Chris Curran

Sustainability: A Million-Dollar Opportunity for the CIO

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The CIO is in a great position to lead sustainability initiatives at a corporation. Why? Because like information technology, corporations must weave sustainability into the fabric of the enterprise to generate the opportunities that companies like The Dow Chemical Company, SAP and Intel have orchestrated. Their successes are featured in: “Sustainability: Moving from Compliance to Leadership.” To generate revenue, Dow Chemical created a Sustainability Chemistry Index, which increased its sales of sustainable chemistry products between […]

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8 Intriguing User Interface Designs from the MIT Media Lab

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To see what lies ahead in the coming years for user interfaces, some of my colleagues at PwC recently visited the MIT Media Lab. The researchers behind the “Fluid Interfaces” project are toiling away on dozens of intriguing prototypes that leverage breakthrough technologies such as gestures, haptics, wearable computing, 3D, projection, and data visualization, to name a few. While some of the user interface designs are useful but not necessarily transformative, such as the digital […]
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Balancing Lopsided IT Governance

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As you’ve probably heard, it’s happening again. Corporations are decentralizing IT and calling the role of the CIO into question. Between social networking, cloud computing and digital mobility, business units are demanding more than ever from IT. As IT struggles to keep pace with rapid innovation, business units are growing increasingly comfortable purchasing and deploying outside systems on their own. As a result, conditions are ripe for restructuring the relationship between business and IT. According […]

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Time is Running Out for the CIO to Lead on Social Media

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When I was setting my clocks back this weekend for Daylight Savings Time, I started thinking about how some CIOs are at risk of getting left behind on social media. The current situation is similar to what transpired at the dawn of e-Commerce back in the mid-90s. CIOs were dragging their feet on e-Commerce rollouts so the sales and product teams took matters into their own hands. They hired outsiders and cut CIOs out of projects. Separate […]

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Will the Mobile User Interface Overtake the Desktop?

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In the October 2011 Wired, Steven Levy writes about how the scroll bar has disappeared in Apple’s latest desktop operating system, code-named Lion.  Instead of using a mouse to point and drag to move the page up and down, Lion changes the metaphor into a two-fingered multi-touch movement, similar to the move used on your smartphone or tablet.  Is this the beginning of a fundamental change in the way we interact with office based computers? […]
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Will Voice Leapfrog Handwriting Recognition?

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Last year, I posed the question if Apple’s barrier to business adoption of the iPad was handwriting recognition. In fact at the time I thought that without a better data input method, the iPad would only be really useful as an information consumption device. Since then, I have experimented extensively with the iPad as a note taking device using my handwriting.  I’m to the point now where I neither carry any newspapers and magazines nor […]

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Learning by Doing with Labs

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Every summer, I spend a week camping with my kids’ Boy Scout troop.  This year, we had the opportunity to camp, hike and fish in the Colorado Rockies near Pike’s Peak. A by-product of a week away from constant email, phone calls and meetings is time to think. A few summers ago, one of these thoughts was how to apply first aid lessons to better project management. This summer’s camp was alongside the South Platte […]

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Reinvent Your Training Methods

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I was recently at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (where PwC is a Patron) for their summer briefings.  Andy McAfee, is one of the regular guests and told some stories contrasting the degree of difficulty in finding the information we want in our own organizations with that of searching the public internet – night and day for most. The contrast reminded me of a discussion I had with an insurance CIO about the […]

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What’s the CIOs Role in Compliance?

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How often do the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) have common cause to work together? More often than you might think. The IT department and the technology resources and skills they contain are among those most in demand by corporate compliance officers when taking on the often enterprise-wide projects that help keep their organization’s out of legal or regulatory hot water, so says a recent survey on corporate compliance practices co-sponsored […]

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Mobile Enterprise – Beyond the Fundamentals

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Guest post by Dan Eckert In my last post about going mobile in the enterprise I talked about some fundamentals for going mobile in your business. In brief, I said there were three things you should know about mobile in the enterprise as you move forward: Things are moving so fast that choosing a software platform is more critical than which hardware you should buy. Mobile innovation is no longer being driven by the enterprise; […]

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Demystifying Business Innovation

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Guest post by John Sviokla Why innovate? Because the growth of your business ― and, ultimately, its success and sustainability ― demands it. In the past two decades over a billion new customers have entered the market economy, mostly in the parts of the world we now refer to as “emerging markets”. In the eyes of today’s CEO ― regardless of his or her home market ― that’s where the action is: it’s among the […]

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Selecting Public Cloud Services – Focus on What’s Different

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I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion last week with a few of my PwC colleagues, Cara Beston and Greg Dupier, during which we talked about both private clouds and also what it takes for businesses to offer public cloud services.  What made this discussion unique for me was that the audience was largely made up of U.S. government contractors, so they were particularly focused on the federal direction and mandates about […]

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