The reality is that most software that is created is ultimately never used, so the key is to avoid making software that isn’t used. Software developers have a better chance of achieving this if the software they are creating has been tested often by end-users and tailored to be as engaging and valuable as possible.
Benjamin Brial
, founder of Cycloid.io, explains that for any large organization, developing a startup approach to innovation is about people, tools and culture. “Only by challenging accepted patterns in these areas can they then start to think about changing their mindsets,” he says in an email interview.
“In a multi-cloud, multi-vendor environment, there isn’t going to be one tool that does it all so the key is to allow teams to use the tools they love and automate as much as possible to remove the repetitive tasks,” Brial says.
Brial says the challenge for organizations trying to adopt a more agile approach is that there are often simply too many silos, not enough skilled people, and a saturated technology market with too many tools.
Kirsten Paust
, senior vice president at Fortive Business System Office, says another best practice is to implement internal programs to create ideas and test and deliver solutions, as these are crucial for balancing agility with quality and scalability.
Faster, iterative software development means getting faster feedback from end-users, instead of spending more time in search of developing the perfect piece of software.
You already know that every day at InformationWeek brings expert insights and advice to help today’s IT leaders identify the best strategies and tools to drive their organizations forward.
That means original reporting from our team of journalists and unique commentary you won’t see anywhere else! But in case you missed them, here are some of our other must-read favorites from this week:
To recognize employees in a truly meaningful way, organizations should look beyond tangible rewards, like money and time off, says
Yvette Cameron
, senior vice president, global product strategy, Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), in an email interview.
"If done correctly, a strong company culture can motivate employees, provide them with a sense of accomplishment, and make them feel valued for their efforts, contributions, and achievements," she explains. "It can also boost engagement and increase productivity and loyalty, resulting in higher retention."
Another option is allowing team members to have a little harmless fun, such as by occasionally encouraging them to insert "Easter eggs" into an application. When business colleagues are invited to participate, the challenge creates a mechanism for fostering enterprise camaraderie.
There's no such thing as too much employee recognition, as long as it's genuine, honest, and deserved, Cameron observes. "You should always try to give recognition in the moment -- when you see the effort, the impact," she advises.
The Potential ROI on Green Data Centers May Rest on CIOs
“Global businesses have reached a sustainability inflection point. Stakeholder expectations and heightened investor scrutiny are putting organizations under pressure to articulate their societal roles more clearly, prioritize environmental and social objectives within their business strategies, and demonstrate progress to stakeholders,” according to the Harvard Business Review.
There is virtually nowhere in the enterprise that can show more impressive and immediately impactful returns as greening the data center. By default, this makes the CIO, who is the de facto leader of the data center, also a de facto leader in corporate sustainability.
Because data center carbon footprints and energy utilization are target areas for sustainability achievements, CIOs have been focusing on these areas for greening their data centers over the past few years.
CIOs have virtualized servers and storage in their on-site data centers. Hardware vendors are making it easier for sites to replace aging equipment with new, more compact equipment that is optimized to consume less energy, and that can also aid in reducing the square footage of data centers.
As the sustainability space evolves and new and more onerous regulations appear, enterprise leaders are recognizing a need to examine business activities more holistically. As a result, double materiality is gaining traction. The reporting method, spurred by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), gauges a company’s overall impact on environmental, social, and governance issues.
“A lot all the oxygen right now is being taken up by double materiality,” observes
Evan Harvey
, audit and assurance managing director for sustainability and ESG Services at Deloitte. “Although things have been moving in the direction of a broader reporting framework, double materiality is being heavily driven by emerging regulations.”
The idea of connecting materiality to sustainability isn’t new. Businesses have traditionally relied on two techniques, financial materiality and impact materiality, to understand their activities and impacts.
As the volume, velocity and variety of data grew -- your insider threat specialist could now not only analyze much bigger cuts of proxy logs, but also correlate it with badge-swipe data -- the sophistication of tooling for data analysis grew alongside and with it. That led to the need for increased sophistication of analysts.
Enter the data scientist. The mighty Microsoft Excel was able to keep up for a while, but it eventually got displaced by SQL GUIs and Python terminals as the source of truth of enterprise data moved out of spreadsheets and into structured databases.
Said another way, the technical sophistication needed to leverage big data in the enterprise brought with it a bifurcation of subject-matter expertise and technical expertise. This was as much a product of suddenly insufficient technical competence among the subject matter experts as it was the lack of walk-up usability of the early data analysis tools.
AI-powered tools today are abstracting away the technical complexity of interacting with huge enterprise warehouses and letting subject matter experts ask and answer questions like they could before the big data era.
Most people might not realize the immense responsibilities and pressure that come with being a data practitioner. Burnout is an ever-present challenge for data teams, and concerningly, most business leaders might not even realize it.
Over the last 10 years, businesses have wised up to the value that data can provide and how critical these insights are. As a result, data practitioners are extremely busy, often tasked with collecting data, analyzing it, visualizing it, producing reports, and presenting the findings to business leaders.
For example, an executive may request insights on website clickthrough rates for a certain product by the end of day, not fully understanding the work that goes on behind the scenes. Is the data easily accessible and already available, or do they have other time-sensitive projects on their plate?
To start, leaders need to genuinely understand what data practitioners are responsible for and how they operate. This means meeting with their teams, talking about the projects they’re working on, and understanding their challenges.
Another way to address the issue is by properly enabling the rest of the organization. By encouraging baseline data literacy within the organization, data teams will have far more bandwidth to focus on higher impact projects.
Rather than dissect just this specific instance with Snowflake, what could and should evolve with cloud security and who needs to take action to drive change?
Do cloud companies hold sole responsibility for keeping bad actors at bay? What role should enterprises play in maintaining security of the resources they entrust to the cloud? Are end-user customers completely at the mercy of security decisions made by either of those groups?
If your company is to survive a growing number of relentless attacks, you had better have eyes everywhere. But no one has that many eyes.
The better strategy is to know your weak points and guard those closely. This webinar offers insights on how to realistically assess your company’s vulnerabilities, including how to prioritize them so that you put the most resources into protecting the vulnerabilities that will likely cost the most if exploited. This webinar is all about developing a custom-fitted strategy.
By attending this broadcast you’ll learn:
How to realistically assess your company's vulnerabilities
How to identify and prioritize risks to information and systems
How to select controls to mitigate and treat identified risks
Methods to improve overall resiliency and cyber posture
Why documenting, reviewing, and regularly updating findings is critical
Data from InformationWeek’s State of ITSM in Financial Services Report shows that there’s a wide range of maturity in how ITSM teams are dealing with the unique challenges of supporting technology stacks in today’s financial vertical.
While application portfolios grow and tickets mount, ITSM teams remain fairly lean. But they’re not necessarily running efficiently, as they’re forced to cope with legacy ITSM platforms, a low level of automation, and inefficient project management capabilities.
Key Findings:
40% of FS ITSM teams support 100 or more applications
13% of these ITSM teams service 400 or more applications
58% of FS firms manage more than 500 tickets per month
40% of FS IT teams struggle with low ITSM maturity
43% of FS IT Service Desks identify manual processing as top issue
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