CIO2CIO Blog

Business Analytics Haves and Have Nots

A new IBM-MIT study found that companies with advanced analytic capabilities are accelerating ahead of their analytically challenged peers. In recent years, there have been a lot of anecdotal accounts of analytics making a positive impact on business growth and now a new study of 4,500 executives provides some data points to back this up.

The global survey of executives, managers and analysts, released by MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value, finds the information ‘haves’ — companies with in-depth experience with analytics technologies and methodologies — increasingly saw competitive advantage, and were more than twice as likely to have outperformed their analytically challenged peers over the past year.

Overall adoption of analytic capabilities has been rapidly proliferating as of late although less so in the Middle East. Fifty-eight percent of organizations surveyed in this study now apply analytics to create a competitive advantage within their markets or industries, up from 37% just one year ago, the study confirms.

Building High Performance IT Teams

On the face of it, building high performance IT teams should not be different from building any high performance team; in sports, finance or even in construction except that domain technical expertise tends to occasionally skew the view of those who are appointing team leaders in IT.

As an individual evolves from pure technical roles to management, within an information technology department, they will hopefully observe that it isn’t the technology that is progressively becoming more difficult, but the people. Humans are dramatically different than machines or software programs. People have emotions, like to test the limits and often do not abide by the rules of logic. Building an effective information technology team is an important goal for any CIO whether he or she comes up though the raks of the IT organization or is appointed from outside the organization. The behavior and performance of the IT team is a direct reflection of the CIOs management skills. In terms of value center analysis, a concept by Michael Porter, negative team performance can affect the supporting role that information technology plays for a particular organization. To effectively create such a team, a CIO must define (or redefine) and understand the various roles within his organization, become acquainted with the team members, set goals, help the department to learn to function as a team, and successfully incorporate and integrate new team players when necessary.

Perhaps Google is not so Innocent after all

Google recently announced that it is acquiring Motorola Mobility for approximately $12.5 billion. The price represents a premium of 63 percent to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares last Friday. Google had about $39 billion in cash at last count. Motorola Mobility is what used to be the Mobile Devices division of Motorola until January 2011.

Google claims that the acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable the company to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. “Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open” Google said.
In a blog post, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page writes that Google has acquired Motorola as move to build up the company’s patent portfolio as it will “enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.
According to Motorola Mobility’s website, the company holds approximately 14,600 granted patents and 6,700 pending patent applications, worldwide, as of January 2011.

Why do they Exit the PC Business

In 1991 IBM introduced the Personal Computer to the world. One hundred million PCs and some 25 years later IBM decided to exit the PC business and sell it PC Division to Lenovo.

In May of 2002 and after a bitter board level battle followed by shareholder voting HP confirmed its acquisition of Compaq, both companies were already leading players in the PC market at the time. The merger created the largest maker of PCs in the world. Last month HP announced that it will be exiting the PC business most likely by spinning off that division of the company.

Only last week Acer which can be viewed as a bell weather for the PC industry because it is almost a pure play PC maker reported its first ever quarterly loss, Acer lost close to seven billion yens. The company blamed the loss on excessive inventories or in other wards poor forecasting.

Only 5% of CIOs Can Authorize IT Investments Alone

According to a recent Gartner press release, CFO influence in IT is growing as CFOs alone have authorized 26 percent of all IT investments, while CIOs alone have authorized only 5 percent of IT investments, according to a recent joint study by Gartner, Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF) and the Committee of Finance & IT (CFIT) of Financial Executives International (FEI). The survey also showed that 42 percent of IT organizations report directly to the CFO, and 33 percent of IT organizations are reporting to the CEO. "This high level of reporting to the CFO, as well as their influence in technology investments, demonstrates the need for companies to ensure that their CFO is educated on technology, and underscores just how critical it is that the CIO and CFO have a common understanding on how to leverage enterprise technology," said John Van Decker, research vice president at Gartner.