Category: Comments & opinions

The city of Hamburg, Germany, a Microsoft CityNext showcase city, is fundamentally transforming the way the city delivers services and interacts with its citizens. Jörn Riedel, CIO of Hamburg, recently shared insights and best practices that contribute to Hamburg’s success. His remarks shed light on the need for pervasive transformation, not just in processes, budgets, and technologies but also in the mindset of employees and city leaders. Success requires buy-in at all levels. Q: What were the top two or three drivers behind starting your city’s e-transformation? JR: As always, one important driver…

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In my previous blogs I have discussed setting up a Self Service Portal and what aService Catalog and Chargeback model look like. Let’s now look at the implementation of an IT operating model to support the Cloud way of delivering IT services. Both EMC and VMware have published articles on transforming IT organizations, processes and skills in preparation to deliver IT as a Service. Both articles are good references for the topic we are discussing here: Capitalizing on Cloud: Preparing people and processes for IT’s organizational challenge Organizing for the Cloud: Providing additional value to the business…

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Guest commentary by Sven Gabor Janszky, trend researcher and Scientific Director of 2b AHEAD ThinkTanks The digital natives of our society, in other words those who have grown up with digital technologies, such as computers, the Internet, cell phones, and MP3 players, are now becoming adults, much like the technologies that have shaped this generation. This digital maturity becomes even more obvious when we take a closer look at Augmented Reality (AR). Additional information on people or buildings within computer games was available long before this term ever became popular.…

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London’s tech startup scene is bigger than just one neighbourhood now – and that’s a very good thing.  It’s suddenly fashionable to say that Silicon Roundabout is on its last legs, so it was with impeccable timing that last week London’s mayor Boris Johnson swung by the neighbourhood last week to talk up the capital’s tech prospects. “We are seeing extraordinary things happen particularly here in London. We’ve got more tech businesses here in London than any other city in Europe,” he said at the event to launch a new office…

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 A pair of mobility experts from 451 Research and Yankee Group talks about what’s in store for the enterprise in terms of mobility trends and developments. To better understand the immediate future of enterprise mobility, CIO Insight recently spoke separately with Chris Hazelton, research director of mobile and wireless technologies at 451 Research, and Chris Marsh, a principal analyst of enterprise mobility at Yankee Group. The pair discussed mobility trends, device vendors, mobile ROI, and related developments for the enterprise in 2014 and beyond. Here is an edited version of the one-on-one…

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Tony Bradley takes a look at Microsoft’s new low-cost option for Office 365, which is aimed at individual users.  Microsoft is shaking things up a bit in the Office 365 lineup. Office 365 Home Premium is a tremendous value, but it’s designed and priced for a family to use. Starting April 1, Microsoft isintroducing Office 365 Personal for individual users who don’t need Office on five different PCs. For $70 per year (or $7 per month), Office 365 Personal will allow a customer to install and use Microsoft Office on one…

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Employees who used to burn the midnight oil at the office now get to do so from the comforts of home, thanks to the proliferation of personal laptops, tablets and smartphones. Getting files to appear on and sync with multiple devices can be challenging, but a little bit of advanced planning can go a long way. Working late into the night in your cubicle to meet a deadline is an uncommon scenario these days. Most employees can use a business-issued laptop or a home PC to complete work assignments from…

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I don’t think it comes as any shock that Federal IT is at a crossroads – straining to keep up with budget cuts, substantial data growth, and user demands.  With high expectations for application development and deployment, users are forced to go outside of traditional IT versus working with their centralized IT function – causing significant inefficiencies government-wide. It’s time for an IT shift – away from a manual IT-centric delivery model (fitting services into a one-size-fits-all box), to an IT-as-a-Service model (identifying enterprise needs and modeling IT to meet…

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It’s a good thing I didn’t know exactly how dangerous a trip I was embarking on, because when I left home in October 2013 to fly to Sudan, I was scared enough. What I had committed to was, quite frankly, the most “impossible” thing I’d ever tried to accomplish. Three months earlier, over dinner, I’d learned about a doctor in Sudan’s Nuba mountains, Dr. Tom Catena, who was treating thousands of people — many of them children — who’d had limbs blown off in the Sudanese government’s bombing raids. By coincidence,…

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