Put “DevOps” and “Leadership” into your favourite search engine and you’ll very quickly discover that the move to embrace DevOps poses some significant non-technical challenges from IT management.

Whenever an organisation contemplates outsourcing part of its IT operation, the IT help desk is often first cab off the rank. Depending on the size and nature of the business - and on whether that IT support is purely to serve staff, or customers as well - running it in-house can throw up some fairly obvious pain points.

The names differ — CIO 2.0, Super CIO — but the message is the same: the role of the CIO is becoming increasingly important and CIOs are now serious candidates for CEO roles.

According to an article on CMSWire in December 2014 What a Digital Workplace Is and What It Isn't,” There are as many definitions of the digital workplace as there are organisations.” OK, but surely that doesn’t include cars and printers, does it? Well, in a way it does. Here’s why.

Are you a samurai CIO or a ninja CIO? Gartner says you need to be both. What does it mean by that?

Ten percent of IT decision-makers surveyed by IDC in late 2015 reported spending 40 percent of their IT budget on mobile technologies, and the next 10 percent reported spending 25 percent. Perhaps not surprisingly, 68 percent said they considered mobility a critical driver of business success.

It sounds like a laudable, and very necessary, initiative; one aimed at empowering CIOs in large organisations to better embrace ambitious digital transformation agendas, and it comes from UK based global telco, BT, the former British Telecom. BT calls the initiative ‘Digital Possible’ and says it will build on insights from its most recent research, The BT CIO report 2016 – the digital CIO.

In January 2015 Microsoft set out to “fundamentally transform the business of business intelligence.” The basis of that bold claim was the release of a new version of Microsoft’s business intelligence tool, Power BI.

Microsoft released to manufacturing SharePoint Server 2016 on 14 March, prompting a {cslimited}blog post{/cslimited} from Seth Patton, general manager for the SharePoint and OneDrive product management team at Microsoft, in which he said: “We are on a mission to make SharePoint more simple, mobile, intelligent and secure to help customers unlock the value of having it as an integrated part of Office 365.”

Every industry is being transformed and disrupted by digital technology. As the traditional custodians of an enterprise’s digital technology chief information officers are in the firing line. They are often the first to feel the impact of those disruptions; they are expected to take leadership of digital transformation; they are under new pressures and their roles are changing rapidly.

The CEO Institute — an organisation that claims to be Australia’s leading networking group for senior executives who want to be better informed and more effective business leaders — has surveyed close to 180 CEOs from various Industries — resources, manufacturing, retail and importing — to try and tease out key challenges and concerns. Mastering disruptive technology came out on top, closely followed by hiring and retaining talented staff.

I’m sure you heard this before, expressed in many different ways. “Today’s successful organisation needs to be able to turn on a dime, changing its product or service strategy as fast as its customers’ needs require. The successful business of the 21st century crosses all boundaries; can quickly meet and adapt to competition, whether it comes from another part of the world, another industry or a startup; or it can use its core competencies to extend itself in new ways.”

Question: what does BYOD have in common with shadow IT? Answer: they both started out as headaches for CIOs but have now become, or are becoming an accepted, and valued part of corporate IT.

Despite early promise enterprise social networking has not yet lived up to expectations. Mostly because organisations have failed to get buy-in from all levels. New research reveals this is partially due to a level of suspicion that they will disrupt traditional hierarchies.

“Information silos are the scourge whose downfall has been foretold ever since the rise of enterprise resource planning platforms in the 1990s, but today, their demise remains far from assured,” said the author of {cslimited}this ComputerWorld {/cslimited}article in May 2015.

Drawing a connection between the sharing economy and the need for a digital workspace may seem to be stretching it a bit, but that’s exactly what consultancy ClearPeople does in its white paper Introducing the Digital Workspace. It argues that the internet has shifted our collective psychology away from attaching prestige and emotional value to ‘ownership’ to “the simplicity and freedom of borrowing and sharing.”

In recent years there’s been a massive migration of processing and data into the cloud, but powerful though the arguments are for centralising computing and resources in large data centres, it’s not a suitable architecture for all applications.

For every technology product (hardware or software) there is a point in its life beyond which it will be more cost-effective to retire and replace it than to continue using and maintaining it. The difficulty is determining that point to minimise costs and maximise operational efficiency.

Wherever you look, organisations are being told to digitally transform or be digitally disrupted, but transformation is never easy and a study by the Harvard Business Review has identified leading the transformation as a new and vital role for the CIO.

There’s never a dull moment in IT. Never a day seems to go by when a new concept, accompanied by the inevitable TLA (three letter acronym) doesn’t pop up. One that has been around for at least a couple of years and is rising rapidly in the awareness rankings thanks the popularity of big data and data analytics, is ‘data management platform’.