What We're Reading

Books, Blogs and the latest research about IT, management and leadership as compiled by the staff of CIO magazine.

By Elana Varon
Thu, February 12, 2009

Tough times call for trusted leadership. Whether you're addressing your staff about budget cuts or answering a question at a board meeting, you don't want to look like you're hiding something. Morgan, a communication coach, tells you how to align what you say with your body language. If gesture and posture are in synch with your words—and you convey your meaning with passion—you'll be a charismatic speaker whose message rings true. And because communication isn't one-sided, there's advice for being a charismatic listener, too. Jossey-Bass, 2009, $27.95

"How to Fix the Innovation Gap"

The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009

Research: In this multimedia presentation, former Cisco CTO Judy Estrin talks about the importance of basic research and learning from failure. Read snippets or watch segments of the interview. See the McKinsey Quarterly

Counterintuitive
By George Colony

Blog: The founder and CEO of Forrester Research seeks to "question prevailing sentiments" via research that affects CIOs, CEOs, CMOs and strategy professionals. blogs.forrester.com/colony

The Power of Less
The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential
By Leo Babauta

Book: Babauta, who writes the blog Zen Habits, interprets the simplicity movement for workaholics. One piece of advice worth considering: Don't write any e-mail more than five sentences long. Hyperion, 2009, $16.95

Bytes from Lev
By Lev Gonick

Blog: The vice president of IT Services and CIO at Case Western Reserve University opines about IT's impact on academia and society. Recent entries address broadband, outsourcing and the economy. blog.case.edu/lev.gonick

"The Next Wave of Green IT"
Deloitte/CFO research services

Research: You've consolidated servers, rationalized applications and bought a ton of energy-efficient hardware. So what's next when it comes to going green? That's the question at the heart of this study, which explores how global Fortune 1000 companies are changing their IT practices to save money, improve performance and shrink their carbon footprint. www.deloitte.com/us/nextwavegreenit

Technologizer
By Harry McCracken

Blog: The former PC World editor in chief covers the consumer tech landscape, from Windows 7 to gaming. technologizer.com

Business/IT Fusion
How to Move Beyond Alignment and Transform IT in Your Organization
By Peter Hinssen

Book: The entrepreneur and business school lecturer offers a manual for becoming a "fusion leader" at the helm of an IT department that is tightly integrated with business operations. The book is divided into readable chunks about topics ranging from alignment models to lateral (the opposite of logical) thinking. Mach Media, 2009, $58

You are here: Business/Management Topics » Careers » Book Review

Most Recent Continuing Education Stories

White Papers »

Top Solutions and Tools to Prevent Devastating Malware

Custom malware frequently goes undetected. According to Forrester Research, the best way to reduce risk of breach is to deploy file integrity monitoring (FIM) tools that provide immediate alerts. This white paper has been brought to you by NetIQ, the leader in solving complex IT challenges.

Identity Governance: The Business Imperatives

This white paper describes the business challenges and opportunities that are driving interest in Identity Governance while discussing considerations your organization should make to help achieve project success.

CA Technology Brief: CA Point of View: Content Aware Identity & Access Management

This paper explores the concept of content-aware IAM, describes the integrated architecture for this new approach, and highlights the benefits that this approach provides.

Measuring the Business Value of CI in the Data Center - IDC-HP White Paper

One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

Accelerate time to application value

For your IT organization to keep pace with the business, you need a new, faster approach to infrastructure deployment-an approach that increases agility and accelerates time to application value. That's HP Converged Systems. Built on Converged Infrastructure, these systems deliver the industry's first portfolio of pre-integrated, tested, and optimized infrastructure solutions for applications running in virtual, cloud, dedicated, or hybrid environments.

Business Value of Blade

The nature of the blade platform makes system management, monitoring and provisioning easy and efficient. Access this resource to learn how blade migration will save your data center time and money while increasing performance.

Webcasts »

Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere

Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Introduction to VMware View 5

VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment

The CIO's View: Time-to-Value Through Automation

IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation

Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter