We all know IT is more than a cost center. When IT budgets get cut, it's easy to despair that others in the executive suite don't agree. If that's true, however, the CIO might ask himself, "How effectively am I doing my job?"
Forget about spending $500 for an iPad. India's human resource development minister, Kapil Sibal, has unveiled a $35 tablet that the country hopes will go into production next year.
Compared to Apple's hot-ticket tablet, it may not have equivalent functionality -- or a hard disk, for that matter -- but at that manufacturing price it's practically disposable. "We have reached a stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity -- all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything," said Sibal at a press conference in New Delhi on Thursday.
As C-level executives, CIOs run the IT organization. Two levels down the ranks, however, their middle managers make IT run. After all, these managers -- the directors of managers -- are the ones who carry out the CIO's agenda. Yet they're among the likeliest in the organization to leave. They're entrusted with interpreting the decisions CIOs make at the corporate level and putting them into action.
I have been writing about open source technology relatively frequently over the last year and have been a little surprised at its growing acceptance in the business enterprise. (Perhaps this reflects 10 years producing a magazine about Microsoft in financial services - Microsoft folks not being big fans of open source.)
So I was interested in an editorial by Jason Pontin in MIT's Technology review. Writing about an article in the magazine in which David Talbot reports on efforts to to make online video open, Pontin writes:
The innovations such openness would encourage are impossible to predict. Talbot quotes Chris Blizzard, director of technical evangelism at Mozilla, which develops the open Web browser Firefox: "Nobody is going to tell you they want something before it emerges--rather, the experience of the Web is: 'Holy Cow, I can do this other thing now!' Open standards create low friction. Low friction creates innovation. Innovation makes people want to pick it up and use it."