There were some great speakers and interesting ideas at the CIO Summit. Here are some random observations:
Sometimes change comes slower than you expect. Nigel Travis, CEO at Dunkin Brands was President at Blockbuster. They experimented with video on demand in the early 90s and it didn't take off. They then were slow to respond to the Netflix challenge.
Have each of your IT employees make 10 friends outside of IT and within your organization. Stephen Laster, HBS CIO, is doing this as a way of connecting his IT organization to his user base.
The Dell CIO Robin Johnson emphasized how they are attacking legacy costs. For example, they reduced the number of applications that they support worldwide from 8000 to 2300 through a combination of turning some off and globalizing others. He also discussed how virtualization and cloud can reduce systems admin costs greatly. Dell then uses these savings to fund innovative new projects.
Mobile technology will lead to an 'abrupt societal shift enabled by converging technology.' specifically mobile devices and the cloud will enable us to move information among our devices as we move from work to car to home. Carl Abrams, an IBM researcher who focuses on future technology trends put forward this opinion in his talk on emerging technologies. I can't wait for my outlook to be able to communicate with my car's GPS and automatically set the directions to my next meeting.
Dr. Abrams also discussed how much smarter computers are getting as processing power is increasing. IBM has a supercomputer that can play Jeopardy and will be on TV sometime soon. There are some YouTube videos available that show it off. The computer has read books and stored information in its database. It then parses the question, figures out the probability that it knows the answer, if this probability is high enough it indicates this (possibly more quickly than its human competitors), and then delivers the answer. This type of problem is called open domain q&a and has some interesting applications in business. Maybe it can help in automating call center support.
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