Message from SIM

MISQE provides research that impacts practice and can provide valuable insights for senior information technology leaders, chief information officers, IT strategists, and SIM members. The research here takes case studies from industry and develops frameworks which model and share best practices and lessons learned. Most important, the research appearing in MISQE supports a partnership between industry leaders and academic professionals. In this edition of MISQE, the topics include cloud services, big data, IT project management, and assessing emerging technologies. All of these timely topics are relevant to IT leaders and decision-makers. In their article, " Cloud Services Practices for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, " Mary Lacity and Peter Reynolds describe the business benefits of cloud services from the standpoint of SME's (small and mid-sized enterprises). These benefits include cost avoidance, cost savings, rapid development, scalability, and better security as compared with in-house information technology services. Big data is a prevalent issue for many IT leaders. In their article entitled, " A Cubic Framework for the Chief Data Officer: Succeeding in a World of Big Data, " Lee, Madnick, Wang, Wang, and Zhang describe the emerging role of the Chief Data Officer. The role of the Chief Data Officer includes internal roles, such as assessing organizational data, and external roles, such as safeguarding external data and reporting. Other roles are partitioning traditional data from transactions-based systems from big data from data warehouse environments and using data sources strategically. The authors present a framework for understanding the role of the Chief Data Officer and its value. Information technology project management continues to be a major challenge, and Ryan Nelson and Michael Morris address the challenge of project estimating in their article, " IT Project Estimation: Contemporary Practices and Management Guidelines. " Based upon the poor track record of IT project estimation over a long period of time, the authors recommend guidelines for improving estimating in emerging agile development environments along with traditional " waterfall " projects. A unique and interesting article on evaluating emerging technologies offers a new look at how CIO's can select which technologies show promise and should be invested in. Amrit Tiwana, in his article " Separating Signal from Noise: Evaluating Emerging Technologies, " identifies sources of " noise " and describes frameworks for assessing emerging technologies which can provide value. This is to share several interesting activities and initiatives within SIM and the SIM Chapters. SIM Leaders continue …