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January 13, 2004
Insyte Conference
Brigham Young University's Rollins eBusiness Center is hosting the insyte Conference on Feb 6th. The agenda includes a keynote address by John Parady, CTO Kelley Blue Book and panels on "IT Strategies: Managing Your IT Investment as Technology Evolves" and "IT Security: What You Donāt Know Can Hurt You." The conference is relatively inexpensive and a great way to meet and talk to other IT executives from around the area.
03:39 PM | Recommend This | Print This
State CIO Hurdles
Tom Davies column in Governing magazine discusses the things that new public sector CIOs struggle with when they've been used to working in the private sector. Reading the issues was a trip down memory lane. I think they all must be reading my blog. :-) Here's some of the issues that they mentioned:
- Process is more important than results
- Bottom-line focused individuals hit the wall pretty quickly
- Management tools are different
- Stovepipes and a lack of enterprise vision
- A lack of transparency in the budgeting and rate process
- Politics
- The slow pace of change
Not surprisingly, no one mentioned the legislature, legislative staff, or the the press. There are some things you don't talk about until after you leave.
01:55 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Amazon as Platform
According to a story in Roll Call, Amazon will provide a means, starting Thursday, for you to make a direct donation to your favorite presidential candidate using your Amazon account. Amazon apparently worked out a deal with each campaign over the last month. The cost of developing the program and the processing fees are being paid by the presidential campaigns. Many will see the benefit to the presidential campaigns, but there's an upside for Amazon as well.
This is an interesting example of Amazon exerting its transaction processing muscle in ways that go beyond books and other merchandise. Clearly, Amazon's position as one of the premiere merchants on the Web is undisputed, but this build upon that and plays to the "Amazon as platform" strategy which make Amazon a competitor in the payments and transactions space. I wonder how much longer it will be before they federate their ID system and allow other Web sites to let me log in using my Amazon credentials.