CIO CORNER

This is the MIT CIO Symposium blog. We invite participation from speakers, sponsors, attendees, and interested parties.



The Four Technology Trends that are Changing Business. Andrew McAfee, with Martha Mangelsdorf, Editorial Director of MIT Sloan Management Review

By Barnard Crespi | May 1, 2012

Andrew McAfee, this year’s moderator of the CIO Symposium’s Fireside Chat, recently sat down with Martha Mangelsdorf, Editorial Director of MIT Sloan Management Review, to discuss the four technology trends that are changing business.

In the video webcast, McAfee helps viewers understand what the phenomena of cloud computing, big data, smart computers and social business will mean for innovation, efficiency and business model development. He offers ideas and advice for “riding the technology wave,” letting managers capitalize on these huge technology shifts, rather than being buried under them.

http://mitsmr.com/I9WjhV

McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

You can register to view the full video at http://mitsmr.com/I9WjhV

Innovation Showcase Finalists – 2012 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

By Barnard Crespi | April 22, 2012

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is proud to announce the Finalists for the 2012 Innovation Showcase. These 10 outstanding companies represent cutting edge B2B solutions that combine both value and innovation to Enterprise IT.

“We are very impressed with these top ten Innovation Showcase finalists, as their technologies demonstrate incredible state of the art thinking to today and tomorrow’s challenges,” said David L. Verrill, Executive Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and the Co-chair of the Innovation Showcase. “The Innovation Showcase provides a terrific one-of-a-kind opportunity for these start ups to gain a larger visibility in front of IT executives, key stakeholders, and venture capitalists.”

The 10 finalists are:

  • Adaptivity from Charlotte, NC – Adaptivity provides innovative software-based solutions to enable IT transformation including data center evolution, application portfolio rationalization, and cloud enablement.
  • Cogent Mobile from Cambridge, MA – Cogent Mobile redefines CRM productivity for field sales professional by leveraging a voice recognition user interface in functional use cases.
  • Desktone from Chelmsford, MA – Desktone’s software platform enables Desktops as a Service, offering full-featured Windows virtual desktops delivered from the cloud to any device, including tablets and smartphones.
  • eIQNetworks from Acton, MA – eIQnetworks is the only global provider of a unified situational awareness solution serving the largest enterprises around the world.
  • Gazzang from Austin, TX – Gazzang provides cloud-based security solutions and operational diagnostics to help enterprises secure big data and maintain performance in the cloud
  • LockPath from Overland Park, KS – LockPath’s innovative software provides keen insight by correlating security information from multiple data sources with current regulations and policies to gauge risk.
  • Nimbula from Mountain View, CA Nimbula delivers a new class of cloud infrastructure software enabling enterprises to build scalable, highly-automated, secure and easy to use clouds
  • Traction Software from Providence, RI Traction TeamPage makes it easy for people to communicate, work together, and stay on top of what’s happening anywhere in their business, including line of business systems or the public Web.
  • TwinStrata from Natick, MA  TwinStrata, an innovator in cloud-based data storage solutions, offers enterprise-class gateway products that make cloud storage fast, safe and easy to use.
  • uTest from Southborough, MA  uTest provides in-the-wild testing services that span the entire software development lifecycle – including functional, security, load, localization and usability testing.


Details on the showcase are available at: http://www.mitcio.com/innov.php

The Innovation Showcase will take place at 6:20pm in the Kresge courtyard tent on Tuesday,
May 22, 2012, at MIT, in Cambridge, MA. The full agenda of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is
available at www.mitcio.com

Accenture Technology Vision 2012: Emerging Technology Trends for IT Leaders

By Barnard Crespi | April 15, 2012

Accenture publishes its technology vision annually. It is a distillation of our extensive research over the course of the previous 12 months, the experiences of our research teams and the input of our clients. In it, we outline the emerging technology trends that forward-thinking CIOs will use to position their organizations to drive growth and high performance, rather than just focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.

Business leaders now accept that their organizations’ future success is bound up with their ability to keep pace with technology. CIOs have to play a key role in helping these business leaders recognize and seize the opportunities enabled by new trends—but the price of progress will have to be paid, along with new risks assumed.

Accenture has identified six technology trends that will influence business over the next three to five years:

  • Context-based services. Where you are and what you are doing will drive the next wave of digital services.
  • Converging data architectures. Successfully rebalancing the data architecture portfolio and blending the structured with the unstructured are key to turning data into new streams of value.
  • Industrialized data services. The ability to share data will make it more valuable—but only if it is managed differently.
  • Social-driven IT. Realize that social is not just a bolt-on marketing channel. It will have true business-wide impact.
  • PaaS-enabled agility. The maturing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market will shift the emphasis from cost-cutting to business innovation, supporting rapid evolution for business processes that need continuous change.
  • Orchestrated analytical security. Organizations will have to accept that their gates will be breached and begin preparing their second line of defense—data platforms—to mitigate the damage caused by attacks that get through.

Download the full Accenture Technology Vision 2012 Report

Enterprise Mobility 3.0

By Barnard Crespi | April 6, 2012

In just a few weeks [May 22,2012] at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium a panel of senior technology and business executives will share their experiences of piloting through this transformation in their organizations with leading and leadership around Mobility 3.0.

Enterprise Mobility 3.0 is the inherent face of the new untethered enterprise. It will have deep imprints in the business processes, IT infrastructure and security policies in the company. In a world where work-related information is accessible, anywhere, anytime, new powerful and smarter phones, tablets, and other Internet-enabled devices will usher us into a new era of countless opportunities and exciting challenges. These challenges loom – Mobility 3.0, after all, speaks to a certain level of maturity attained within enterprises – some new, some not-so-new. For example, security policies will have to be revisited for viability and sustainability. Productivity, agility and other business metrics will have to be measured with some rigor. Organizations will also have to measure if the investments in Mobility 3.0 are finally generating the payback and ROI that the executive suite has been looking for.

Moderated by: Susan Nunziata, Editor-in-chief, CIO Insight, the panelists are an all-star cast of cross industry practitioners including:
+Todd Schofield, Global Head – Enterprise Mobility, Standard Chartered Bank
+Ashish Mahadwar, SVP – SAP & Enterprise Mobility Practices, Cognizant
+Eric Scace, CTO WWPass Corporation

Join your peers in shaping the future. Be a part of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, May 22, 2012. Register today.
Details: MIT Campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Date: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 Full Day event
For more information visit: http://www.mitcio.com

These are the Top 25 Most Social CIOs in the Fortune 250

By Barnard Crespi | April 6, 2012

By: Mark Fidelman (Fobes)

“One thing a person cannot do no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”Thomas Shelling, Nobel Prize winner.

Imagine a CIO who had never configured a router.  Imagine a CIO who had never led an IT project.  Imagine a CIO who had never managed the implementation of servers into a server environment.  Imagine a CIO who had never sourced, negotiated or selected a solution from an IT vendor.

Now imagine if this CIO had been asked to design your organization’s next generation network infrastructure.  Would you trust her? Read more..