At the MIT CIO conference today. About 800 attendees signed up. About 700 showed up across the day. Most found something worthwhile.
First panel: CEO Strategy: Emerging Stronger from the Downturn
Sundar Subramanian, CEO of Knome and Cambridge Technology Enterprises created an analogy. The CIO's right hand is everything to make IT run securely and efficiently. The CIO's left hand is everything done to start innovation. The methodology and discipline which makes the right hand successful does not work for the left hand.
Bob Burke, CEO of ATG on switching to a SaaS model: You need to set the direction, then burn the ships so you can't go back. Your team must be committed to making the new direction work.
All the panelists note that their are people who are great at doing the right hand work and people who are great at doing the left hand work, but it is rare to find someone who can do both well. They recommend having different people focused on each. The CIO being the right handed person and the CTO being the left handed person. Innovation needs to be spun out of the conservative Type-A IT department to succeed.
Bob Brennan, Iron Mountain CEO, recalling a quote he read recently, "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."
General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army as quoted by Tom Peters in Reimagine, DK 2003
Second good panel: How do CIOs Drive Innovation?
CIOs should implement ideation technology to gather and prioritize the thousands of possible innovation ideas from employees, service providers, top local universities, and partners.
Do not depend on just the IT department to create innovation.
Once the top innovation ideas are determined, get the innovators the right resources such as:
- some customers willing to discuss the idea and experiment with it.
- necessary data and system access to build prototypes of their solutions
- funding and C-level support
Innovation ideas should gather momentum or fail fast. Document key assumptions for success, then test them quickly. One key assumption is: Does the innovation engage people quickly?
At the end of the panel, cloudTP asked the panel moderator to ask the audience what was limiting them from innovation. By show of hands, the main issus were cultural and organizational. Funding was only an issue for 3 of 80+ attendees. One attendee shouted out, "resources and timing".
After the session while speaking with Forrester analyst Chris Andrews, he indicated that the key barrier was lack of an innovation strategy and an innovation task force. This seems like a great way to start the transformation from being a maintenance-driven CIO to one who enables innovation.
Third good panel: How do CIOs use Cloud Computing
Gartner analyst notes, "Business buys cloud computing, not IT".