Braindump: 2009 MIT CIO Symposium

This article was originally posted on May 22, 2009.

This MIT CIO Symposium, my fourth, was themed, “Sustaining CIO Leadership in a Changing Economy,” and I attended sessions as follows:

— CEO Keynote Panel
— Academic Keynote Panel
— CIO Keynote Panel
— Lunch Presentation from Attivio
— Breakout: Enterprise 2.0 Panel
— Cloud Computing Keynote Panel

The CEO Keynote Panel was noteworthy because of the assembled CEOs’ ability to succinctly talk about what they need and expect from CIOs in a changed world. A key concept that they stressed was simplicity. In fact, they emphasized that CIOs should use this downturn as an opportunity to prune their portfolio of projects (and vendors) to focus on those most closely aligned with the organization’s strategy. One CEO’s best-of-show aphorism was “Do less with less,” while another’s was to “Stamp out diversity [of platforms].” The CEO panel also told us that the CIO’s job is to “hold up a mirror to where the CEO is not thinking about the business correctly,” although we all know what a challenge it is to do this directly and still keep one’s job. (link to prev blog article on CIO/CEO exchange)

The Academic Keynote panel is always a favorite of mine, as it represents the chance to listen to some of the best and brightest researchers from MIT relate their thoughts on the “Next Big Thing” in IT. Of the most interest to me was Tom Malone’s assertion that the NBT is “Collective Intelligence,” the collecting and harvesting of knowledge via tools like Google, Wikipedia, and Innocentive. I’m interested in how organizations use social media and collaboration tools to drive efficiency, speed, and innovation, and will follow this trend closely. Professor Malone suggested that perhaps we should be talking less about “Cloud Computing” and more about “Crowd Computing.”

My biggest takeaway from the CIO Keynote Panelwas the emphasis on Portfolio Management, deemed a critical skill/process for CIOs — this should be welcome news to our partner William George Associates, who should benefit from their specialization/expertise in this discipline.

The lunch was punctuated (rather than interrupted, as in the past) by a brief presentation from Sid Probstein, CTO of Attivio, a company I’ve been kind of ambiently following for quite some time via a friend who works there. Their value proposition of integrating SQL-style joins among structured data sources with rich full-text searches of other unstructured data sources could make for a separate blog post on its own, and I will be researching this more.

I had high hopes for the afternoon’s Enterprise 2.0 Panel, not least because I always enjoy Andrew McAfee as a moderator and/or participant. However, I was disappointed in that there was only one CIO actually on the panel, and there was relatively little talk about how enterprises were using Enterprise 2.0 applications behind their firewall. The most interesting answers for me were to the question “Are people acting differently [as a result of these tools]?” Several changes are afoot that the panelists summarized as:

• increased desire to/comfort with “putting one’s thoughts out there”
• the blended lines between private and public communications (save for regulated communications)
• the increased permeability of organizational boundaries and informality of corporate communications
• the increased velocity of information (e.g., wikis for agile development, integrated presence)

The final panel of the day was dedicated to the theme of the “cloud,” loosely defined by the panelists as computing:

• with no capital expenditure (via a third party, outside your organization’s own data center)
• with elasticity of supply (pooled resources delivered over the web)
• powered by software
• providing new business capabilities

One data point of interest mentioned by the panelists was how consistently an upgrade in an organization’s core messaging platform (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes) served as an inflection point for CIOs evaluating moving applications to the cloud. There is enough acceptance of cloud applications (e.g., SalesForce.com) in the marketplace and price pressure to force them to consider this option. Principal barriers to CIOs adopting applications hosted in the cloud were observed to be: regulatory requirements, sunk costs in data centers, and “fear of trying.”

Through the day, there were lots of references to many IT standard heuristics, for example, “5% of revenue dedicated to IT,” “60–70% of all IT expenditures dedicated to maintenance,” etc. but there was also an interesting glut of references to the recently released McKinsey study (pdf) debunking some conventional wisdom about cost savings of cloud computing. The debate has been ongoing since the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and won’t change any time soon.

All in all, this is an event that I look forward to each year. Through KMA’s affiliation with both SIM and MIT, we know many of the attendees, enjoy learning side by side with our clients, and have a significant presence here. We are already looking forward to May 19, 2010.

Some final, relatively random, thoughts and musings from the day:

• “Never waste a crisis” — most of current Fortune 500 companies were formed during past economic downturns.
• CIOs need to do less with less, by de-selecting projects. Focus on customer-facing initiatives.
• CIOs need to “seduce the business people” with capabilities that add value in order to get joint sponsorship/CEO’s ear.
• Four years into my attendance at MITCIO, and I’ve heard presenters refute Nicholas Carr (“IT Doesn’t Matter”) each year. Think he hit a nerve?
• On Federal Economic Stimulus accountability: “We are bound to not get it right the first time.” (evolving processes)
• On Enterprise 2.0: Beware the “trough of disillusionment”phase of its lifecycle.

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.