CIO Wisdom
Bruce Taylor recently spoke with Dr. Phillip Laplante and Thomas Costello, co-authors of "CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices". The discussion touches on best practices and lessons learned from CIOs. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.
Hi. I'm Bruce Taylor, and this is Voices on ITworld. Today we're talking about IT leadership, in a time when it's becoming evermore challenging. To be a successful CIO, an IT executive in today's world, requires one part vision and philosophy, one part business strategy, one part technical prowess, and one part human, social, and behavioral awareness. And in my personal view, no one part out weighs the importance of each of the others. My guests today have that balance clearly in mind in their most recent book, entitled CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices. It is a detailed, rigorous, realistic work based on proven in the trenches solutions from world-class CIOs. The authors are, first, Dr. Phillip Laplante who directs the CIO Institute, a knowledge community of practice for CIOs, based in Philadelphia, and a sought after executive mentor and coach. Welcome to the program, Phil.
Phillip Laplante: Thank you for having me, Bruce.
Bruce Taylor: Also joining us is Tom Costello, CEO of Upstreme, and I spell in case you're running right to Google right now, Upstreme is U-p-s-t-r-e-m-e. A firm dedicated to assisting senior management, boards, and investors in matters relating to the deploying and evaluating of new technology. Gentlemen, before we get started, I'd like to give you each a chance to talk just a bit about your respective work and what you see opening up for your work in 2006. Phillip, why don't you take the first crack at this.
Laplante: Well, thank you very much. First I think that I will be spending a significant amount of time evangelizing the work that we've done in the CIO Wisdom II book. There's a lot of message here from the various contributors, there's a story, there's some themes. And I do want to spend some time promoting this, both to the CIO community in the outside world, to my own students at Penn State University and I ought to put a plug there for that. And we really need to get on the road and evangelize this work. I also have some other work that I've been doing, very closely related to this, that has to do with anti-patterns and dysfunction in IT organizations and I'll be continuing to work on that. And finally, I'm really opening up my own research, applied research in open source software, how to measure its goodness, how to apply it in various settings, how to test and document it. So I hope to be working on those three areas with a lot of enthusiasm this year.
Taylor: So let me ask you one follow-on question before we go to Tom. Give me, give our listeners, one to three predictions for 2006, in the IT universe.
Laplante: Okay,
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