January 18, 2006, 5:04 PM — 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, first prediction, I think that the use of offshore providers is going to be increasingly challenged, as a viable business strategy. It's going to be called into question much more frequently. It's no longer going to be a reach-for-without-thinking kind of solution. The second thing I think we'll be seeing in 2006 relates to the open source movement. I think CIOs are going to be looking even more aggressively at using open source solutions, particularly in places where they haven't been looking at them before. I want to say, in places where open source has been considered verboten in mission critical systems, in secure systems. I think it's too viable of a solution space to be ignored. And I guess the third prediction I have will be in hiring. I think that it's clear that the ebb of hiring in the United States, of IT, of indigenous IT workers has been reached, I think CIOs are already beginning to staff up. I think the employment outlook is going to be looking much better for the IT workforce in this country and I think that bodes well for a lot of folks in the academic community, in the research communities and in the industrial sectors.
Taylor: And let me ask, just my final question onto your last point. Do we have an IT workforce that's ready for the new world?
