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Advice for New CIOs in Search of Operational Excellence

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.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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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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