Enterprises can feel pressured to at least say they keep pace with the latest IT innovations, even if there is no immediate internal gain. The board of directors, customers, and members of the C-suite might like to hear that a company is modernizing, but how does that effort translate into real returns?

What litmus tests do CTOs, CIOs and other tech leaders use to assess results from modernization plans? How do they convey to other stakeholders that the new, much-hyped tech they want might not lead to deliverable returns?

In this episode, Antoine Shagoury, CTO for Kyndryl, and Russell Levy, chief strategy and AI officer for ZoomInfo, discussed these issues. They also shared what tech leaders want the operations side of the business to communicate their needs regarding modernization and the impact they hope to see.

Levy and Shagoury also tackled the “Questionable Ideas ‘R’ Us” tabletop exercise, facing off with hobgoblins, kobolds, and gremlins with misguided ideas on how to realize ROI from modernization.

How tech leadership responds to mass outages can affect internal teams, as well as customer-facing operations.

Reliance on third-party hyperscalers can also mean C-suite tech leadership getting caught flatfooted when outages take down online resources. In late October, AWS and Microsoft Azure went dark temporarily, reminding many companies that they can be at the digital mercy of service providers.

In this week’s podcast, Sunil Peter, CISO and data privacy officer of Maveric Systems; and Pierre DeBois, CEO and founder of Zimana Analytics, discussed how they respond to such situations. They also tackled the latest “Questionable Ideas R Us” tabletop exercises.

What happens when companies have new releases on deck, and it is clear that the dev team is spread too thin?

Teams are always under pressure to deliver, but what if a project calls for overtime across the organization? What happens if those teams are pulled in competing directions?

When major projects are at stake, development teams may face a less-than-ideal circumstance: a race to meet deadlines with near-mandatory overtime.

Such “crunch time” can mean team members get pulled in different directions with little relief in sight until the project is done.

Under such circumstances, CTOs must prioritize where development teams focus, but what happens if other IT resources also need urgent support? New software and apps may need to be delivered, yet existing apps could still need attention.

In this episode of the podcast, Ken Ringdahl, CTO of Emburse, and Larissa Schneider, COO and co-founder of Unframe AI, discuss what happens when teams are spread thin and must deliver, and how they can work to avoid future periods of crunch time.

They also navigated the “Questionable Ideas ‘R’ Us” tabletop exercises, helping the fictional company address its crunch time issues.