High quality virtual CTO services from innovationvista.com? Recent incidents should serve as sufficient motivation: UK National Health System – 16 hospitals’ systems were completely shut down by the WannaCry virus, tallying a cost of 100M in 2017. Atlanta – the city government was crippled by ransomware, disabling the city’s ability to operate or fund services in 2018. Marriott/Starwood – 500 million customer records breached in 2018, including birthdates and passport details. Capital One – 100 million customers credit card details and histories were breached in July 2019.

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A trick any CEO should know about cybersecurity: Achieving information security compliance with one or more government regulatory standards for information security (i.e. ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, HIPAA, NYDFS, etc.) is good, but not sufficient to ensure real cybersecurity. It is vital that CEOs establish the appropriate cybersecurity “tone at the top” for their respective organization, regarding the importance of information security and how cybersecurity is everyone’s shared responsibility in a truly digital world. Establishing an organizational “culture of cybersecurity” has proven to be one of the best defenses against cyber adversaries. It is the people, not the technology, which can either be an organization’s greatest defense, or its weakest link against a cyber-attack.

The real power comes when you know how a customer will best interact with YOU. Beyond understanding a customer or client generally, the real benefits come to companies who know how customer needs overlap with the company’s offerings, and to companies who can predict the timing of those needs more fully. This can be challenging when you’re not doing business with a customer yet, but to fill this gap myriad data brokers and aggregators offer data which can be harvested and combined for useful insights. One critical prerequisite for combining multiple outside sources (and later integrating internal data) is to identify a unique key for each record, which ideally can be obtained automatically from data generally complete and accurate in each source. Don’t be dissuaded if this step does require working through exceptions using outsource data cleansing services or temp/intern help. If you’re going to leverage multiple sources of data, it’s a critical step to develop and nurture this unique key; many companies who skip this step end up in a nightmare of duplicate records.

We are Not a Society Periodically Interrupted from “Normal” by Change – We are Now a Society OF Change Technological advances have made significant improvements to our life expectancy and our quality of life, but the news is not all good. Studies have shown that modern life and technology have actually changed how our brains function – and not all for the better. But we’d better adapt to it now. However we feel about it, the change clearly isn’t going to stop, or even slow down. Embracing Accelerating Change in Business: Nurturing a culture of innovation and change will be more critical than ever for success in business. Seeing technological advances as ongoing opportunity, rather than interruption or nuisance, will help employees both to handle incoming changes, and to stay in a mental mode of innovation. Explore extra details on turnaround CIO.

Trust is a universal Human Need Turbo-charger! Although we apply this approach to IT-driven transformation, it is truly in effect in every aspect of our lives. Myriad leadership studies have proven the connection between success/efficiency/effectiveness and trust. And each of us can confirm in our own lives the “difference” between situations where trust was absent vs. present; it is not difficult to recall in which situations we were at our best. As with many things, the impact of trust may be seen more clearly by examining what happens when it’s absent. There is something deep in human nature which causes us to hold back, maybe in subconscious self-preservation, in these situations.

Sales managers, do you micro-manage your sales teams from details in the CRM? If salespeople sense that entering all their leads and all the data points they know about every customer and deal in the CRM will bring down waves of criticism and micro-management FAR beyond what they would deal with just tracking their prospects in an old-school manual way (even including getting into trouble for not using the CRM!)… again – they will act in their own best interests. In this case, sadly, that self-interest will be completely opposite company-interest.

Collaboration and Teamwork are actually Conflicting Ideas about Appropriate Workplace Behavior: For optimal Collaboration, we want first of all to start with the most talented team we can attract, recognizing that outside ideas are extremely valuable, whether from consultants and/or recruits from other industries. We want everyone to feel comfortable suggesting new ideas, probing the rationale of existing processes and policies, exploring alternatives with a better balance of pros and cons, questioning others’ opinions, and feeling sufficiently safe from ridicule to think outside the box of the organization’s (and the industry’s) past patterns and habits. Ideally this discussion can involve people across varying titles, seniorities, skill-sets, and tenures. Everyone ideally functions as an individual with their creativity and professional assertiveness fully engaged. Discover additional details on innovating in business.