2013 CIO Playbook - 5 Ways IT Must Work Differently in 2013

By Balakrishna Narasimhan(@bnara75)

Last week, my colleague Nick Hamm (@hammnick), wrote about the 5 things CIOs must do in 2013. These included creating a plan to end-of-life on-premise software, building mobile apps, making IT more of an enabler than a gatekeeper, moving beyond deploying social technologies to arming the business with social insights and using crowdsourcing to scale. All great areas to focus in terms of the “what.”

In today’s world, more and more CIOs are starting to take on broader roles within the business. In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey, 77% of CIOs have significant responsibilities outside IT. This stands in stark contrast to the situation even a few years ago when most CIOs had no responsibilities outside IT. The CIO and IT have an opportunity to have a much broader impact on the business in 2013 and beyond, but taking full advantage will require working quite differently than in the past.

Based on what we’ve observed working with CIOs who are driving broad impact within their businesses, here are 5 ways in which IT teams must operate differently in 2013 to achieve success and drive business change.

2013 CIO Playbook - 5 Things CIOs Must Do This Year

 By Nick Hamm (@hammnick)

 Well, it’s that time of year again.  Time for reflection on the past year, planning for the new year, and resolutions for improvement.  By now you’ve probably read a dozen “Top Tech Trends of 2013” articles (here are Gartner’s and Mashable’s), sprinkled with a retrospective or two about the trends of 2012.  Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, Social Media, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Personal Cloud, In-memory Computing, Consumerization - there is no shortage of buzzwords to distract you from actually making progress and getting things done.  Fortunately, I’m not here to talk to you about the hottest trends of 2013 (you already know all about them, I’m sure) but instead talk about the things you must do in 2013 to keep your business ahead of the curve.

Death to on-premise software!
If your business owns servers, hosts internal software, requires a VPN for folks outside of the office, or has rogue Access databases running mission-critical applications - it’s time to cut it out.  This has to be the year where you replace your on-premise applications or at least have a solid end-of-life plan established for them.  More and more businesses are trying to figure out how to get out of the business of hosting and supporting software, freeing up resources for more innovative value-add ventures, and there are fewer and fewer excuses for running your own data center.  By the end of 2013 if you aren’t fully transitioned to the cloud, or at least operating on a solid transition plan, you’ll be next in line with those businesses ripe for disruption.

Crowdsourcing hits Primetime

By Sal Partovi
(@spartovi)

We’ve been throwing around a term internally for the past month or so in regards to our CloudSpokes community. When the community was started, the focus was to steadily create and curate a stable platform for the community members. Now, as we approach the two-year anniversary of CloudSpokes’ launch, we’re seeing the effects of the community’s maturity in the market. We’ve lovingly nicknamed this phenomenon: Primetime.

Primetime is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, but we didn’t expect it to start this early. It signifies the shift from seeing crowdsourcing as an interesting pet-project, to a dynamic game-changer. It’s the light bulb that goes off shortly after running that first CloudSpokes challenge - the excitement of seeing the results, the empowerment of getting work done, and the eagerness to harness the power of the community to do even more. Primetime could be due to any number of reasons: