The number one reason you’re not taking action and what you can do about it
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- Written by Vicki Bradley
Fear is normal and something we all experience, but if we don’t stand up to fearful thoughts on repeat, we become paralyzed by fear. In this article, I want to talk about what fear is, why it stops us from taking action—especially at work—and how to flip fear on its head so we can move forward instead of feeling stuck.
Mission Security
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- Written by Nasheen Liu
Q & A with Bryan Rutledge, Regional Vice President and Canadian Country Manager, McAfee
I recently had the opportunity to participate at MPOWER, McAfee’s annual cybersecurity summit where several major announcements were made. I was looking forward to meeting with Bryan Rutledge, McAfee Canada’s General Manager, to understand a Canadian perspective.
Leap of faith: Changing careers to win the battle against cyber threats
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- Written by Jeff Ishii
At MPOWER 2019, McAfee’s annual cybersecurity summit, I had the opportunity to interview Bill Woods, Senior Director Security Intelligence. His career has taken him from assault pilot, to FBI Special Agent in Charge, and finally to leading McAfee’s world-wide security operations. Bill’s journey is a case-study into how seemingly unconnected professions can lead to extraordinary results for organizations struggling with the onslaught of cyber threats.
Improve Customer Outcomes Through IT Business Partnering
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- Written by Ernest Solomon
The role of IT Business Partner is increasingly vital to the success of an organization. In today’s technology delivery model, we generally agree that the Business is the driver to achieve a defined outcome of a customer centric model and IT becomes the enabler.
Solving the challenges of an aging demographic
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- Written by Ted Maulucci
Everyone has a method through which they solve problems best. Some people can argue their way out of anything, some people can solve problems better on paper, some people work better in a team and some work better alone. Everyone has a method of problem solving that comes naturally to them, and mine is to build things.
Why building trust is essential for leaders
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- Written by Vicki Bradley
Trust is extremely important because being trusting and trustworthy helps you build meaningful relationships and perform better at work (and home). Today, I want to talk about what trust is, what happens with and without it and how to increase the amount of trust in your business (and life).
Strategic Insights Report: How Digital is Changing the Face of Canadian Manufacturing
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- Written by The IT Media Group
The manufacturing world is putting on a new face, and the makeover it is receiving from powerful new technologies has the potential to help Canada reaffirm its position as one of the world’s leading manufacturing nations and win back work that has migrated to low-cost countries.
Strategic Insights Report: Digital's Role in Reshaping Canadian Oil and Gas
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- Written by The IT Media Group
The challenge for CIOs is that IT has long been the neglected child of the Canadian oil and gas industry, not much understood or valued by senior management and left out in the cold with respect to corporate strategy. Now CIOs must find a way of making their voices heard in order to ensure that their companies take the right steps along their digital journey, and they must change the corporate perception of IT from cost centre to cost reducer and revenue generator.
How to Make IT the New Cool
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- Written by Nasheen Liu
Q & A with Renée McKaskle, CIO of Hitachi Vantara
I had the opportunity to interview Renée McKaskle, CIO of Hitachi Vantara, at HitachiNEXT, the company’s global customer and partner conference. Renée joined Hitachi three years ago and has led her organization through a successful transformation by leveraging the power of data. I was curious about her journey, best practices she could offer to fellow CIOs, and advice she might provide to encourage more women to reach for the stars.
Becoming a Data-driven CIO
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- Written by Nasheen Liu
Q & A with Shawn Rosemarin, SVP & CTO, Global Field and Industry, Hitachi Vantara
I first met Shawn Rosemarin in 2014 at the Hitachi Product Launch World Tour where I was the emcee for its Toronto stop. At the time, Shawn was the CTO of VMware Canada, a Hitachi partner, and spoke about thought leadership and strategy. Shawn joined Hitachi in 2016 with global mandates for solutioning, technical strategy, and enterprise architecture. I had the opportunity to catch up with him recently at HitachiNEXT, the company’s global customer and partner conference. During an executive briefing, I picked his brain about industry trends, practical strategies, frameworks, and steps CIOs need to take in order to monetize their data assets. Shawn also shared what’s important for building talent.
Managing Radical Technological Change
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- Written by Peter Carr
Information technology influenced disruption is impacting most organizations today. It is helping to accelerate globalization, intensify competition and transform markets, business models, ecosystems, products, services and processes. Most leaders understand that rapid advances in technological capabilities provide revolutionary organizational performance opportunities and also introduce threats that may be existential. For many, investing in and successfully applying information technology is now a much greater priority.
The Rewards of High Tech: One Woman’s Journey
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- Written by Frances Newbigin
I have been extremely fortunate to have enjoyed a stimulating career in high tech sales and leadership. As a woman, the world of technology afforded me a wonderful profession and as I progressed up the ranks, I actively sought to ensure that I developed balanced teams and mentored women into what I saw was an incredibly rewarding field. I had the great fortune to work with some inspiring women along the way, but we were sorely under-represented, particularly in executive ranks. I hope to encourage more young women to take advantage of the opportunities that a career in technology can offer. It is a demanding, lucrative, and constantly evolving field. I hope that my experience and voice can help encourage the upcoming generation to pursue technology careers.
Creating Organisational Innovators: The Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Online Certificate
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- Written by Peter Carr
Technological innovation is viewed as more strategically important to organisations today than it has been in the past. Being able to change products, services and processes in response to higher levels of competition and rapidly advancing technology is a challenge for most organisations in the private, public and not for profit sectors. At the University of Waterloo, we are developing a new online certificate programme that is intended to support the development of organisations’ technology oriented innovation capability. We are looking for feedback from the CIO community on our new programme design.
The IT Hiring Challenge
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- Written by Ali Moghadam
Despite the many tools, approaches, philosophies, and processes available to human resources, identifying and hiring good IT people very much remains a challenge. Whether you are a candidate or a hiring manager, the overall experience continues to be lengthy and often frustrating with questionable results.
Although hiring has always been a challenge in IT, it appears to have become even more difficult due to the growing list of requirements imposed by HR and the organization. There is a significant misalignment between hiring rules and departmental hiring requirements within most companies today. This is highlighted by the size of the staffing industry. In 2015, the staffing industry in Canada had a market size of $8.5B and it is expected to rise to $8.9B in 2017.
How to Defeat the Innovation Con Game
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- Written by Paul Lewis
I watch an inappropriate amount of television.
Whenever I have free time, I am in front of the TV consuming content. It’s not always streaming, as is the dominate form for my kids, but a variety of content across an array of subscription services. My love of television, established and nurtured as a child and enduring over a lifetime, creates a welcome distraction to the media consumption during my working hours.
Digital Transformation: Creating Magic in Customer Experience
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- Written by Paul Lewis
Magic does exist.
And I’m not just talking about the Vegas style extravaganza and Cirque de Soleil masterpieces. I’m including all magic; from that black & white plastic rabbit picture trick from a birthday magician for hire; to the coordinated team-on-the-street hustling each of my $20 bills with 3-card Monte. It’s all magic.
Here is what I know:
- Random audience members do get cut in half with rotating power saws or pierced with steel swords and live to tell about it
- It is possible to vanish the Statue of Liberty and teleport through the Great Wall of China
A Pragmatic Approach for Securing Enterprise Data and Applications
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- Written by Jeff Ishii
More than a dozen senior IT executives representing financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and commercial business gathered in Toronto to discuss their experiences with Securing Data and Applications. The event was produced by The IT Media Group and was sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The dialogue yielded a notable set of common issues that spans industries. This article will describe the key security challenges facing IT executives, what companies are doing to solve them, and a practical approach for enhancing your security framework.
IT Talent Wars Strategic Insights
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- Written by Jeff Ishii
I recently had the pleasure of attending a roundtable with 13 senior IT executives to talk about “Winning the IT Talent Wars”. The event was produced by The IT Media Group and was sponsored by Salesforce. The discussion focussed on attracting and retaining top talent in today’s challenging environment. The conversations yielded surprising insights that both businesses and IT vendors would do well to heed in the war for talent. In this article, I will summarize the critical factors that define top talent and the calls to action to hire that talent and keep it.
How the Data-driven CIO Enables Digital Transformation
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- Written by Paul Lewis
Some people prefer the destination, but I prefer the journey.
Not really the journey, but the anxiety of the journey. Whether during a detour at Starbucks on the long drive to Disneyworld, reading a chapter in the biography of Walt Disney, or my eighth back-to-back viewing of Monster’s Inc., I’m wondering about the next stop, chapter or sequel and ignoring what’s right in front of me. Maybe that’s why I’m constantly tripping. The anxiety of what I’m missing or what’s next is always pushing me ahead of the now.
I’m even anxious to get this article done. It has been in my inbox for the last three weeks, with ample time to deliver the content for editing before the publishing deadline. The knowledge of its presence keeps me alt-tabbing to my inbox to see if it has magically been completed.
The Future Revealed – How CIOs Became Extinct
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- Written by Dave Carey
While browsing a junk shop in a dodgy part of St. John’s recently, I happened across a curious object, a fist-sized orb covered in a tracery of peculiar hieroglyphics. I bought it, took it home, and was in the middle of examining it when a remarkable thing happened. The orb suddenly opened and up popped the figure of a tiny chimpanzee, dressed in scholarly robes and puffing meditatively on a pipe.
“Welcome to the Encyclopedia Galactica, ‘Planet Earth, Third Millennium’ Edition. Please state the period and subject matter you are interested in,” said the ape.
Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. Was it possible that I had stumbled upon some future reference work that had somehow found its way back through time to that musty little shop? I was determined to find out.
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