Similar statements can be made for mobile, open data and big-data. Great buzz-words, but what do they provide to your organization, how does it add value and how can you educate the business units in what they really mean? We could have selected to pay a Vendor to provide open data to our community. The cost of this would be at least $100,000 annually. What real value is generated from that expense? Good will is certainly generated as we can say we have an open data portal but what is the usage? There is not a large developer community in our City, would applications be created? Would they be applications that are beneficial to the City? We took the approach of asking the local Code for America brigade what data they needed and we provided it to them. A focused cost-effective approach that targets the needs specifically. We also provide various feedback mechanisms for the community to request various data sets; we also use existing Open Information requests to drive our decisions on making data available. Often these are simple concepts that most would look at and say, “well, duh”. Instead of barfing out large data sets just to say we are being open and transparent, we let data and demand drive what we do and how we do it.

It seems there is great benefit in driving new technology sales through marketing various concepts, but staying grounded in the needs of the business can cut through the marketing hype and provide the right solutions to the issues uncovered. This is not an easy thing to do; many CEOs read articles, go to conventions and have discussions with various entities. Usually these discussions are related to the latest shiny object, the direction your company "must" go to stay up with the changing technology ecosystems. Many times upper management is swayed by these discussions and come back to IT asking, "why aren't we doing x or y?" The answer many times is there are no business drivers to move forward and without a crystal ball, no one can tell if there will be one in the future. Cloud and Cloud platforms will continue to improve and adjust to the needs of technology. This may or may not provide more opportunities to move solutions to the Cloud. The focus of these decisions should continue to be based on business value and not where a solution “sits”. Maybe I am still an old school thinker and I need to start with the digital world, what is possible with Cloud, mobile and customer experience. Constantly asking “how do we get there from here?” Being a CIO today is complex, I like to think that simplification where possible at least provides a brief moment of mental relaxation.

Focus on creating a good business strategy for your IT function regardless of the tools that you select to meet strategic direction and business demands. Create an excellent customer experience that looks across functions and places the focus on the experience, not on the technology that produces it.