A CIO on his or her first day of a job faces daunting challenges, notably how to deliver business value and to drive digital transformational change throughout the enterprise. It can be a lonely proposition, without a well-defined path to success. But Executive Vice President of Pink Elephant George Spalding offers some excellent advice for new CIOs on how to do it in his blog post, The strategic CIO’s first day: In search of IT operational excellence, on SearchCIO.com.
CIOs face daunting challenges, notably how to deliver business value and to drive digital transformational change throughout the enterprise. but here is some some excellent advice for new CIOS on how to do it.
Spalding lays out a too-common scenario in which a new CIO tries to give a presentation to members of an enterprise’s C-Suite, only to have it hijacked by complaints about the help desk, network outages, and other issues. That’s because the company has been burned in the past by IT, and simply don’t trust IT anymore or the person who runs it.
To change that, Spalding says CIOs need to focus on one thing and one thing alone: IT operational excellence. There are a lot of components to that, including fixing network outages, and having the service desk focus on first-call resolution for individuals, “while implementing problem management in the background to eliminate the repeat incidents, which increases availability and reduces downtime.”
While doing all that, though, he also says a CIO needs to mobilize the enterprise, and convert or transform “every system in the enterprise to a mobile-ready environment should keep the millennial consumers from fleeing to the startups.”
CIOs need to mobilize the enterprise, and convert or transform “every system in the enterprise to a mobile-ready environment should keep the millennial consumers from fleeing to the startups.”
We thoroughly agree. And in order to do what Spalding sets out, you’ll need digital transformational technology. That’s where Alpha Anywhere comes in. CIOs have used it to transform their businesses, speed up app development and reap big productivity and financial benefits. You don’t need to just take our word for it — listen to what one CIOs has to say. Tim Bochard, Director of Information Technology for Glacier Water Services, the world’s leader in water vending, says, “Alpha Anywhere is a force multiplier. It lets your development team produce modern business apps much faster than they could otherwise, and deliver much more value to the enterprise.”
The company owns and operates more than 24,000 water and ice vending machines across North America. With Alpha Anywhere, Glacier’s IT team designed, developed, debugged, and deployed a new custom workflow application in a mere six months—about five to 10 times faster than was possible had they used Microsoft Access, Visual Studio, or an alternate Rapid Application Development (RAD) platform. Alpha Anywhere’s complete prototype-to-production IDE let Glacier Water rapidly create an enterprise-class app with one code base that can met all front-end to back-end requirements, including support for tablets, smartphones, laptops, and desktops, and SQL Server.
A case study about Glacier Water Services has more details. And check out my blog post, How CIOs Can Create Successful Digital Workplaces for more information about how CIOs can transform their enterprises for digital innovation.
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