Stories by Thornton A. May

Sustaining your career during unsettled times

Sustainability, or creating economic prosperity without wreaking ecological havoc, is very much on the minds of executives at big brand companies like Coca-Cola, American Greetings and UPS.

Let's Keep the Board of Directors in the Loop

The role that IT plays in value creation should concern the very top levels of management. That being so, your company's board of directors should be well versed in what is happening in IT .

Managing the Fears That Define the Information Age

To a large extent, our fears define us. Our earliest bipedal ancestors probably mostly had fears about ingestion -- either being eaten or not having enough to eat. The literature and art of the Victorians, as Julie Wosk notes in Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century , reflected a popular psychosis fixated on fears of being blown up by misengineered technology, being accelerated half out of one's mind on a train or being maimed when a train went off the tracks.

The look of post-cloud IT

I recently surveyed the vendor, analyst and trade-show landscape seeking to get a snapshot of current thinking about cloud computing . I came away with two visceral conclusions. The first is that vendor marketing on this topic is terrible. One would be hard-pressed to find more gibberish per pixel than the typical vendor or analyst PowerPoint presentation on cloud computing. The second conclusion is that no one really knows anything about what will happen to IT after the cloud becomes a mainstream reality.

Where has IT's passion gone?

When was the last time you woke up and wanted to go to work? If you could do anything you wanted, would you be doing what you're doing today? The future of IT depends on how you -- and the people who work for you -- answer these questions.

Most CIOs 'dinosaurs,' heading for career Ice Age

Most CIOs are dinosaurs: out of place in the world that is taking shape, and headed for mass extinction.

Have you mastered the many worlds of technology?

Our world has changed. On second thought, make that "worlds." The things technology executives are supposed to handle have expanded exponentially. Virtualization, innovation, globalization and collaboration now require mastery of multiple worlds.

Paying attention to paying attention

Economics is the study of how human beings allocate scarce resources. And in this Age of Big Information, when we all must be knowledge omnivores able to digest a steady diet of news and information coming at us through media as diverse as smart phones, computers and televisions, there can be little doubt that the scarcest and most precious resource is attention.

Tom Sawyer, IT and the 'free' world

Many of us thought that the great chasm that divided us into free and not free ceased to be a model of the world orderabout the time that the Berlin Wall fell. Politically, that's true, but a similar chasm is developing today in the worlds of business and IT. In fact, any IT professional who is not thinking in terms of free vs. not free is behind the times. You need to polish your strategy lens and recalibrate your business model. You need to get busy giving stuff away and getting it for free.

A deeper look at BPM

Not so long ago, ERP initiatives were the industry's poster child for undelivered IT value. Just about every industry gathering featured a well-attended "whine-in," where CIOs would lament the time, dollars and pain it took to get an ERP implementation up and running.