The CIO's Guide to IT Automation in 2024: Enabling Innovation & Efficiency

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Download this report to learn about Enabling Innovation & Efficiency with the 2024 CIO's Guide to Automation.?

Read about:

• IT Automation Strategies for 2024
• CIOs Battle Growing IT Costs with Tools, Leadership
• Supercharging ITSM: Eliminate Toil with Automation
• Could Your Organization Benefit from Hyper-automation?

Welcome to InformationWeek 's Big Picture!

You already know that every day at InformationWeek brings expert insights and advice to help today’s IT leaders identify the best strategies and tools to drive their organizations forward.

That means original reporting from our team of journalists and unique commentary you won’t see anywhere else! But in case you missed them, here are some of our other must-read favorites from this week:

Water Systems are New Targets for Cyberattacks

Story by Joao-Pierre Ruth

Key Points:

• Once the stuff of espionage thrillers, cyberthreats are taking aim at real world, critical resources such as the attack on water systems used by towns in Texas, an attack linked to Russian hacker group Sandworm -- aka APT44.
• With such international threats in play, even local infrastructure can be at risk. Kevin M. Morley, PhD , manager of federal relations for the American Water Works Association, says though the attacks might target resources at a local level, the threat is of national concern.
• Another aspect of what makes cybersecurity for water systems a challenge can be the age and longevity of operational technology environments. The financial constraints of cybersecurity, often an ongoing cost in the private sector, can be draconian for municipalities that need to protect water system and other critical infrastructure.
• The overall challenge of safeguarding water systems also includes the potential scale of end users who may be affected, Morley says, which can include school systems and residences.

Who Should Regulate AI?

Story by John Edwards

Key Points:

• In the US, a government leader even talks about regulating food product package sizes. So, should AI be next on the regulation list? Expert opinions vary.?
• Rebecca Engrav , co-chair of business law firm Perkins Coie ’s artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics practice, believes that it's fair to consider how government regulation will best serve two goals: the risks associated with AI use, and increasing AI's availability and reach for the betterment of society.
• On March 13, the European Parliament approved the Artificial Intelligence Act, which takes a risk-based approach to ensure companies release products that comply with the law before they're made available to the general public.
• For now, government should leave AI alone, Engrav says. "We don't yet have enough information to be able to predict with confidence that proposed regulations will, in fact, decrease risks … without unduly impairing or impeding the competitive and entrepreneurial environment," she explains.

Healthcare Breaches Rising

Story by Carrie Pallardy

Key Points:

• “ Kaiser Permanente has determined that certain online technologies, previously installed on its websites and mobile applications, may have transmitted personal information to third-party vendors 谷歌 , 微软 , Bing and X (Twitter) when members and patients accessed its websites or mobile applications,” the health care giant shared in an emailed statement.?
• The technology in question? Tracking codes, also referred to as tracking pixels, embedded to understand how users interact with webpages and apps.?While the information of 13.4 million people may not have been misused, that personal information was still compromised.
• “Depending on what the OCR finds, they'll probably [be] subject to fines and penalties … depending on the underlying issue, but with something this high-profile … with this many impacted individuals, I think they could expect to see some enforcement action,” Marc Lombardi , chair of the privacy, cybersecurity, and data Innovation practice group at law firm Shipman & Goodwin, tells InformationWeek .??
• Are tracking pixels a useful marketing tool or a privacy nightmare? Answering that question requires health care organizations to weigh the risk versus the reward of using this technology.??

CIOs Impacting Business Value

Story by Lisa Morgan, CeM, J.D.

Key Points:

• Unlike traditional IT departments, which “kept the lights on” and were considered cost centers, today’s IT is inextricably intertwined with the business and helping to proactively drive business value.??
• "Where we often see missteps and challenges is when technology is deployed [or] embraced out of a reaction. We saw this a lot in healthcare coming out of the pandemic. Hospitals quickly had to embrace virtual technology and quickly move workstreams onto the cloud without a long-term strategy. This was necessary so they could remain operational but leaves many with siloed data and workstreams, which can open the door to security vulnerabilities and decrease the efficiency of your workforce,” says Kristi Cunningham , US CTO at IT services provider?Kyndryl in an email interview.?
• Organizational agility has its roots in IT because software development was the first to adopt agile mindsets and methodologies. Agile practices also involve collaboration among stakeholders, which accelerates the realization of business value.??
• “For me, this all boils down to relationships and the simple ability to communicate initiatives and progress against them in simple business terms,” says Steve Doyle , VP and chief information officer at EnterpriseDB, an enterprise-class software and services company focused on Postgres in an email interview.

How is The Chief Data Officer Role Evolving?

Story by Nathan Eddy

Key Points:

• As the use of advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence,?generative AI (GenAI), and machine learning (ML) become central elements of any CDO success strategy, expectations placed on CDOs continue to rise.?
• To navigate intensifying data complexities and deliver on AI's promise, successful CDOs must blend technological expertise with business acumen, change management skills, and foster data literacy across the organization.?
• Key among these skills is strategic visioning to align data initiatives with business goals, the ability to articulate the value of data-driven decisions across various levels of the organization, and stakeholder management skills to navigate diverse interests and foster collaboration.?
• Ultimately, the role of the chief data officer is not just about managing data but leveraging it to drive business value. Through the creation of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, the CDO establishes measurable benchmarks to track progress towards organizational goals.?
• CDOs can ensure continuous development by fostering a culture of learning and innovation within their organizations, encouraging ongoing education, and staying engaged with the latest industry trends and technologies.?

Latest Major Tech Layoff Announcements

Original Story by Jessica C. Davis, Updated by Brandon Taylor

Key Points:

• As COVID drove everyone online, tech companies hired like crazy. Now we are hitting the COVID tech bust as tech giants shed jobs by the thousands.
• Updated May 4, 2024 with layoff announcements from Sprinklr , Peloton Interactive , Google, Assurance IQ , and Tesla.
• Check back regularly for updates to our IT job layoffs tracker.

Commentary of the Week

Story by Vincent Alloo

Key Points:

• Defying all expectations, mainframes are as useful to many organizations today as they were in the late ‘60s. But this comes at a price: Opaque costs and complexity, and today mainframes and the data they hold often sit in isolation apart from increasingly cloud-based infrastructure.???
• The System/360 in many ways blazed a computing trail -- not least by establishing for the first time a unified platform with differentiated software that could run on any machine in the same line. It was later described as setting “the benchmark for mainframe performance for many years”.
• Aside from the basic costs associated with keeping the lights on, there are challenges involving skills as mainframe experts retire with no obvious successors. There are complexities associated with how and where the platforms are used, and the programming languages they require.
• Yet, all is not lost for big iron. In fact, there are three macro-trends that could usher in a renaissance for the mainframe, as long as enterprises are able to tackle the cost, performance and integration issues.?Vincent reveals those trends in the story above.

Podcast of the Week

Podcast and Story by Joao-Pierre Ruth

Key Points:

• Meant to arm federal authorities with intelligence gleaned from telecom and other sources to catch potential foreign threats that operate domestically, the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was reauthorized, but not without debate, down to its deadline for renewal.
• The act will be up for renewal again in two years, rather than the usual five years, as the topics of privacy, surveillance, and the roles tech companies play in the equation continue to be questioned.
• In this episode of DOS Won’t Hunt, Richard Searle , chief AI officer with Fortanix , and Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, J.D., CIPP/US, CIPM , managing director of the Washington, DC office of the IAPP , discuss FISA's renewal.

WATCH ON-DEMAND!

“Hybrid Cloud: The Great Balancing Act”

An archived LIVE webinar from April 30 - Presented by InformationWeek and Nutanix

Hybrid clouds - a mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises data centers - is an ever-changing management challenge for IT.

In this archived keynote session, Tia (Yatia) Hopkins , chief cyber resilience officer and field CTO at eSentire , and Mayank Gupta , director of product marketing, AIOps and DevOps at Nutanix , share best practices and tips on finding the right balance for managing your hybrid cloud.

Watch the archived “Hybrid Cloud: The Great Balancing Act” live webinar on-demand today.

" Black Box and 瞻博网络 : The Perfect Alliance For NaaS Customers"

Network outages cost companies millions of dollars each year, but companies don’t always have the resources they need to keep their networks healthy.

IT labor shortages and increased remote and hybrid work have made it more challenging than ever to keep up with the technological backbone of business.

Fortunately, your organization doesn’t have to face these challenges alone. With a smart network-as-a-service (NaaS) arrangement, you can offload the headache of network installation and management, while benefiting from cutting-edge security powered by AI.?

Download this free white paper in the link above.

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