Should CIOs blog? Should they tweet, or otherwise engage with social media? It is a question that IT executives should increasingly ask themselves, as they attempt to fight their corner within organisations that can be sceptical about IT as a function.

Blogging, once a pastime for celebrity followers, cookery buffs, and movie fans, has increasingly become a corporate activity as companies understand and embrace the appeal of social media. It can be used as a way to encourage conversations between executives and others in the industry, and with customers. It can be used as a platform to hammer home a particular message, or to promote a particular category of product. For CIOs, who in many cases are managing a transition for the IT function within their companies, it can be a useful way to make themselves heard. It is a pursuit followed by several high-profile CIOs, including Vivek Kundra, the CIO for the US Federal government.

For years now, IT departments have been considered a cost centre within organisations. IT executives constantly have had to battle boards that are unwilling to spend money on what they see as a cash drain on the organisation. However, in the last couple of years, some companies have begun maturing to the point where they see IT as a potential centre for revenue. The savvy CIO understands this transition, and the associated requirement for a more strategic conversation between the IT function and others in the business. If organisations can be persuaded to view IT strategically – as a business partner which can help to drive growth in new and interesting directions – then CIOs can manoeuvre themselves and their departments into a more advantageous position.

A blog is one way to help demonstrate thought leadership both within an organisation and further afield. It also helps to promote a CIO personally as a strategic thinker who can be relied upon for a visionary approach. Here are our top tips to help new CIO bloggers to make their mark:

Break new ground

There are plenty of blogs that say nothing. An online platform for discussion that simply spouts conventional wisdom is almost worse than no blog at all, because it casts the author in the role of follower, rather than leader. Find something new to say, and say it in an engaging and entertaining way.

Find a cause

One way to demonstrate a visionary approach and develop a distinct personal voice is by embracing a subject as yours, and using your blog as online platform to help win over others in the industry. Think about broad topics, such as accountability, service culture, or operational security – something that will identify you as a pioneer with a passion.

Market your blog

Develop reciprocal links. Twitter your blog, and use the blog to expand on some of your Tweets. Comment on other peoples’ blogs and add value to the conversation, rather than blatantly using others’ comment sections as a means of promoting your own outlet. It is also a good idea to promote your blog in areas that will attract like-minded people. User group web sites and discussion boards might be a good example. Measuring and monitoring is part of a good marketing strategy. Services such as PostRank Analytics provide analytics services that can help you to monitor the coverage that your blog posts are getting across various social media services.

Blog short, and blog often

Short, snappy posts of a few paragraphs are better than infrequent, longer posts. Busy readers like smart, informative content that they can digest easily, but they also like to keep coming back for more. Infrequent blogs make you seem inconsistent, and will discourage people from subscribing.

Check in with HR

You don’t need to rock the boat to make some interesting waves. Even bloggers that do not promote themselves as employees of their particular company can be subject to disciplinary action if they overstep the mark and say things that may bring their employer into disrepute. It is therefore imperative that bloggers capitalising on their executive position within a particular company should ensure that what they are saying does not cause any conflict with that company’s message. It would be wise to check in with human resources and with other board members to get the go-ahead to blog as an executive within your organisation

Make your blog last longer than your job

Your vision should outlast your tenure at any one company, and so should your blog. Use a personal URL wherever possible, so that you can take your online location and your blogging history with you where ever you end up. Phil Windley started blogging when he was the CIO for the State of Utah, for example, but has since maintained it while in multiple positions and roles in the tech industry.

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• Social Media Mythbusting For The C-Suite (outspokenmedia.com)
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• Vivek Kundra – A Conversation with Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra (itc.conversationsnetwork.org)
• Staying Under the Corporate Umbrella in the Midst of the Social Media Storm (socialmediatoday.com)

This will probably come back to bite me….

I love my iPhone, it’s indispensible. I run with it (tracking my distance and speed), i’ve used it when i’ve been lost in the mountains, i’ve checked train times, used maps, watched TV episodes when I’m on the treadmill in the gym, search recipes in the supermarket, found recommended cocktails when wandering around the West End, and listen to audio books on the Tube. I’ve even used it to have multi-way, international Skype conferences while I’m stuck in a service station on the M1. It’s properly integrated with out MS Exchange, so i have pretty seamless communications.

For me, its the personal and portable nature of the iPhone which has become indispensable – and i think augmented reality apps (when mature) will entrench the addiction even further.

So what of the iPad? Its seems to me predominately a device for using at home – although yes it would make a great accompanyment to a long haul flight if the 10 hour battery life for video playback is a genuine.

So what would I use the iPad? Which of the dozens of location and office productivity tools that i have on my iPhone will be useful on a tablet that spends most of its time in the living room?

I’m sure that the enduringly innovative app developer community will prove me wrong, and before you know it there will be a plethora of compelling and addictive iPad apps – but it seems to me that the most likely use of the iPad in my home will be the web and possibly TV series. I already purchase TV through the iPhone and connect to my giant plasma screen using an AV out cable so that’s not nessarily a new feature. The iPad doesn’t have HDMI either. Or USB. And its 4:3, so not great for most of today’s video content.

And so to the Web – the Web that requires so many plugins and updates that allow you to view the broad spectrum of file formats. Like Flash – the iPad does not offer in-browser Flash. Kind of dumb in my humble opinion.

Apple in its rather closed, limited environment, would rather that you were a viewer or consumer of the Web rather than a contributor to it, they would rather you purchase your leisure time through iTunes than finding you pleasure spread throughout the four corners on obscure site. I cannot believe that the iPad will offer me a sufficiently flexible and rewarding experience as my £500 laptop, with which i can download all manner of content and plugins. My cheapo Dell Vostro is light enough, with a long enough battery life, to support most of the living room browsing I need. A Windows tablet would probably do the trick if i really wanted a tablet. Or maybe the new Chrome OS ultra-mobile PCs.

So for me, the iPad is just a little bit too much. Just like the Touch, and the Apple TV. A profitable niche perhaps, but unless you are a Mac lover (I’m not), the tablet in my living room will need to be a lot more open than an iPad.

There are some more objections here: http://technologizer.com/2010/01/27/my-first-25-questions-about-apples-ipad/ and this wonderful sanitary towel courtesy of failblog.

@stewartbaines

After years of gnashing teeth about the brain drain of innovators out of the UK, it appears that the tide may be turning. A recent article in Reuters claims that international technology entrepreneurs are in fact choosing the UK, with London and Cambridge proving particularly popular. It quotes someone from the OECD saying that the “UK is now well placed in Europe on a number of indexes measuring factors like taxes, red tape, the dynamics of internal markets and how they are connected on the world stage, and the ability to access a qualified workforce.” The article also points to a review by the Legatum Institute, that places the UK 2nd in the world in “Entrepreneurship and Innovation”. Good news indeed, particularly with our esteemed bankers all threatening to take their expense accounts to Geneva.

Judging from some of the news stories circulating online recently, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Researchers keep discovering flaws in the way that it works. Worryingly, these are not simply execution flaws. Rather, they are basic design flaws, which raise significant problems when it comes to mitigation.

Most recently, PhoneFactor, a company specializing in authentication using telephones, discovered a fundamental design flaw in SSL, a key technology designed to protect online web sessions from being hacked. 18 months ago, Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at security consulting firm IOActive, discovered a flaw in the way that the Internet resolves web addresses. And shortly after he made his announcement, another pair of researchers announced yet another flaw, this time in the border gateway protocol [BGP], which is a key Internet technology designed to exchange information between different networks.

The most worrying thing about flaws such as these is that they render almost everyone using the Internet open to potential security attacks. For example, the flaw that PhoneFactor found lies with the secure socket layer [SSL], which is used to encrypt information passing between a website and a browser. It enables an attacker to inject their own data into the communication stream between the user and the website — even when that website is using encryption technology. This partly invalidates the padlock that you will see in your browser when surfing supposedly secure websites. Perhaps even more worryingly for enterprise users, it also potentially affects users of smartcards, which could render your whole two factor authentication system for remote employees [if you use one] vulnerable to attack.

Because SSL is a foundational technology which protects so many other things online, this design flaw is particularly worrisome. For example, others have pointed out that SSL is commonly used to protect database queries sent from one computer to another. If an attacker can inject their own commands into an SQL database query, they could turn something fairly innocuous — such as a request for a single customer’s details, for example — into something more malicious, such as a instruction to delete all of your customer records [assuming that the database granted such permissions].

Security problems have also been found in MD5, an encryption mechanism that has been traditionally popular on the Internet, and was used by some certificate authorities [the companies that create digital certificates designed to identify organizations and people, and authenticate them online].

Even so, not everyone believes that the Internet is fundamentally broken. Leslie Forbes, technical services manager at F-Secure, which sells software and services designed to make people more secure online, argues that it is the way we use it that is inherently flawed. “It is the model we used to trust [or not] the services offered across the medium that is broken,” Forbes says. “So, based on the premise that the Internet is supported by software, and software will have bugs — some never dreamed over the time of coding — there will always be fixes to be made.”

One of the biggest problems when such flaws are discovered is the remediation process. Fixing deployment errors is bad enough, but it generally only involves passing a piece of software or firmware and then distributing it online. But when the security problem involves a basic mistake in the design of a protocol, then this entails a potential change to a standard, which can be a much more complex task. Standards bodies move at a glacial pace, meaning that it can take years to alter existing documents to account for a design problem. In the meantime, companies must find workarounds that at least prevent an attack from happening in the interim.

Unfortunately, the general consensus is that such design flaws will keep cropping up as we become more adept at finding them [and hopefully do so before the Internet criminals]. “Any complex system will be difficult [or time-consuming] to analyze empirically, so it will continue to be both possible, and likely, that while there are Internet protocols, there will be serious flaws,” warns Martin O’Neal, managing director of security consulting firm Corsaire.

Not only must these companies work together, but they must do so largely in secret, so that they can find the solution to the problem before malicious attackers do. To this end, a group of companies including Microsoft formed the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet [ICASI]. ICASI focuses on working together to try and find solutions to security problems affecting the broader Internet and not limited to any one vendor.

Unfortunately, such efforts do not otherwise result in a fix before attackers exploit such basic vulnerabilities. For example, the SSL flaw that PhoneFactor discovered was kept secret until it was independently uncovered in a discussion forum. Shortly after that, security researcher Anil Kumas used it to engineer an attack against the Twitter micro-blogging service that would enable any attacker to authenticate themselves as another user.

Alternately, the question of whether the Internet is broken maybe too simplistic. The online world is never that binary. After all, you are still reading this article online — something that is miraculous when we consider that the web didn’t exist 20 years ago. However, thanks to increasingly sophisticated attackers online, we are finding the Internet in a continuous state of disrepair. This is the nature of the medium. It is chaotic, disjointed, and always in flux. Perhaps the best that we can do is to secure systems as best we can by applying the most up-to-date patches, and then protecting all of our valuable data by increasing his, and applying multiple layers of defense to thwart any single attack. Internet may not be broken, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our best to try and fix it.

Further info

PhoneFactor SSL flaw discovery http://www.phonefactor.com/sslgap/

BGP flaw – http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Flaw-in-BGP-net-protocol/0,130061744,339291643,00.htm?omnRef=1337

Twitter hack http://www.securegoose.org/2009/11/tls-renegotiation-vulnerability-cve.html

Kaminsky DNS flaw news http://www.orange-business.com/en/mnc2/footer/news/enterprise_briefing/september2008/industry_watch.jsp

ICASI http://www.icasi.org

This blog was contributed by Danny Bradbury, one of Futurity Media’s international network of writers

News from IDC that 6000 technology marketing executives will have lost their jobs by the end of 2009 is hardly a surprise.

You only have to glance at the recent figures from Gartner about 2009 IT spending to see that those that are responsible for marketing, branding and selling kit are going to be in for a rough time.  They paint a picture of the IT industry’s “worst year ever”, with worldwide IT spending falling by 5.2% during 2009,with enterprise IT hardest hit, with a fall in spending of 6.9%.

IT services declined during 2009 by 3.6% to $781 billion, global telecom spending was down 4% to $1.9 trillion, software spending fell 2.1% to $197 billion. The biggest kicking was felt in hardware (servers, storage, network equipments, computers, printers) with sales falling 16.5%, to $317 billion.

(Please bear in mind that this time last year during the worst of the economic crisis, Gartner estimated that the worst case, global IT spending would grow at 2.3%. If you don’t remember this bullish optimism, check it out: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=776112 )

So it’s not the fault of marketing departments then? Well, according to IDC, they have contributed to their own demise. Yes, IT vendor marketing budgets will have declined by 8.3% during 2009, the first decrease in year-on-year marketing spend since the dot-com bust of 2001-2002.

But what money has been available has often been poorly spent, with inefficiencies from product-based marketing not being aligned with brand, sales and corporate marketing. IDC recommends more thematic marketing campaigns, and shared services to remove redundancies.

Over the past decade, we have worked with many of the world’s largest (and smaller) IT organisations, and we’ve experienced these inefficiencies first hand. Many of our clients really do understand integrated marketing, and are a pleasure to work with, but others (ex-clients) can be ingredibly disorganised with product, brand, corporate and PR pulling in opposite directions, with completely different messages and timescales. Projects get abandoned because they are not cleared, audiences recieve mixed messages and marketing is the first to be cut when lean times begin. It’s a pretty simple rule for success though – recognise that sales and marketing are inexorably linked, that your brand must be apparent in everything you do, and be committed to communicating your messages when times get harder. Now, more than ever, your customers need you to be confident.