Cioinsight.com Summary Description the Intent

¶ … CIOInsight.com

Summary Description

The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the website, CIOInsight.com, a Ziff Davis publication. CIOInsight.com is specifically designed to serve as an information resource for Director, VP- and C-level executives who are responsible for their company's it infrastructures and systems.

This site is primarily built on a series of interviews with it professionals who are interested in learning how to use their systems and processes more effectively in pursuit of business strategies and objectives. The focus of the site is on the pragmatic, tested concepts from C-level executives who are striving to learn more and accomplish greater integration of their systems with business strategy objectives.

Overall Look and Feel and Apparent Target Audience

The site is designed to convey a high level of credibility to readers, many of which are in senior management positions. The site has a high level of content richness to it as well, organized in a tabular format to include sections for Top Stories, Trends, Case Studies, Research, Expert Voices, Technology, and Opinion. There are also a series of informational areas for those readers interested in a specific area of outsourcing, cost reduction strategies, or research into specific areas as tracked in industry analysts.

What the site does and does not give you

The CIOInsight.com site does deliver a wealth of information specifically in the areas of compliance, it strategies, business process management, case studies, and a series of research links to see what industry and financial analysts are finding from the standpoint of ROI in business strategies from it investments. The site also provides a series of pragmatic articles that focus on key criteria in evaluating outsourcers, and a strong orientation toward measuring results of using enterprise-wide applications overall.

The site however does not provide a more expanded series of tools for completing ROI analysis, for defining strategic interaction of SOAs and the organizations that are standardizing on them, or an assessment of pricing from software vendors. All of these areas are of interest to C-level executives that are reading this website. There is also a lack of mention regarding large ERP system failures, an area no one specifically discusses in print but many C-level it executives are concerned about.

Why the site will or will not be used as part of a professional resources list

Yes, most definitely, it will be on the professional resources list of many college and graduate-level courses in it, and is most definitely bookmarked by many it Directors, VPs, and C-level executives.

Reasons to return back to the site

This site is one of the best in the it industry at capturing what is most critical for C-level it executives and summarizing it down into manageable information. The site also has a strong set of navigational tools for quickly finding informational elements of information. Lastly and most significantly the site has excellent writing which has been honed through users of research by its authors and by their approach to interviewing practitioners in the key fields of it covered on the site. The investigative style of writing brings the entire site a high level of credibility with readers as well.

What information was expected to be found and was not there in general it is difficult to find sites that report back failures of large it projects as the companies involved do not want their names in the public media. That is one of the larger shortcomings of all sites, yet CIO Insight.com does get to the point of discussing failures at the enterprise level and backs away from naming companies. The site also does not mention specific enterprise application area failures including CRM as is shown in the Microsoft Survey (2006) report. While SaaS has also gained significantly in prominence in the it industry there is also little discussion of the hosted aspects of ERP systems as Sweeney (2006) has commented on extensively before.

Links from the site that are helpful

There is an abundance of links for navigating the site, specifically in the areas of case studies, expert assessments of key market trends, research, technology, trends and mid-market adoption of enterprise software. The Web Buyers Guides and Fact Sheets further deliver significant value to the reader, and in each of these areas there are useful tools for evaluating investments in enterprise software.