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 »July 01, 2003 — CIO —
Montserrat is one of the many islands sprinkled among the Caribbean West Indies. In just 39 square miles, it boasts mountains, rain forests, beaches and groves of bananas, mangoes and coconuts. The air temperature rarely dips below 78 degrees and neither does the water.
In short, Montserrat is paradise. Or it would be but for the Soufriere Hills volcano, which erupted for the first time in July 1995 and hasn’t stopped since.
Soufriere Hills has rendered nearly two-thirds of the island—an area now called the Exclusion Zone—uninhabitable. Since 1995, the island’s population has fallen from 11,000 to 4,000. The volcano has buried Plymouth, the former capital. It killed 20 people in one violent belch in 1997. It has suffocated the economy, once driven by tourism and rock stars like Sting, the Stones and Paul McCartney, who partied and recorded music there at Air Studios, the recording facility once owned by the Beatles’ former producer George Martin but now buried by the volcano.
This dichotomy—Eden on one side of the island, the fires of Hell on the other—makes Montserrat a perfect laboratory for risk analysis. Just as much of Montserrat is buried in ash, it’s also buried in probabilities. Scientists know, for example, that there’s only a 3 percent chance that Soufriere Hills will stop erupting in the next six months. They also know there’s a 10 percent chance of injury from the volcano at the border of the Exclusion Zone, and they can draw an imaginary line across the island where the threat from the volcano equals the threat from hurricanes and earthquakes.
"Thirty years ago, you needed the biggest computer in the world to do the statistical risk analysis," says Willy Aspinall, who helped develop these figures in the shadow of Soufriere Hills. "Now all you need is a laptop and a spreadsheet." He says the risk calculations get better and more textured all the time. He uses Monte Carlo risk analysis simulation software and spreadsheets to quantify the risk levels that help decision-makers minimize the volcano’s threat to people’s lives.
If this type of risk analysis is good enough for Aspinall, it ought to be good enough for CIOs, especially now that they’re working in an economic environment looming as ominously over their businesses as Soufriere Hills looms over Montserrat. For the most part, though, CIOs have not adopted statistical analysis tools to analyze and mitigate risk for software project management.
This is why they should.