What is the Threat to the CIO? Competition baby

I was reading this guest post on Forbes by Gartner research VP Peter Songaard.

Many CIOs Are Unprepared For The Next Era In Enterprise IT

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By Peter Sondergaard

Gartner, Inc.

The next era of enterprise IT is upon us, but many CIOs are not prepared to manage the demands that come in this new era. We refer to this next era as the digitalization of IT, and it’s the beginning of the digital industrial economy.

According to Gartner’s annual CIO Agenda survey, the CIOs responded to say that they often feel overwhelmed by the prospect of building digital leadership while, at the same time, renovating the core of IT infrastructure and capability for the digital future. The survey found that 51 percent of CIOs are concerned that this change is coming faster than they can cope and 42 percent don’t feel that they have the talent needed to face this future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now one answer could be go to Gartner to be prepared for the changes.  Or the other way to look at this problem of being unprepared as Enterprise IT has competition. Check out this Dell Video with Safeway’s CIO Barry Libenson and PuppetLab’s Luke Kaines.

IT is Facing Competition for the First Time Ever

Do the CIOs realize that they are now competing for IT services?

Imagine if Google put a data center in Hangar One at Moffett Field (humor)

Mercury news covers a Google subsidiary taking over the maintenance of Hangar One at Moffett Field.

Google to restore Hangar One and operate runways at Moffett Field

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com

POSTED:   02/10/2014 07:42:48 PM PST | UPDATED:   ABOUT 9 HOURS AGO

 

Hangar One at Moffett Field, 2011.
Hangar One at Moffett Field, 2011. (Mercury News)

MOUNTAIN VIEW -- After designing driverless cars, experimenting with robots and secretly building a fleet of barges, Google is taking on a new challenge: running an airfield in the heart of Silicon Valley and restoring one of the area's most iconic buildings, once used to house Navy blimps.

Imagine what kind of data center Google put in the hangar.  The super structure looks like it could be the basis for a new rack system.  :-)
 
Google's plans for the Moffett airfield are unclear, although the agreement could allow limited commercial development, or possibly a museum or education center at the hangar site. The company declined to comment, saying only that it wants to "preserve the heritage of Moffett Federal Airfield."

A view of working in Amazon's IT group vs. Google

We have all seen when people have sent an e-mail that copied the whole company.  Thanks to social networking, you can now make same mistake magnitudes worse by sharing to the public vs. your company.

Here is a post by a Google engineer that has been published on another google plus site on his comparison of amazon vs. google.

Shared publicly  -  Oct 12, 2011
The best article I've ever read about architecture and the management of IT.

***UPDATE***

This post was intended to be shared privately and was accidentally made public. Thanks to +Steve Yegge for allowing us to keep it out there. It's the sort of writing people do when they think nobody is watching: honest, clear, and frank.

The world would be a better place if more people wrote this sort of internal memoranda, and even better if they were allowed to write it for the outside world.

Hopefully Steve will not experience any negative repercussions from Google about this. On the contrary, he deserves a promotion.

***UPDATE #2***

This post has received a lot of attention. For anyone here who arrived from The Greater Internet - I stand ready to remove this post if asked. As I mentioned before, I was given permission to keep it up.

Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform. In the end, a company's greatest asset is its culture, and here, Google is one of the strongest companies on the planet.
Steve Yegge originally shared:
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
 
Steve responds well and adds another point on how wicked smart Jeff Bezos is.

Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first realization about him. Who knows how smart he was before he became a billionaire -- let’s just assume it was “really frigging smart”, since he did build Amazon from scratch. But for years he’s had armies of people taking care of everything for him. He doesn’t have to do anything at all except dress himself in the morning and read presentations all day long. So he’s really, REALLY good at reading presentations. He’s like the Franz Liszt of sight-reading presentations.

So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.

In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

One Simple Reason why Open Compute Project works, An Executive Visionary - Frank Frankovsky

When you think of the technical companies in our industry you can’t help, but think of the founders - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry and Sergey, Zuckerberg, etc.

Organizations that are trying to drive change in the industry that host conferences can be viewed in the same way.  The successful ones have founders as key figures.  Seybold Conferences worked because of Jonathan Seybold.  GigaOm works because of Om Malik.  Tim O’Reilly.

And, Open Compute Project works because of Frank Frankovsky.

NewImage

Where would Open Compute be without Frank?  Probably just an idea of what could be done.

Here is Frank’s opening keynote at OCP V.