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Association Mag Review: CIO Executive Council

The second in my series on association publications, this time I'm doing the CIO Executive Council's magazine which is called, appropriately enough, CIO. The article I focused on was a pretty good one that focused on strategic partnerships. Here's a graphic that illustrates the issue. I thought the magazine was very well done and pretty slick. The production quality was seriously like Newsweek.

Anyway, the piece featured Campbell Soup's CIO, a woman called Doreen Wright. Here's a case study of the issue from IBM themselves. Anyhow, the article was pretty good--but it made partnering sound pretty scary--at least that was my takeaway. Apparently "strategic partnerships" fail like 50% of the time. Above is a graphic that covers some of the issues one needs to look out for.

Not being a member of the Executive Council, I thought the magazine did a good job of covering current issues in the field and talking about big-picture stuff. I'm not sure how I would feel if I were in a smaller organization, it was fairly focused on Fortune 500 types of issues--maybe that's their overwhelmingly predominant demo. The other thing I noticed is that there weren't many plugs for membership, and the sense of community was not there, it was pretty advertiser driven. I wonder if they sell a lot of subscriptions to nonmembers. Would be interesting to find out.

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