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CIO Corner

Boundaryless Information Flow is Real and Relevant

Boundaryless Information Flow to Manage Our Safety

EA, Business Agility, and Boundaryless Information Flow

Enterprise Architecture: Return on Investment

Deciding on Open Source

Managing the Flow

Certification - A Part of a Virtuous Circle

Directories - If There Were No Directories I Couldn't Find IT

Boundaryless Information Flow & Enterprise Architecture

Thinking Strategically about Certified Products

Architecture: Make IT Work for You

Open Source and Standards

Architecture: An Essential Tool for the CIO

What Keeps CIO Awake

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What Keeps CIOs Awake At Night?

A lot of things keep CIOs awake at night. Like Security. . As Priscilla Guthrie, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Deputy Chief Information Officer points out, “It's absolutely imperative that we look at security from a broad perspective. It's physical security. It's I.T. It's personnel. It's processes. It's data. It's information as opposed to data. And it's infrastructure vulnerability.”

Dealing with change keeps CIOs awake, too. We’ve moved far away from the environments that drove mainframes and functioned well with technological status quo. Rapid, relentless change is now the most important driver, and that change needs to be managed. At the top of the chain, at the intersection of security and change management, is the understanding of security policy. This is where change occurs: Today’s security policy has a different set of rules than the security policy of next week. In order to effect changes in policy, it is imperative that security information flows through the entire system in near real-time. Not just the security policy information, but also the necessary instruments that implement the change in policy.

Dealing with these two intersecting areas alone is a daunting task. A single organization would find it nearly impossible to accomplish by itself.

That is why The Open Group uses tools such as Business Scenarios to look at the big picture--people, processes, policies and information technology. Using this technique, we have focused on understanding the “change makers” of information technology and we have embarked on specific challenges to the I.T. industry to make the changes, such as the Secure Messaging Challenge. At the core of this policy is our vision of Boundaryless Information Flow, a condition in which information flows through a system with the appropriate filters and channels to get the right information to the right destinations all the way “to the edge.”

In the upcoming quarterly conference you’ll see various forums where people are working diligently on many of these problems. Helping each other come up with solutions that are beneficial to the entire I.T. community. You’ll see people working at the technical level, and you’ll see people working at the executive level. All these people working together, seeking to make progress on the pressing issues that keep the CIO awake at night.