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 »November 03, 2008 — CIO —
The key to a successful Agile migration is having the change driven from within. The change needs to be driven by key players throughout the company. Once this team is created they will be evangelists to the entire company.
The role of this group, which I call the Agile Core Team, is to learn as much as they can about Agile and use this knowledge to outline a custom Agile methodology for the company. The team will collaborate and reach consensus on new processes, then mentor project teams as they use the Agile techniques.
This core team is powerful and influential for three reasons:
They are not a part of line management. There will be very few members from the management ranks but the majority of the team will be "doers." The people that actually design, build, create, and test the code. This will add to the credibility as the methodology is rolled out to the company. It is not a management initiative being forced upon everyone; it is coming from real people who will be a part of the project teams.
Since the team is composed of doers they actually know the ins and outs of developing in your environment. This is different than when consultants come in suggesting standard practices and disregarding the realities of a specific company. The Agile Core Team has experience with your company and they will use that experience to develop a methodology that knows what to keep and what to discard within the existing practices.
Remember our earlier discussion of awareness, buy-in, and ownership? What better way to create awareness than to have Agile Core Team members come from each functional area. Imagine a member being from quality and going back to the quality team and telling them what is going on with the new methodology, or a developer doing the same with the development team. Having team members from all areas will initialize awareness across the company.
Many companies use outside consulting to get their methodology going. I have seen several companies choose to go with Agile methods such as Scrum, and then have a third party come in and train, design, and deploy the methodology. In my opinion this approach is not as effective as growing the methodology from within. Creating it from within the organization addresses all of the issues with ownership. It is hard to get a team to buy into a process that was forced upon them. Note that there are occasions when an organization is so dysfunctional that it needs to have a methodology forced upon it. This is the exception, not the norm.