Posted by Microsoft Subnet editor Julie Bort (and here’s my offtopic warning. This post is not particularly about Microsoft): I’m at the Colorado IT Symposium in Denver today where I will be moderating an afternoon session composed of a panel of CIOs. In attendance is about 200 technology professionals gathering together to discuss such diverse topics as security threats, “virtualizing” your IT staff and the best way to manage consultants.
Want to post a few observations from the field. Social networking in all of its forms is a giant topic of casual discussion. Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, YouTube are strange problems for IT professionals. On the one hand, everyone uses them. On the other hand, they create odd governance situations for companies. A CIO from a company that manufacturers alcoholic beverages explained the particular dilemma. Marketing folks need to use Twitter, YouTube and the like because the company’s ideal customer demographic are heavy users of this technology. On the other hand, the company must also meet legal/regulatory requirements not to be marketing to underage kids. What to do? One solution was to roll out Yammer, a private Twitter (and equally free) so that employees could microblog with one another and not the public. But he’s also on the prowl for analysis tools that will help marketing folks monitor references to its beverages made on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like.
Managing IT resources on shrinking budgets is another hot topic. A CIO of one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains discussed his companies strategy to try and balance local, distributed IT staff and centralized need. IT people report to individual business units, but he keeps a central repository of skills and plays matchmaker between units. Individual IT folks might spend a small fraction of their time working on a project for another business unit, even though that second unit doesn’t pay their salary. It’s a complicated political balancing act but it allows him to have half the full-time IT employees than is typical for similar-sized companies (1.5% IT staff to headcount, compared to the typical 2.8 to 4.2%).
Now … onto the panel discussion. I’ll update this blog post with more interesting thoughts from that discussion.
