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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

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.

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5 Things I've Learned

Five Things Twitter's CEO Has Learned About What You Are Doing

How Jack Dorsey figured out that short is sweet, flexibility is essential and applications should work so that people don't have to be at their computers all day long.

1. Don't be at your computer all the time.

Instant messaging has always been interesting to me, particularly the away messages you leave for friends. People would leave away messages such as "I'm eating lunch" or "I'm about to go to a movie" but this was limiting because you were always bound to your computer.

I wanted to find some way to get away from that. You should be out doing something and still be able to update your friends and get a sense of what they're doing. Six years ago, the technology just wasn't there to do that. Now, with short message service (SMS), and mobile phones, we can.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

2. The merits of brevity

It's intimidating to figure out what to put on a wall-size canvas. It's much easier to approach a postcard. You can be a little bit more off-the-cuff, more in the moment. It's this quality that makes Twitter different from e-mail or blogs. With e-mail and blogs, you have all this structure, like a subject line. Then, you have this huge area in which to write. All that can be intimidating, especially when you just want to get one message across.

3. Good technology has a narrow focus.

I've always loved systems that do one thing and do it extremely well. The Unix operating system is structured around this philosophy. You have a collection of tiny little tools. They do just one thing, and they do it well. You put these tools together and suddenly, you have an operating system. You have an environment with which you can work. Twitter and tools like it share the same philosophy. If you constrain a technology enough, if you really get it down to an essence, then the potential is unlimited.