Chris Curran

Building a BYOD Ready Infrastructure

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What can the process of protecting a prized baseball card collection teach us about BYOD security? Let me explain. A few years ago, my sons and I got hooked regularly visiting a sports collectables store. These days, collecting sports cards is not just about completing team sets or collecting your favorite players.  Now, its about trying to find the rarest cards in perfect condition – sometimes these cards even have a piece of a jersey […]

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How the CIO Can Establish a BYOD Usage Policy

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If you’re grappling with putting policies and procedures in place to manage the consumer-driven transition to a bring-your-own-device workplace (BYOD), don’t worry. You’re not alone. Only 43 percent of respondents to PwC’s 2012 Global Information Security Survey said that their organization has implemented a security strategy for use of employee-owned devices. It’s not surprising that companies are struggling. Developing a BYOD strategy can stir up a hornet’s nest of issues for the CIO at the nexus […]

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  1. Building a BYOD Ready Infrastructure
  2. 5 Smartphone Usage Trends for 2012 and Beyond
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Digital Razorblades: CIO Insight from App Stores

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  Razorblades. This was the thought I had while browsing the “top grossing” apps in the Apple AppStore today.  The top 10 grossing apps are “free” and the same is true in the Android store. How could this be?  Well, it turns out that these apps ARE free, but make their revenue by selling add-ons, upgrades, tokens, in-game currency, game equipment, etc.  This is like the razor vs blades business model, in which the razor […]

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We Need More Demos

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TED is an unbelievable place to step back from the day-to-day and dream big.  As I described in my first TED 2012 post this week, this place puts me in a great frame of mind to find meaning in just about any subject or point of view.  Speakers all throughout the week have helped me to crystalize one thing in my mind that we as IT leaders in our organizations can and should do better.  […]

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3 CIO Questions from TED 2012

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Where do you get inspiration from?  How do you challenge yourself, your ideas, perspectives and plans?  An old friend and mentor used to tell me that it’s crucial to commit to learn about a few disciplines that are seemingly unrelated to your own.  The TED experience is one way to immerse yourself in many worlds – some somewhat comfortable and others wholly new.  I’ve been fortunate to attend TED for the last 2 years and […]

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Social Collaboration: Four Steps to Success

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Co-authored with Jeff Auker Enterprise software deployments are complex, customized to each customer and incredibly time consuming. To speed rollouts and improve customer satisfaction, one of the largest software companies in the world had a gutsy idea: let customers, partners and employees communicate about implementations. If connected, they could collaborate to uncover consistencies between installations that could be replicated, saving customers money. To make it happen, IT set up ad hoc internal social networking tools […]

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Mobilization: The Missing Link between Strategy and Execution

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Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will. Too many companies fail to anticipate the bumps in the road and to assign leaders who are ultimately accountable for keeping projects on task and budget when the inevitable hiccups happen. As a result, organizations often blow deadlines, overspend and backtrack because they skip the crucial stage: mobilization. Mobilization connects strategy and execution. This is the step where top-performing companies set plans and budgets against […]

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5 Real Innovation Opportunities in 2012

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Co-authored with Devin Henkel For years we’ve heard the challenge “innovate or die.” Companies are taking that idea to the extreme in 2012 – we are currently working with several companies that are re-thinking their approaches to innovation. To survive, they are “innovating innovation.” Some companies are letting outsiders in on their innovation processes. That old paradigm of company researchers toiling away in back rooms on secret innovations for months is going up in smoke […]

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7 Digital Strategies of Top-Performing Companies

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Growing a multimillion dollar corporation during a recession is no small feat and it’s no accident. Companies that are swimming against the economic tide are doing things differently than those that are treading water, or worse, drowning. So, what exactly separates the best from the rest? In a world of tech-empowered consumers and employees, companies that are bucking the economic trend exhibit key behaviors that allow them to exploit technology and weave it into their […]

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5 Smartphone Usage Trends for 2012 and Beyond

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My PwC colleagues studying consumer intelligence recently conducted a survey of 3,283 smartphone users to find out how they plan to use their devices in the next couple of years. In many ways, smartphone users will grow increasingly reliant on their devices, but their concerns over privacy, security and convenience will keep them from ditching their desktops all together. “The Speed of Life” dives deep into the data to surface the next wave of trends […]

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The CIO Through the Eyes of the CFO

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Guest post by Phil Garland I had the opportunity to have lunch with 8 chief financial officers in Denver last week.  Our conversation started with why the CFO should care about IT and what they need to know about technology. Our discussion quickly got to the topic of the roles of the CIO in this changing world of cloud, mobility and social networking.  These enabling technologies have made technology much more accessible to non-IT users […]

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Outside-In IT: A Preview of PwC’s Digital IQ Results

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Only a few years ago corporations issued corporate-sanctioned devices to employees like the army issues uniforms to new recruits. They sourced them, dispensed them and controlled how they were used. They also called the shots in how they communicated with customers. Back in the day, corporations were in charge inside and outside the firewall. That was then and this is now. Innovation Infiltrating the Enterprise We’re in a new era, the consumerization of IT–defined as […]

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