FUD on Enterprise Mashups

Information Week just published a piece on Mashups.  They picked a really in-your-face title for this cover story, labeling it "Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?"  I guess in the world of tech reporting you need to use a little fear to get people to pick your journal out of the stack.  It sure made me stop and read it.   After all, maybe I've been encouraging folks to cook up a massive disaster!  … [Read more...]

CTOs as Interpreter Translators

I believe Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) should be good at IT (Interpreting and Translating). We should interpret and translate between technical experts and their languages and users and their languages. We shouldn't expect every technical person to understand the full elegance of the broad missions we support, but they must grasp the essentials or their tech work will not be appropriately aligned. And non technical leaders and users cannot be … [Read more...]

Integrating Web 2.0 into existing IT infrastructures

James Connolly just wrote a nice piece on the challenges and rewards of Web 2.0 integration (see "Web 2.0 Integration..." ).    James interviewed me for the piece and I found him to not only be very professional but to have a really good knowledge of these new technologies.   He was also skilled at asking the right questions to ensure he captured the essence of what was going on. I think some of what he pulled from me is instructive and I quote what … [Read more...]

Top 10 CTO Principles

Consider a principle as a basic generalization that is accepted as true and that can be used as a basis for reasoning or conduct. I believe there are basic generalizations accepted by all leading CTOs and therefore these CTO principles can be studied and learned. I have my own list that I've applied at several organizations and will expand on them in future posts.  But my real point here is to underscore that by study of the principles of CTOs we can … [Read more...]