We love to hear that people are switching to the cloud, but we love it even more when we hear that they have put the proper preparation in place before doing so.

To get the most out of your cloud services provider, you need to look carefully at your company's legal, security, and business affairs prior to the move in order to confirm the perfect match...more.

If you were at VMworld 2011, you probably listened in on a presentation or two at the Solutions Exchange theater. SHI had its own presentation slot on the first full day of the show, where I moderated a panel discussion with SHI execs.

Speakers included Thai Lee, Henry Fastert, and Rich Taggart; as well as a customer of ours, Jeff Vannest of LABVANTAGE Solutions Inc. I asked questions of our panel about SHI's new cloud services, and they discussed how it's built, how it works, how it's different, and how clients are already benefiting from it...more.

The SHI team is back at the ranch after a great week in Vegas at VMworld 2011. And while we put the finishing touches on a few videos we shot at the show, we'll whet your appetite with this one -- my interview with SiliconANGLE and Wikibon.org in The Cube. Those of you who were lounging in the "grass" outside the Solutions Exchange might have seen me recording this in the open air studio....more.

By now, you have undoubtedly experienced at least two dozen visits from suppliers coming in and pitching the cloud. Or perhaps, you have signed up for and are using some cloud services. It's amazing how much Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) has been created by the vendor community around cloud. So to help you cut through all this nonsense, I’ve put together a couple of questions you can ask your cloud supplier (or cloud sales teams) to clear the air, cut through the FUD, and allow you to understand and compare vendor offerings...more.

At SHI, we have a long history of developing solutions that deliver lower costs and greater business agility for customers. Today's announcement falls in line with this tradition of innovation -- we launched the SHI industrial-grade cloud from the floor of VMworld 2011. The SHI cloud offers organizations a new way to use the software and hardware we've delivered for 20 years as a trusted VAR, and ushers in a new era for SHI and its customers...more.

As an IT professional, you examine a vast array of metrics to measure the internal performance of your IT organization. But how are you measuring and communicating IT value to the business you support? To accomplish this, IT needs to develop a carefully crafted set of metrics that can be regularly reported to the business to measure how IT is performing. I undertook one such program at a large multi-national and the program we put together was an eye opener in just how complex it can be to adequately summarize IT value using a narrow set of measures the business can easily understand, digest, and trend over time...more.

PIO's are usually assigned a specific critical business scope, such as Customer Relationship (in the broad sense of the word – inclusive of all the touch-points from the business to the customer), Manufacturing, Engineering, Finance, etc. In many organizations these business areas have a multiple different processes and hundreds of legacy systems that were developed over many years. In short, in many organizations systems supporting these business areas are in desperate need of attention..more.

It happens to every I.T. executive. Your staff is "fired" by your internal business customers. It happened to me! Within the first month of a new role, at a new company, I walked into what I thought was a friendly first "meet and greet" with the marketing team, and I found myself listening to a history of poor I.T. execution. Our marketing customers were very dissatisfied with I.T. performance, and wanted changes…..and wanted them fast. What to do? There was not time for a complete rework of the staff. How to begin the process in turning around a completely failing I.T. to business relationship? How do you start to create a strong and effective partnership with the business...more.

Effective IT Governance is a difficult challenge for most organizations. One of the complexities making IT governance so problematic is that IT is the focal point for decisions made across the organization. Business strategy, business rules and business processes are most often implicit within the business. They are not written down. Therefore when business strategy, business rules and business processes come to IT to be mechanized in code, a two step process must occur. IT must help the business rationalize their strategy, rules and processes into a single coherent set before implementing into code...more.

Every Top CIO must spend adequate time reviewing how IT is funded, and ensure the IT funding model is doing its job in enabling IT success. There are three key questions to ask that will guarantee a successful review of the IT funding model...more

If you read the IT trade press, you'll come across articles and books that state IT, once the proud parent of corporate competitive advantage, is in trouble and its future may be bleak. It is stated that every organization has more or less the same computers and software. If every organization has the same IT, then by definition competitive advantage from the technology decreases since competitive advantage means having something unique that your competitors do not. If we all have email and ERP, these technologies are just a cost of doing business, not a source of competitive advantage...more.

Each month in 2011, the SHI Solutions Newsletter will focus on my 13-point checklist of issues, concerns and methodologies that all IT managers should be considering to help prepare your organization for 2012...more.

Rich Taggart disagrees with pundits who claim that IT headcount will decrease in the coming years.

But because the responsibilities of CIOs will continue to evolve quickly in the short-term, the former Disney CIO offers a 13-point checklist to help IT Managers adapt...more.