(originally published on Nick's Book Blog)

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.