strategy guide

In today's economic environment, enterprises have learned that innovation, though risky, is one of the surest paths to growth. Innovation is a learning process by which organizations discover and implement new ways to use their existing technology. By innovating, enterprises can operate more efficiently and better align their IT and business goals.

CIOs and other top IT executives play a vital role in creating enterprise innovation programs that deliver both short- and long-term benefits. Over time, as innovation becomes “business as usual," it's necessary to refresh and revitalize the innovation process, and be prepared to deal with the organizational obstacles that accompany it.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Enterprise virtualization guide for CIOs

Virtualization isn't a technology you can exactly wrap your hands around. Nevertheless, enterprises are turning to virtualization as a way to wring the most from their software dollars and to secure and expand the reach of their systems.

This enterprise virtualization guide for CIOs covers the management and monitoring of virtualized systems, the virtual desktop and the vital role of virtualization in disaster recovery and business continuity.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com's CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Guide to managing business processes

Infrastructure activities that help organizations achieve specific goals are called business processes, and a refined strategy for managing business processes can make them more effective, efficient and adaptable -- thus propelling organizational success.

But which factors contribute to an IT department’s approach to business process management (BPM), and which best practices and techniques should be used? New software development methods, especially frameworks such as Agile and lean, are often integral to successful BPM efforts, and innovation -- the lifeblood of organizational growth -- is closely linked as well. Learn more about managing business processes in this tutorial.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com's CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Guide to CIO roles and responsibilities

As with most dictionary definitions, this one for chief information officer (CIO) is pretty laconic: "A job title commonly given to the person in an enterprise responsible for the information technology and computer systems that support enterprise goals." Today, this description hardly begins to cover the complexity of the enterprise CIO's roles and responsibilities. The term CIO dates from the era of the mainframe, before client/server, the Internet or any of the communications capabilities and devices that are now considered a given in the consumer market and have found their way into the enterprise. Every one of these new technical capabilities and devices has become the responsibility of the CIO, altering and expanding CIO roles and responsibilities.

This guide provides an overview of the current status of enterprise CIOs' roles and responsibilities, IT salaries, technology budgets and spending, and IT staff development.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

2012 Global IT Forecast

TechTarget asked 2,642 IT professionals and business analysts around the world for their 2012 IT forecasts. The direction of IT budgets and emerging technologies may surprise you as IT struggles to align itself with businesses recovering from a global recession. What's on the horizon for Windows 7 migration? Server virtualization? Cloud computing? Business tablets? The data tells the story. Our editorial teams from the U.S., Europe and India drilled down into the survey results and wrote a series of information technology market analysis articles to help you see what’s hot – and where.

Shared services strategy guide for enterprise CIOs

A shared services strategy refers to the allocation of responsibility for technology resources among groups or departments within an organization, allowing them to share these resources, rather than having dedicated resources for each business group. When a service is shared, in many cases, each business group that uses a service contributes to its cost and maintenance in a usage-based model.

Because cloud computing is the delivery of shared network resources, software and corporate information as a service over a network -- typically, the Internet -- it is a close relative of shared services. In fact, cloud computing contributed to the idea of sharing services beyond network resources and applications.

This month's CIO Briefing will discuss the role of the CIO in shared services, the different models for delivering these services, the relationship of shared services to virtualization and cloud computing, and the costs associated with a shared services strategy.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

CIO compensation and careers survey 2011-2012

Does your CIO compensation stack up to the pay of your peers? Are you happy with your career path, or do you think job satisfaction awaits you elsewhere? Do you ever wonder how other enterprise CIOs confront these concerns?

The CIO/IT Strategy Media Group IT salary and career survey was conducted among readers of SearchCIO.com and SearchCIO-Midmarket.com in November, gathering more than 1,700 responses from IT executives and roles globally across 32 industries. All 50 U.S. states were represented. The survey defined a senior IT executive as a respondent with a title of vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president, CIO, chief technology officer, or chief information security officer. It defined as midlevel IT executives those who identified themselves as being at the director level.

In this special report, based on the results of the survey, learn how IT executives feel about CIO compensation, their role within the organization and more.

BI strategies evolve for big data analysis needs

It might have seemed like just another buzzword, but before 2011 was out, the need to mine big data was topping many a CIO agenda, upending long-established practices for data management. By the time the calendar turned to 2012, all eyes were on big data analysis -- how to make sense of this wealth of information to maintain, enhance and expand the business.

Accordingly, attention also turned to business intelligence (BI). Based on a survey of CIOs at 178 organizations worldwide, the CIO Executive Board of Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Executive Board Co. (CEB) found that CIO spending plans for 2012 favor BI projects. CEB Executive Board Director Shvetank Shah called this BI focus a "mega-trend" -- IT focusing on information-related projects.

"[T]he real action right now is in business intelligence, as well as [in] collaboration and anything at the customer interface -- from either understanding the customers' patterns, performing customer service or empowering salespeople through IT to be better at their sales jobs," Shah said. "All of these line up with information and analytics. What remains to be done for IT, increasingly, are those information projects, not the process projects."

Whatever your industry, your company's ability to manage and mine large data sets will be critical to its success going forward.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Karen Goulart, Features Writer.

Enterprise business intelligence tutorial

Enterprise business intelligence (BI) applications and technologies are helping companies make targeted and appropriate decisions at a time when good business judgment can make or break an organization. BI applications are highly varied and adaptable: They can target enterprise missions broadly or meet a specific purpose, can be built for enterprise-wide use or for a single department and might be created by an executive decree or be driven by user demand.

CIOs at any point in the BI spectrum can bolster their strategy with this enterprise business intelligence tutorial, which provides advice for both new and experienced users on ramping up BI initiatives, discusses how BI success can be measured and explores what lies ahead for these technologies.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com's CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Strategic outsourcing and vendor management guide

Strategic outsourcing has become commonplace in IT shops during the past 20 years, due to the promises of cost savings and IT efficiency. Moreover, enterprises are establishing strategies centered around IT vendor management best practices to ensure that their balance of offshoring, onshoring, insourcing, rightsourcing -- you name it, they've tried it -- properly suits organizational goals.

The responsibility for the outcome of the strategic outsourcing of IT usually lies with the organization's CIO, who must decide which IT functions can be safely outsourced, and then establishes and oversees the IT vendor management best practices that will ensure that the relationship works.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Need for speed in project management methodologies

Just a few short years ago, it was cited as a coming trend: Regardless of company size, IT project management methodologies need to be smaller and faster. That trend is now upon us. Rather than plotting a big project from start to finish before they pull the trigger, CIOs must be comfortable with shorter projects, staying focused on the customer to learn to manage unknowns until they are known.

Project management remains a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes from start to finish. What's different today is that the five stages of IT project management methodologies (as defined by the Project Management Institute) -- initiation, planning, executing, controlling and closing -- need to be applied to smaller projects. And these projects have to make a difference for the enterprise quickly (but still safely in terms of risk mitigation), because speed is becoming one of the most competitive weapons companies have. With this in mind, CIOs are adapting agile methodologies for projects companywide and considering cloud-based project collaboration tools.

Enterprise CIO project management resources guide

There is a vast number of project management resources floating around the enterprise today, but which approach is right for your organization? Choose the wrong project management methodology, and you run the risk of missed deadlines, cost overruns and a disgruntled C-suite. Choose the right path, and projects should run smoothly, with a minimal number of holdups, start-overs or shoulda-beens.

In this guide, examine the range of project management resources and options for your organization, including Agile project management, project and portfolio management (PPM) and business process management (BPM). Check out our related project management vocabulary and videos, and be sure to take our enterprise project management quiz.

This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

FAQ: Info-on-demand era calls for mobile strategy

Today's CIOs are being called upon to juggle more technologies than ever before. Knowing where and how to best focus their energies and resources is critical. With the rising demand from both internal and external consumers for access to information anytime, anywhere and on any device, mobility has edged its way to the top of many a CIO agenda. With this prominence comes a need for IT leaders to build a strong mobile strategy.

According to Niel Nickolaisen, CIO at Western Governors University in Salt Lake City, when IT executives are faced with changes in technology, business rules, market conditions and so forth, one of the best options is to be a leader: "In my experience, we make ourselves obsolete if we deny change. If we resist change, we get fired. If we embrace change, we keep our jobs. If we lead change, however, we prosper, IT prospers and the organization thinks we are geniuses!"

Leadership is especially important in the face of megatrends, Nickolaisen says, and CIOs are now in the early stages of a megatrend that creates an incredible opportunity: mobility. This megatrend includes advances in wireless technology, the consumerization of IT and end-point devices that are getting smarter and smaller.

Nickolaisen suggests the mobility megatrend will be as disruptive and all-encompassing as the Internet revolution was 15 years ago. However, he notes, mobility is different from the Internet revolution in one critical way: The Internet drove changes to the technology that connected IT leaders with customers and partners. The wireless-consumerization-smart-and-small-device mobility megatrend, in contrast, opens the door to a dramatic change for the workforce. Confronting these changes with a mobile strategy in place is paramount.