Killing Time with CIO Magazine

This is the first issue of CIO Magazine I've read pretty much end-to-end. I had nothing else to read while riding to and from work yesterday, so it kept me occupied. The magazine was not a hard read. The language was fairly simple, which surprised me. I expected a magazine dedicated to CIOs would be more financial, from an IT perspective. Guess not. Anyway, here are a few things I found of interest:

Best Practices for Disaster Recovery - there are eight of them according to this article. 1) Have dedicated and empowered staff. This can't be secondary responsibility for another department. 2) Disaster Recover and Business Continuity Planning are two different things, requiring different resources, and different governance structure. 3) The recovery plan needs to be capable of execution without the staff who know it intimately. 4) Usually, everybody wants to have their processes covered by the plan. Not all processes need to be covered. Push back. 5) Put disaster recovery into the development process, so that critical apps can be certified recoverable during testing phases. 6) Live test is important. 7) Before you purchase a new app -- test to see if passes your recovery plan. 8) Follow up with recovery tests. You can learn things, and change what needs to be changed to make them better.

Wal-Mart RFID -- Jan. 1, 2005 marks the deadline for vendors participating in Wal-Mart's RFID expedition. CIO Magazine has interviewed quite a few of those vendors, and evaluates Wal-Mart's efforts. Bottom line: Wal-Mart will not hit their target. Few major issues: 1) There are no standards. 2) RFID doesn't have a business case for many companies. 3) Today's technology only works really well in controlled situations.

Collaboration -- this article is supposed to serve as a CIO guide to collaboration. As someone who's spent quite a bit of time in Supply Chain, this seems like a no-brainer to me. But I suppose some CIOs need to be educated. More and more, collaboration is becoming easier -- technically. The tools are there. The automated processes are there. What's not necessarily there is the culture, the trust, the maturity and the understanding of how collaboration works.

Business Models -- CIO Magazine has a short excerpt from the book, Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right, by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan. The book uses the concept of a business model help organizations respond to structural changes within the business environment that's driving competition globally. Three fundamental structural changes are identified: 1) Globalization of business, aided by technology and resulting in sharing of ideas across borders. 2) Flow of global capital. 3) Global purchasing has shifted power to consumers and giant retailers.