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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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What CIOs Can Learn From Hollywood

The movie industry's history of dissing new technology offers lessons for anyone trying to introduce innovation

 

October 15, 2008CIO

The movie industry is full of prima donnas, overpaid incompetents and people who talk endlessly just for the pure pleasure of it. Nothing like your industry, is it?

Hollywood, with its glittery red carpet premieres, may not seem to have much in common with banking, health care or auto manufacturing. But I believe it shares a key trait with every large, well-established industry:

how it responds to new business models and technologies.

For more than a century, every time an important innovation knocked on Hollywood's door, the industry treated it like a homely auditioner—giving it the cold shoulder and trying to show it the door. The movie industry ignored or tried to stave off sound, color, television, home video, computer animation, and digital editing and cinematography before realizing that each revolution would help grow the business, ensure its cultural relevance and expand the creative possibilities.

New ideas always threaten the status quo. Businesspeople worry how they'll affect today's predictable revenue streams. Everyone else worries about how they'll affect their standing in the organization: "Will I be less of an expert when this new tool or technology takes over?"

When innovations arrive in an industry, they split it into three groups: innovators, preservationists and sideline-sitters. The innovators develop, support and find applications for these new ideas. Preservationists seek to preserve the status quo, often battling the innovators. The sideline-sitters simply wait to see how things will pan out.

CIOs, in my experience, can find themselves in all these roles. Sometimes a CIO is an advocate for a new technology or business model; sometimes she's on the sidelines or campaigning to preserve the status quo. The CIO might lead the charge on storage virtualization, watch a standards battle play out or explain to sales why storing company data on a new Web-based application is a bad idea.

Here are the behind-the-scenes stories of three movies that marked turning points in Hollywood's technological history. Each offers lessons for anyone trying to identify or introduce powerful new innovations.

Take one: Embrace risk.

Most cinephiles remember The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, as the 1927 movie that brought synchronized sound to the silver screen. Few recall that others, including Thomas Edison, tried earlier to link the pictures on screen with a sound track. But the technology wasn't good enough—the audio wasn't clear, or it veered out of sync—so most people concluded that movies were meant to be silent forever.

 
 
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