I was recently interviewed by the IT-Finance Connection to discuss some of the common issues facing business leaders when it comes to technology direction and strategy. We briefly hint at our Five Questions concept and how it can help start-up and growth companies better prepare for their futures. You can listen to the interview right here.

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Today, the information security world was hit with some findings from well-known security researcher Bruce Schneier regarding a method to defeat the plausible deniability features of equally well-known disk encryption software. After reading the full paper, I need to raise some red flags and call shenanigans on Mr. Schneier.

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I received an email today from fellow IT pundit Robby Slaughter referencing a previous post of ours which dealt with an article in CIO Magazine. Our original article, titled “Nine Reasons Why IT Personnel Think Their CIO is Clueless”, expounded on some of what we felt were key failings of many CIOs in today’s management environment. Robby took it one step further and, with his acerbic sense of humor, essentially re-wrote the original CIO article to point out areas he sees as actual incompetence instead of principle abstracts.

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With over 12,000 laptops being stolen every week from airports around the country and with increasingly sensitive information stored on them, Full Disk Encryption makes sense. FDE has traditionally represented a capital expense that made it fairly unattractive to the SMB. Thankfully, this has recently changed.

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This last week I was browsing through industry publications and ran across some interesting reporting (one could also call it an op-ed) on achieving success with managing the millennials, or the twenty-something IT crowd. I found tihis particularly striking because we work with clients who have teams of millennials with boomer-generation management. Typically, this is a recipe for disaster.

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“My company faces technology issues all of the time, but my IT budget seems to run wild with consultants, capital expenses, and personnel training!” For most businesses leaders we’ve met with, this statement sums up their entire view of (and frustration with) IT. Even if they do not immediately see issues and have just a general feeling of malaise with their IT efforts, after we go over our five questions it begins to crystallize. I personally feel that this desperate statement is cried out not only due to a misunderstanding of the role of IT, but can also be due to either lack of or downright ineffective IT management in their organization.

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This morning we stumbled across an excellent article from CIO Magazine. While it focuses primarily on Application Developers, we believe it applies to IT across the board. We’ve seen these so-called “9 Reasons” violated at many an organization, much to their detriment and dismay.

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Tony Fisher, President of DataFlux, wrote some great material on The IT-Finance Connection Blog regarding the importance of finding common ground between IT and business when it comes to data management.

Businesses are discovering that their success is increasingly tied to the quality of their information. Organizations rely on data to make significant decisions that can affect customer retention, supply chain efficiency and regulatory compliance. As companies collect more and more information about their customers, products, suppliers, inventory and finances, it becomes more difficult to accurately maintain that information in a usable, logical framework.

The data management challenges facing today’s businesses stem from the way that IT systems have evolved. Enterprise data is frequently held in disparate applications across multiple departments and geographies. The confusion caused by this disjointed network of applications leads to poor customer service, redundant marketing campaigns, inaccurate product shipments and, ultimately, a higher cost of doing business. Add to that a sense of unrest and poor communication between departments regarding data quality and you’re at a standstill.

Much of this is directly related to building stronger links between business and information technology. While data stewardship and management are functional aspects which our VCIO program encompasses, it’s but one part in a successful IT strategy.

Feel free to read our article on five questions every business leader should ask about IT for more details.

One of the sad realities that I witness almost every day is when genuinely good IT people are overlooked by inexperienced management or human resources teams. Or, these existing good people find themselves being shown the door due to their manager’s inability to work with technologically-minded people. This happens extensively in the realm of growth companies and even in some start-ups. The push to become big and behave as a bureaucracy sometimes becomes incorrectly perceived as tantamount to success.

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