I am not a Futurist.

This article was originally posted on May 20, 2007.

Nor do I believe I can ever really trust someone with that title. However, I had the occasion to listen to a futurist, various academic big-brained persons, and many very accomplished CIOs at the 2007 MIT CIO Symposium last week.

The conference theme was “Networks for Competitive Advantage: People, Partners, and Processes,” and the keynotes and panel discussions I attended were focused on themes like:

• how CIOs can foster collaboration among their global teams (one idea: hand people in HQ plane tickets and tell them to get out and meet/know their global teams)
• how IT can contribute to marketing efforts in a world of networked consumers (embrace it, be transparent and honest, listen to public forums, make it easy to engage)
• a discussion of whether IT could become “componentware,” a first cousin of the discussion stirred up by Nicholas Carr in 2004

In a recent post, I wrote about the best practice, identified by Forrester in a recent white paper, of CIOs allocating 10% of their time for development activities: learning, inventing, exploring, etc. This was my 2nd trip to MIT’s CIO Symposium, and I can’t think of a better medium for CIO-level learning from panelists and fellow attendees. It is a day jam-packed with very bright and accomplished people asking, answering, debating and challenging, big and relevant questions.

Alternatively, if you’re a CFO-type, the annual MIT CFO Summit is held each Fall.

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