Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »February 08, 2008 — InfoWorld —
Vista adoption in business has been slow (and at this writing more than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's petition asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available indefinitely). Nonetheless, thousands of businesses worldwide have already adopted Vista.
Some have made the move because they see real benefit to changes in the OS, especially for deployment management and security protection. Others see Vista as inevitable and would rather switch sooner than later. In either case, early adopters offer lessons on how to get the most from Vista and how to deploy with minimal disruption.
Such insight can only help the vast majority of businesses that are holding off on Vista. "The market has been slower to adopt Vista than lots of folks expected," notes Jeff Dimock, vice president of Microsoft solutions at the IT consultancy Dimension Data Americas. Gartner has advised its clients to wait until early 2009, to give Microsoft time to issue a couple of service packs and for third-party providers to update their applications and drivers, notes Michael Silver, a research vice president.
Both Dimock and Silver recommend that IT shops avoid installing Vista onto existing PCs unless they are less than a year old and instead pair a Vista upgrade with a hardware refresh. "We encourage customers to integrate these two cycles," Dimock says. The reasons are to confine the user and IT disruption and to avoid the performance and compatibility issues that older hardware can have with Vista.
When the time is right to move to Vista, Dimock expects IT organizations will like the tighter security, despite the fact it requires a change in both user behavior (to acknowledge the User Account Control warnings when installing potentially harmful applications) and an update in applications (to run in user mode rather than administrator mode). "It's a lot more robust security model, but it does come at a price," he says.
Dimock also sees the adoption of Vista as a handy excuse to clean out old apps from the IT portfolio, as many will no longer be fully compatible. "It is an ideal time to do that," he says.
For IT, perhaps the other big advantage is Vista's ability to create a unified installation image that selectively loads the needed drivers and applications onto users' computers -- saving IT from having to manage lots of install images as with XP or to rely on the PC-model-specific OEM installations whose "bloatware" then needs to be removed from each system.