“Liability for data breaches that affect customers leads directly to the C-suite. Executives need to personally know how strong their company’s cyber defenses are, as well as the expected responses for attacks or breaches. But according to a recent survey, 40% admitted that they lacked a clear understanding of the cybersecurity protocols within their organizations. This should be an urgent wake-up call to executives that cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously throughout the organization,” writes the author of this Harvard Business Review article. Learn what executives should be doing to ensure security is part of every company initiative, not an afterthought. 

“By taking people out of their functional silos and putting them in self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, the agile approach is not only accelerating profitable growth but also helping to create a new generation of skilled general managers,” write the authors of this Harvard Business Review article. The challenge is that most executives haven’t been trained on agile methodologies, resulting in management that runs “counter to agile principles and practices, undermining the effectiveness of agile teams in units that report to them.” In this HBR article, the authors share “six crucial practices that leaders should adopt if they want to capitalize on agile’s potential.”

The pace of business is accelerating, and organizations are demanding more from their information technology teams. They need IT departments that act as hubs of innovation, not just cost centers.

In The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change, more than 20 contributors from open source communities, companies, and projects offer hard-won lessons and practical advice for creating a more open IT department—one that can deliver better, faster results and unparalleled business value. We invite you to download the guide now.

Talent shortages in IT are nothing new. In fact, CIO Magazine devoted a special issue to the topic in the early 1990s. Even with recent technology slowdowns and whole layers of the IT stack being abstracted at a dizzying pace, the unemployment rate for most IT jobs remains close to zero. Skilled technologists are being recruited in the same way sports prodigies are, often after their first year of college. To look for solutions in this talent-constrained environment, The Enterprisers Project gathered four top IT executives from the Greater Atlanta area for dinner and an evening of conversation. Download the roundtable for the conversation highlights.