The New Year is usually greeted with a glass of water fizzing with Alka Seltzer. It's often followed by the curation of resolutions and lists of promises to keep in the year ahead.
It's fairly easy for personal goals to flat line once February 1st comes, but professional hopes and aspirations have a different lifespan.
Resolutions for businesses impact more than the individual championing them; brand, revenue and company morale are at the heart of professional resolutions.
No pressure.
CIO Dive asked seven technology executives for their New Year's resolutions and what they're looking forward to in 2019. Here is what they said:
1. Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger:
"In 2019, we (Hyperledger, as a project, as a community) are resolved to show how blockchain and distributed ledger technology can be used to rebuild trust in the digital infrastructure our society is increasingly depending upon.
"In 2018, we saw an increasing gap between the interests and expectations of the public, and the policies and actions at leading technology platforms. People no longer trust what they see or are told online, and don't know how to figure out who to trust."
This has further complicated the digitization of industries such as logistics and finance, and made it more difficult to implement systems that align with progress and development benchmarks, according to Behlendorf.
"In 2019 you'll see many of these systems not just hitting production but creating measurable value. Our resolution is to make that more and more evident to a larger audience, and help more people use it to address their needs."
2. Michelle Dennedy, VP and chief privacy officer at Cisco
"Take the [privacy impact assessments] you did to get ready for GDPR ([and the] rest of world) compliance and create a data map for your critical data assets.
"Sometimes you can't get anywhere if you don't have a map, ask for directions. Or — resolution for 2020 — GPS for data!"
3. Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO at Stack Overflow:
"Personally my resolution is to spend more time learning new technologies.
"In particular I'm very excited about everything around the 'internet of things,' including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and all the new technologies that make electronics much more accessible to a broad audience."
4. Chris Andrews, CIO at Pei Wei:
"We're going to continue to focus on our digital enhancement and also look at omnichannel. And not omnichannel for omnichannel sake, but what really are our guests asking for. Not what I think is cool or somebody at marketing heard at a conference. Really doing some work around how would our guests want to interact with us.
"I try to put a consulting mindset on our group and not just focusing on the fires that we're fighting or what we may have in a project pipeline, but continuing to look to see how we can streamline operations."
5. Rebecca Herold, CEO of The Privacy Professor and co-founder and president at SIMBUS:
"Most people download apps, particularly free apps, then never use them. However, these apps often are collecting data from your smartphone and sending it out to unlimited numbers of others: third parties."
To avoid "unfettered" harvesting of personal data, "review, uninstall and completely remove all apps from your smartphones, tablets and other computing devices that you have never used, and those you've not used in more than a month or two.
"While you're at it, review the privacy and security settings on your remaining apps, and tighten the security settings on them, including implementing two-factor authentication" on all that allow it.
6. Dave Jackson, CIO at Welch's:
"It's interesting because we have a new CEO, who just started [in October] so for me, I'm excited to see where the company direction is going and then where that will lead us.
"Technology-wise, you know, we've been under-invested in our systems from an ERP perspective and application perspective for the last few years.
"I guess, I'm kind of looking forward to the day where we can look at what's out there from an application perspective, where the next ERP is going, where we can add value to the business by maybe investing in say a new planning system or something.
"Instead of replacing our whole EPR, but piece by piece, kind of finding some applications out there that can really help add value and try to move forward."
7. Michael Guggemos, CIO at Insight:
"This rings true every year, but it's always worth repeating in business and especially within technology: ignore the hype.
"While digitization and AI are incredibly important and relevant topics, they are all too often poorly understood, painted with too broad a brushstroke and fall victim to shiny object syndrome, which creates a lot of noise vs. thoughtful conversation.
"Also, stay close to your users, be usability centric, shut things off and always focus on what matters most: your team."
