In this podcast, Michael Hugos provides insight from his CIO experience and his latest book, Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.

Michael Hugos, the former CIO for Network Services Company, took a different track when he wrote his latest IT book. Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World provides business executives with tools and tips on how they can help IT professionals drive business revenue. He says that IT professionals tend to forget that the business is where the money is. That's why IT exists." He adds that technologies, such as cloud computing, open source and virtualization, will provide great cost benefits to the business. "We need to be in better position to guide these decisions."

Hugos has first-hand experience working with business executives to drive revenue at Network Services Company, an $8 billion cooperative of 86 distributors that market industrial products to major companies. Before this company became agile, the profit margin on coffee cups was practically nothing and getting smaller. Multiply this by Network Services' distributors who sell to 5,000 stores across the country. He says, "We banded together under this cooperative and worked closely with sales. Interesting things started to happen and ideas for making more money started to flow." The information-based, value-added services Hugos helped to devise returned a two percent to three percent profit margin. "If you do things right, you can earn more money or what he calls the agility dividend"

Hugos thinking is nothing new. He refers to the invisible hand theory which Adam Smith, the great British economist, came up with 250 years ago. He says, "The invisible hand pushes the price of all products to their cost of production. No amount of fast talking sales people and ball game tickets will change this."

The end result for Network Services was complete transparency for more products. Hugos says, "Out of the 50 items we came up with, we carried out 25 for them. For example, we could fill an order directly off a purchasing system or via EDI or XML. We now had a customized solution that made our paper cups more valuable."

In this podcast, Hugos provides some current IT enablers that will help an organization achieve speed and agility, give some examples of companies that have achieved both business and IT speed and agility, and offers takeaways to help CIOs assess the business impact of IT based on speed and agility.

Bio
Michael Hugos, at Center for Systems Innovation [c4si], mentors companies and teams in practices of IT and business agility. Up until 2006, he was the corporate CIO at Network Services Company, an $8.2 billion cooperative distributor of janitorial product and disposable food service items. His books include the Essentials of Supply Chain Management (2nd Edition), Building the Real-Time Enterprise, and he contributed to CIO Best Practices -- Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology. His most recent book is Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.

Resources
Michael Hugos' Blog, CIO Magazine, "Doing Business in Real Time"

http://advice.cio.com/taxonomy/term/30

Michael Hugos' Website

http://www.michaelhugos.com/Center_for_Systems_Innovation.html

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Nathan Langston knows what it takes for the almost 100-year old Boy Scouts of America to train five million youths in citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in outdoor activities, educational programs, and career-oriented programs in partnership with community organizations. About 15 years ago, Langston, got into scouting as a volunteer leader and then served as a scoutmaster and a committee chairman. Today, Langston serves as the national director of the administration group at the Boy Scouts of America's Dallas headquarters. Langston wears many hats at the largest youth organization in the U.S. He not only serves as the CIO overseeing IT, but he manages the national service desk, portfolio management, properties and treasuries, and health and risk management. He says that his technology hat demands the most time and holds the most interest for him.

Like most organizations dealing with tight dollars, the Boy Scouts of America needs to make sure that its technology investments result in a business impact. Employees, however, don't drive business impact as much as the volunteers do.  In fact, the Boy Scouts operates locally through units sponsored and operated by churches, clubs, and civic associations. Volunteers lead each unit. Local councils consist of some paid professionals and volunteers.  Langston says, "Business impact for us is all about helping our volunteers to enjoy the programs and for our youth to progress on the path to eagle scout. We look at this benchmark in whatever decisions we make."

Langston says that these volunteers demand improvements in technology. "As their time gets squeezed and squeezed with our other things, they need to have the administrative side of scouting simplified so they provide the activities to our youths." One such technology investment includes the online reporting of all volunteers within each unit. This yearly task has always been a paper-based process. Within the first three months after the system went live, more than 100 councils adopted the process. Today, more than 80 percent of all scouting units, which represent three million youths, use this process.

A new social networking investment promises to have significant business impact for volunteers, scouts, and the paid staff. Langston says that you need to belong to a Boy Scout unit in order to participate in this social networking community. "The site assures everyone that you have a legitimate connection to the Boy Scouts of America. It's unique in that we're including paid staffers. For the first time, everyone will have the chance to gather around an electronic campfire to talk about how we can resolve issues. We can communicate best practices, not only to a unit, but across the U.S.

On the business side, Langston says the organization has made several IT investments to improve the staff's ability to get information from a system consolidation that occurred a decade ago. "Our people kept saying they couldn't get access to the information needed to help facilitate the volunteers.  At first the CEO had some skepticism about how many staffers would use the internal, Web-based portal. We had some people who were adverse to technology. Today, everyone uses this portal to keep track of fund raising, membership, and other important information. It's the most widely tool we have."

In this podcast, Langston talks about how he works with the chief financial officer to make investment decisions, the business impact the move to open source will have on the Boy Scouts, and the job benefits he has gotten from being an active member of the Society of Information Management.

Bio
Nathan Langston joined the Boy Scouts of America in 2000 as the director of information systems. In 2006, he became the national director of the administration group, where he reports to the chief financial officer. He joined the organization after working for 16 years in IT at Conoco Oil, both in the U.S. and abroad. He also worked as a senior project director for Oracle. He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oklahoma Christian University and a master's in computer science from Oklahoma State University.

Resources
Sitecore, Me, and the Boy Scouts - Eric Brown
Boy Scouts Go Digital

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Doug Marcis - Audio Editing

In an effort to bring a consistent message about open source to customers and to partners, and to participate more actively in the open source community, BMC in 2007 hired William Hurley (aka whurley), an open source activist, inventor, and chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management.

Whurley's role as chief architect of open source strategy has many facets to it. BMC's executives depend on guidance for anything that has to do with open source. Whurley contributes to the company's open source strategy, as well as carries it out. As an evangelist, he is the BMC open source voice at IT venues. He manages BMC's presence in the open source community by getting customers involved with it. In fact, management has encouraged whurley to maintain all of his open source community connections.

In this second of two podcasts, whurley, without mincing words, talks about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of mantaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source.

Bio
William Hurley is the chief architect of open source strategy at BMC Software, Inc. Also known as whurley, he is responsible for creating BMC's open source agenda and overseeing the company's participation in various free and open source software communities to advance the adoption and integration of BSM solutions. A technology visionary and holder of 11 important patents, whurley brings 16 years of experience in developing groundbreaking technology. He is the chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management. Named an IBM Master Inventor, whurley has received numerous awards including an IBM Pervasive Computing Award and Apple Computer Design Award.

Resources
Computerworld - William Hurley Talks Up Open Source
Talk BMC podcasts with William Hurley
Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Linux - By William Hurley

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

When it comes to looking for a job, an apartment, or even a good garage sale, more than 26 million unique visitors each month turn to a Craigslist.com site in one of 450 cities in 50 countries. No one can dispute the cult-like reputation Craigslist, founded by Craig Newmark, has earned. As a company, Craigslist runs frugal with 25 employees working out of an old Victorian building in San Francisco. However, Craigslist has proven that even a well meaning, grassroots bunch of nerds can put a big dent in the advertising profits earmarked for 1,000 of newspapers. Let's not forget how Craigslist, which is 25 percent owned by eBay, has changed the way many of us live and work.

So how did Craigslist, which started as Newsmark's idea for a San Francisco events list 12 years, come this far? Why would a company that could be making hundreds of millions of dollars each year continue to offer a primarily free service? What drives Craigslist's quirky form of innovation and culture? These are some of the things enterpriseleadership.org asked Jim Buckmaster, craigslist CEO. Since 2000, Buckmaster has led craigslist to be the most used classifieds in any medium, and one of the world's most popular Web site.

Bio
Since 2000, Jim Buckmaster has been CEO of craigslist.com, which is 25 percent owned by eBay. Before craigslist, Buckmaster directed Web development for Creditland and Quantum, a major disk drive company. He built the terabyte-scale, database-driven Web interface at ICPSR through which researchers worldwide access the primary data archive for the social sciences. After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in biochemistry, Buckmaster attended medical school at the University of Michigan. Business publications, such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune, frequently write about him. He also has made dozens of television appearances.

Resources
Business Week -- A Talk With Craigslist Keeper

USA Today -- Jim Buckmaster's Best Business Book Picks

Fast Company - Is It Still Craig's List

New York Times -- What eBay Could Learn from Craigslist

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish Host and Audio Producer
5AlarmMusic.com  Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

In the 1997 Sci-Fi thriller “Contact,” Jody Foster played a research scientist at work on a project called “SETI” — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The “search,” as it turns out, did not involve death-defying space voyages into unknown galaxies (well, not initially, anyway), but the slow, methodical crunching of data gathered from hundreds of radiotelescopes, turned to the sky like giant ears, listening for ... something.

As it turns out, “Contact,” is based on a real project involving signals gathered with radiotelescopes and analyzed at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exploring, understanding, and explaining the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe. But unlike the movie, which only references in passing the essential work of gathering and analyzing all that data, geeks among us might be interested in how a nonprofit institute based at a publicly-funded university could afford the kind of megacomputing power necessary to coax even the weakest of signals from the sky.

A top-secret government supercomputer?

No. The SETI@Home project has found a way to create the worlds largest and most powerful supercomputer, by tapping into something called Volunteer Computing — breaking up all that data into small chunks that are downloaded by home computer users around the world. These chunks are crunched by the volunteers’ CPUs when they are not in use; next, the SETI program notifies the user, who uploads the analyzed data chunk and downloads another from the site. Thousands of hours of CPU time, 24/7, are donated free of charge to the project, and thousands of home computer users become members of a community of ever-widening citizen scientists.

In this interview, meet the project’s director, David Anderson, who talks about SETI@home and other projects that now reside under the umbrella of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (yep, BOINC). Learn how Anderson, with just one other staff member, navigate issues like security and project management, to push the limits of both distributed computing and Open Source computing to intergalactic heights.

Bio

David Anderson is a research scientist, principal investigator, and director of the University of California at Berkeley’s BOINC project and SETI@home project. His research interests include distributed systems, realtime and multimedia systems, graphics, computer music, communication protocols, and psychometrics applied to learning and aesthetic preference.

Resources

SETI@home

BOINC

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities  Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show  Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development  Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer

Sometimes, control can be beautiful ... especially in the complex (and expensive) arena of IT governance. And that is when CobiT -- the Control objects for IT -- can be beautiful, too, helping you to streamline and improve your processes for managing IT service delivery. And not many people understand this better than Gary Hardy, IT consultant and contributor to the original initiative that created CobiT.

CobiT was established by the nonprofit IT  Governance Institute (ITGI), formed to help business leaders "ensure that IT is aligned with the business and delivers value, its performance is measured, its resources properly allocated, and its risks mitigated." Although CobiT predated it, interest in CobiT grew considerably after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was enacted in 2002, following the very-public reality checks involving Enron, MCI, and others. CobiT is often used as a framework in which corporations can address the demands of SOX, and the processes it introduces include how enterprises:
- acquire or develop application software
- acquire  technology Infrastructure
- develop and maintain policies and procedures 
- install and test application software and technology infrastructure, and  more.

Want to know more about CobiT? Tune in to this educational podcast, and spend a little time getting to know how control can be beautiful for your enterprise.

Bio

Gary Hardy is a Computer Science graduate with 30 years experience in the IT industry, originally as a systems developer and project manager, and for the past 24 years as a specialist in IT audit, risk management, and performance improvement. He has been an Internal Computer Audit Manager, and has held Director positions with Deloitte & Touche and Arthur Andersen and also with one of the UK's leading IT security companies Zergo, now Baltimore. He has consulted with a wide range of companies in the UK and overseas, and led several major IT security projects for the European Commission. He has also acted as Project Monitor to the UK Department of Energy. Gary coordinates the IT Governance Special Interest Group for the Impact Programme, one of the UK's leading forums for IT Directors and CIOs. He has been an active member for 25 years with ISACA, the world's leading organization focused on Information Systems Control. He has been a board member and has held several leadership positions within Europe. In particular, he helped initiate and has been a major contributor throughout ISACA's CobiT® initiative, and serves as advisor to the IT Governance Institute. He helps companies use the CobiT materials to implement an IT Governance framework and improved IT Management processes, and as a tool for identifying performance improvements. He is a regular speaker at conferences and seminars, and runs training courses on IT Governance.

Resources

Information Systems Audit and Control  Association (ISACA)

IT Governance Institute  (ITGI)

http://www.itwinners.com/Home.htm

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities  Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show  Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development  Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer

There is a tribe of people in the world today who are, well, a different  breed of cat, shall we say. They commit passages of Stranger in a Strange  Land to memory. They carry on a love affair with coffee, not only for its rich flavor, but for the opportunity to experience nearly infinite durations of caffeine-generated consciousness. They are not particularly WOWed when inventions like cellphones emerge, because chances are, they've already thought of them ... or envisioned them. They are the techies who work all day in front of a computer, then go home at night and, well, turn on a computer. And always, always, they are thinking, dreaming, about what will be The Next Cool Thing.

Recently, Enterpriseleadership.org had the opportunity to sit down with BMC Software's chief techie, CTO Tom Bishop, and to ask him a range of questions all around the idea of The Next Cool Thing. From what will Oracle CEO Larry Ellison do next, to how will the video iPod change the world, to what is the hype behind the recent GOOGLE/Sun Microsystems announcement (and what he'd hoped they'd say), Tom is not without opinions, visions, and creative thinking about some of the hottest topics in tech today. This visionary CTO even wonders aloud about the Disneyworld, or Brave New World, that the present Internet infrastructure will usher in ... and he invites the listener to think, and to dream, along with him.

Bio

Tom Bishop was named one of the top 25 CTOs by InfoWorld  Magazine in 2004 and is a well-known industry innovator who holds nine patents in fault tolerant computing and in leading the development of industry standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and POSIX.

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities  Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show  Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development  Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer

Here is a short list of complaints about the IT organization in business  today; do any of these sound familiar?

• IT spends all of its time in the reactive mode, fighting fires rather than  proactively solving problems
• IT is not aligned with the company's business goals
• No matter how much money is spent on technology and software, the situation  in IT does not seem to get better
• IT perennially costs major dollars, but company executives still don't see  it as central to the success of the business

Now, say a consultant listens to this list, and tells you that it doesn't matter how much money is spent on new hardware and software, it doesn't matter how many consultants you call in to fix the problems, because in the end, you must focus on the people within IT to heal the IT department. And, oh, yes, using this approach will not cost a lot of money. Sounds too good (or too scarey) to be true? Harris Kern, an IT industry veteran, proposes these and more in an energetic conversation with Tom Parish, discussing topics from why implementing ITIL can be a great idea on paper, but can do little to improve your organization; to how important it is that IT executives get away from their desks, no matter how busy they are, and do lunch with other executives. It's all about people, organizational structure, and processes, says Kern, who clarifies and builds on ideas he proposes in his article, "Building a Competitive IT Organization." Tune in to this refreshingly unconventional wisdom about some of the most commonly cited problems in the industry, and see if you agree.

Bio

Harris Kern is an author, publisher, lecturer, and IT consultant, specializing in IT simplification. Through the Harris Kern Enterprise Computing Institute (www.harriskern.com), he has developed a powerful resource for building competitive IT organizations. Under the umbrella of the Institute, IT professionals from many of the world's leading companies come together to take advantage of leading edge disciplines and strategies for improving the IT industry.

Resources

Enterprise Computing  Institute

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities  Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show  Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development  Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer