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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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Feature

Cloud Computing Will See Developers Soar to New Heights

As cloud computing takes over, say experts, the role and attitudes of software developers will change, and choosing programming languages will become "comparable to choosing a religion." (Like it's not already?)

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Analysts say smart developers will rake in cash as vendors war over the best software code — the new black gold of the industry — during the next three decades.

Former CIO for the Queensland Health and Transport departments Paul Summergreene said cloud computing and its manifestations will make code development cheaper and faster.

"The cloud will make developers more agile and allow them to work from home."— Research firm Longhous

"The role and attitudes [of software developers] will change," Summergreene said.

"The cloud allows them to focus on writing code and entrepreneurs in the industry will see it as an opportunity."

He said the best software developers will cut costs, development time and money by hosting their kit in the cloud.

Longhous principle research analyst Sam Higgins said the choice for developers between Java, .Net or dynamic language scripting will become comparable to choosing a religion.

"There will be three choices; the church of Microsoft, Java or the dynamic script crowd which are the atheists in that sense," Higgins said.

"Application lifecycle management will be pushed up into the cloud. Having test-boxes and toolkits in the cloud will make developers more agile to interact with vendors and allow them to work from home because they will push code into the cloud.

"Developers will be faster to market and have cheaper costs because the cloud will wipe off their capital expenditure."

"Vendors will be screwed without good devs"

A software developer at a Sydney-based media company, who requested anonymity, said while cloud computing will cut development costs through bandwidth and scaling, it may increase complexity.

"I do not think a movement to cloud computing will be as revolutionary to software development as suggested. Writing good software is already complicated, time consuming, and costly, and developing for the cloud just introduces another level of complexity that needs to be dealt with," he said.

"While it may cut some of the time they would have otherwise spent managing infrastructure, the bulk will still be spent where it always is — writing code.

"The 'cloud' means I do not have to worry so much about whether the servers my code runs on can scale while a project is in its infancy. I can instead let someone else worry about that while I get in and build something. That is a great brain saver."