In 2007, Michael Spears became CIO of the National Council on Compensation Insurance. It wasn't the usual promotion. Spears had spent two years as the NCCI's chief data officer, and he kept that role when be became CIO. In his dual capacity, he oversees both the IT department and the data resources division, though they operate as separate entities. Over the years, he says, the CIO and CDO roles have sometimes been held by different people and sometimes by the same person.Spears has taken some ribbing for his CIO role from his colleagues in the data analytics world. "I was just at a data conference where people were making fun of me for being in both roles. They said, 'You can't get lumped in with IT — it's just bits and bytes. You won't be respected for the knowledge you have about data.' But it doesn't have to be that way. It depends where the value is coming from, the skill sets of the leaders, and what's important to the company at that time."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do millennials make up a substantial portion of your IT staff? If not, they will soon. Within a few years, millennials — roughly defined as people born after 1981 — will comprise the biggest demographic in the country, overtaking the baby boomers, who are today's most populous generation. By 2020, one-third of U.S. adults will be millennials, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that they will also account for more than 50% of the workforce by that time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Rotary Club members who donate $1,000 or more to the Rotary Foundation get a lot of special attention. They are named Paul Harris Fellows in honor of the organization's founder. They receive a certificate and an elegant lapel pin. It's an important award in the Rotary world, and one that has been around since 1957. But recently it had become the source of a lot of unhappiness.When Discover Financial Services set out to expand its offerings beginning in 2007, the company's legacy technology was an obvious impediment, according to executive vice president and CIO Glenn Schneider. "As with many others who've been around for years and have multiple generations of technology in their data centers, the question was, how do we leverage that?" he says. The company's move into the banking business, with IRAs, CDs and many other types of accounts, made its banking platform an obvious choice for an update. "Our mission is to be the leading direct bank and payments platform," Schneider says. "We are all online, so to create competitive differentiation, we felt the necessity to start at the foundation level itself and create a new platform."To read this article in full or Continue reading
Minda Zetlin