Practices Videos

Author: SASNewMedia Keywords: Manufacturing Best Practices Optimization Product Quality SAS Institute Publishing Cover Story PBLS 2009 Bobby Hull Added: November 20, 2009

In this podcast, Susan Cramm, author of, The Eight Things We Hate About IT, talks about how CIOs can improve their relationships with business partners to achieve a higher quality of business value. She also attacks some of the political issues that CIOs face on the job.Regardless of the company's size, CIOs have the on-going challenge of creating business value or business impact of IT. Executive management needs to realize that CIOs and their IT team can’t deliver business impact on their own. According to Susan Cramm, a former CIO and founder of Valuedance, an IT leadership coaching firm, says that CIOs don’t own the four P’s needed to realize business impact -- people, processes, products, and profit and loss. Business partners manage these four things. Cramm, the author of the forthcoming book, The Eight Things We Hate About IT (Harvard Business School Press, says that CIOs and their senior leadership team need to partner with their business counterparts in order to deliver value to the organization."If you have a good strong leader and a relationship across the business for delivery of IT services, then you have a chance to move up the value chain and set up an investment governance process. Such a governance process will ensure that you have a full cycle of investment management in place. You just aren’t looking at things like a business plan, but managing those targeted business impacts through the duration of the program and subsequent projects. Moreover, you are holding business leaders and IT accountable for the realization of that value."In this podcast, Cramm, who writes and blogs for Harvard Business Review, talks about how CIOs can improve their relationships with business partners to achieve a higher quality of business value. She also attacks some of the political issues that CIOs face on the job.

Soon, it will be 4G wireless. This technology will not only provide a staggering amount of bandwidth, but it will create new business models, as well as a new platform for innovation. As a result, CIOs to become 4G wireless savvy immediately. That's the advice of Dr. Scott Snyder, author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in 4G Revolution. Now let's meet Dr. Snyder, author, professor, and CEO of Decision Strategies International.Every now and then a disruptive technology comes along and dramatically changes the way we live and work. In the mid-1990s it was the Internet and TCP-IP, and in 2000, it was the iPhone. Soon, it will be 4G wireless. Consider, for example, how it could make healthcare more pervasive. A doctor in Africa doesn't need to make a dangerous trip to treat patients at a remote village. With 4G wireless technology, he can treat these patients remotely.Since the 1990s, 3G wireless has been in place, providing us with increasing amounts of bandwidth, speed, and the ability to download multi-media content in a more efficient way. Dr. Scott Snyder, author of the New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution, says that many people think of 4G wireless, which is the next logical step in the progression of the technology, as just more bandwidth. "Yes, 4G wireless will offer up to 100 megabits per second to mobile users and one gigabit per second to fixed users. You are talking about a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than what you get in your home broadband connection. This is only part of the story. 4G wireless will provide a new paradigm that will alter the network and the handset, by enabling users to have more control over what type of content they get, and what type of services they can get from any location they might be in around the globe."Snyder adds that user-centric capabilities will be the defining feature of 4G wireless. "Extremely intelligent handsets will have the ability to make decisions on your behalf, just like a remote control for your life. Because it is based on the cloud concept rather than a fixed network, 4G wireless has the capability to follow you around. You will have access to many networks without going back through a network. That's a scary proposition for wireless carriers that make money from people going through their network. This feature enables a whole variety of digital swarms or group behavior. Users can self-organize in this cloud without going through the structure of traditional networks."As CEO of a Decision Strategies, a technology consulting firm, Snyder came across many executives who lacked awareness of what 4G wireless technology could do, not only to their business, but to their industry as a disruptive force and an innovation platform. The need to educate these executives propelled Snyder to write The New World of Wireless. His book is not just about what's happening with the technology, but how this technology could have broader social and business interactions to create new business models, new industries, and transformational type events.Meanwhile, new standards for 4G wireless and experimental handsets loom on the horizon. Even aspects of the iPhone sheds light on what new business models might look like. Snyder says that because these weak signals will explode very fast, CIOs need to prepare for 4G wireless right now. "They need to start building wireless into their organization as a competency to be explored both as a communication platform, but also an innovation platform. They need to put the infrastructure in place to support both platforms and to leverage both to build an ecosystem with their customers, partners, vendors, and even your industry. They have to also start fostering wireless content, connectivity and allowing the digital swarm to take place both in your organization and in your ecosystem."In this podcast, CIOs will learn the following:The top three things they should be doing to prepare for 4G wireless Some of the ways they can innovate around 4G wireless to become more profitable and derive more marketplace, The new business models that 4G wireless will enable, and And the security issues that will confront this technology.

Marketing always needs a strategy and one of the most prolific and in fashion strategies is the email marketing strategy. When it comes to this, one of the most important email marketing tips would be to avoid spamming. And remember that in order to sell

How does a guy with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience wind up doing green IT initiatives at Microsoft? He also has co-authored a guidebook called Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line. I’m talking about Dr. Tony Velte. In this podcast, he offers a concise framework for how you can green everything from your data centers to desktops. He also has co-authored books about cloud computing and virtualization. How let’s meet Dr. Toby Velte, a member of a Microsoft team focused on helping large enterprise groups with their IT strategies. That includes going green. How does a guy with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience wind up doing green IT initiatives at Microsoft and also co-writing a guidebook called Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line and the upcoming? Dr. Toby J. Velte’s work in computational neuroscience focused on creating models that were very similar to the widespread enterprise networks found in most large companies and in government agencies. Contacts he made along the way helped him to secure a position at Microsoft helping large enterprise groups with their IT strategies, especially around green IT. Velte’s green IT book provides a roadmap for how you can create a company-wide green IT program starting with your data centers, moving down to desktops, and empowering individual business units to develop their own IT strategies. He says that the number one problem companies have with moving forward with green IT isn’t the technology or having adequate funds. It’s the people situation.” He urges companies to get all of their stakeholders together to try to understand what the green initiatives are going to look like at the end of the day, and how do they plan to measure success. Next, companies need to measure everything starting with power consumption. “Most companies don’t have the metrics in place. People need to understand what they have and what they are consuming. “ Once companies know what outcomes they want to achieve, then it’s time to execute the green IT program as if it were another IT initiative. In most companies, green IT begins in the data center. In fact, that’s where it began at Microsoft. When Microsoft built its new data center outside of Quincy, Washington, it supplemented reliance on the power grid by use of water power. Meanwhile, virtualization and cloud computing can also cut down on a data center’s power consumption. He says, “By moving business process out to the cloud, you are really turning over the power consumption issue to the service provider. With virtualization, can you eliminate the servers with low utilization, say around 15 percent, by moving those applications to virtualized servers. You can achieve upwards of 80 percent utilization with fewer servers.” In this podcast, Velte talks about some of the practical measurements you can take to make sure your desktops and data centers are green, the ways you can translate those metrics into meaningful results, the steps you can take to reduce your reliance on the power grid, and a plan companies can follow to stay green.

A debt collector who thinks they have the upper hand gets a nasty surprise! Watch this collection agency get caught red handed violating privacy laws in the FDCPA. Starring John Griggs and Chi-Town Bones.

Traditionally, the holiday season represents a highly productive time in your business. Building a comprehensive plan to generate and maintain focus on revenue opportunities will ensure that this is your business' strongest holiday season. Join this dynamic panel of salons owners sharing best practices in holiday kick-off meetings, marketing, guest appreciation, staff celebrations and more. Discover ways to keep your feet grounded while driving your team to achieve their personal best.

Stephen Walther, Microsoft Product Manager for ASP.NET AJAX, joins the show to discuss the recent advancements in the AJAX toolset found in Preview 6.

China's biggest lead smelting firm accepts partial responsibility for lead poisoning...Billionaire George Soros invests in clean technology.