John Dodge

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John Dodge is an award-winning journalist, blogger, editor and web community manager, who has covered technology and business since 1980. He spent 16 years at PC Week (now eWeek) as news editor and editor and several years as editor-in-chief of engineering magazines EDN and Design News. From 1995-99, he was a regular technology and business columnist for the Boston Globe. From 1999-01, he was regular technology and business columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He has won numerous journalism awards, most recently the 2010 ASBPE Silver Award for his coverage of Bernard Madoff's technology and the 2009 IEEE Distinguished Journalism award for his coverage of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner's development. He can be found in many places including Twitter and Facebook. His personal blog is The Dodge Retort.

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Jerry just commented on John this is interesting in Cloud

John this is interesting especially given your recent video post to stop thinking like a CIO. The merger of these two thoughts should mean that a background in finance is a great start for a career path to the CEO office even if that means passing through the CIO role. But two other thoughts come to mind.

First, many CIO's and mid-level IT managers neglect developing their business acumen altogether but still carp about not getting a seat at the table. Financial literacy is often missing in IT management career development so by the time you hit the CIO office you still can't read an income statement or explain what <a href="http://blog.thehigheredcio.com/2011/10/30/project-selection-criteria/">net present value</a> has to do with choosing IT projects.

Second, for many organizations IT reports to finance and the CFO I say because of the previous issue of CIO's not be ready to lead financially. So, having a background in finance would strengthen the ability of the CIO's ability to work more closely with the CFO on their terms possibly more as a peer. It would also allow for ascension if the finance background was strong enough.

I think most CIO's overvalue their technical background and underestimate a strong business sense and financial literacy. If there was more self awareness for the balance of these in the CIO office more CIO's would struggle less with being strategic and for transitioning to CEO or other senior executive roles.

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 00:41

jdodge just commented on Balaji, Here's a post that in Cloud

Balaji, Here's a post that might interest you along with a ton of comments about innovation and outsourcing. After all, what's more operational than outsourcing?

http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/goddardd/cost-innovation-and-outsourcing

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 00:17

jdodge just commented on Mark, You make spot-on in Cloud

Mark, You make spot-on observations....CIO "should nearly mirror the CEO"...last week, I posted a video commentary on just such a topic along with a text blog....

http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/jdodge/real-cios-don039t-think-ciosthey-need-think-ceos

http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/video/stop-thinking-cio

Does CIO have to think more like the CEO than the CFO, COO or CMO?

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 00:14

pearl just commented on Hi, Charles, enjoy your in Converged Infrastructure

Hi, Charles, enjoy your series of CLoud blogs, I agree, Cloud is really a journey, not a one time project, the destination is to build an Agile organization: easy to provision, faster to maket, CapEx to OpEx, and yes, change management in order to become more innovative, adapte to changes, the pain points for steping into cloud are GRC/security, SLA, vendor lockin these concerns, when cloud technology get more mature, the business IT may also turns into higher level of maturity. thanks

Tue, 11/01/2011 - 22:12

sujitjv just added Goddardd to network

Tue, 11/01/2011 - 10:20

Cara Shockley just created content Understanding the Risks: Why most organizations have exposure for a security breach from their imaging and printing environment

I’ve blogged on imaging and printing security previously, but in light of the results from a recent survey by Government Technology magazine to their subscriber based I think that the subject warrants further discussion. The GovTech survey, titled “Understanding the Risks: Government Technology IT Security Survey,” was targeted to State and Local Government IT executives so while the results are not necessarily nationally projectable, I think that it’s still good directional insight about the curre

Tue, 11/01/2011 - 00:20

The IT Talent Problem

Mon, 05/20/2013 - 20:08

CIO.com blogger Martha He ller, writing in CFO.com, offers some basic advice about how to grow your own IT talent. In a nutshell, she urges CIOs and CFOs to rotate IT leaders in and out of business units; to invite business leaders to meet with senior IT leaders; to embed IT personnel in business units and use a buddy system.

Dual-Persona smartphones not a BYOD panacea

Mon, 05/20/2013 - 15:44

With perhaps the most insighful and ahead-of-the curve reporting about BYOD, CIO.com's Tom Kanshige raises the issue of two colliding worlds on smart phones - work and personal. His latest story raises an obvious point: what happens when someone saves a work white boards, for instance, to the personal side of their smart phone? Or what happens when they post photos of the kids to their work side of the phone?

The IT conversation we should be having

Fri, 05/17/2013 - 14:38

I never know quite what to think of articles predicting the CIO's and IT's demise, but they are appearing with greater frequency and intensity. Here's the latest research findings from a CIO Survey by the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Intel, CEB formerly the Corporate Executive Board and TNS Global (that's of lot or surveyors).

The IT Conversation We Should Be Having

Thu, 05/16/2013 - 19:06

corporate_it_and_the_conversat.html

The IT Conversation We Should Be Having

by Jim Stikeleather | 1:00 PM April 25, 2013

Seeking top companies which invest in their work forces and IT skills

Thu, 05/16/2013 - 13:56

Where will the skills to drive the U.S. economy forward come from? Business leaders say they need to recruit offshore to get the skills they need to keep their companies competitive (our poll favors raising the limits in H1-Bs.)

IT is dead, says ZDNet blogger

Wed, 05/15/2013 - 13:15

JD Irving CIO Martin Davis once said there are no IT projects...just projects with an IT element. Those would seem to support the argument in this ZDNet post that IT's days are numbered...that it will be reduced to overseeing "low value technical plumbing."

That might be an extreme view, but here's the operative paragraph in this provocative post: