By annie shum | April 2, 2011
Timeless insight: “Think Before You Build”- architecture is about thinking. Slate’s new post on “Have computers made architects less disciplined?”
Think Before You Build
Have computers made architects less disciplined?
Witold Rybczynski considers architecture before computers:
Rigor was equally a part of the Renaissance architect’s working method. This period not only lacked Xeroxes and blueprint machines; it even lacked pencils. All drawings, including rough sketches, were done in ink. A finished architectural drawing required two steps. First, a stylus was used to impress an outline on thick, hand-laid paper. (There was no tracing paper.) Once the barely perceptible ghost drawing was complete, it was inked in. No wonder that Renaissance architectural treatises often seem cerebral; architects spent a lot of time thinking before they started drawing.
Take away message:
“This is not a question of turning back the clock but, rather, of slowing it down—and recognizing that rigor of thought is as much a part of design as making shapes.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2289527/?from=rss
By Barnard Crespi | March 16, 2011
The Mobility and Extended Enterprise Panels will help bring a practical perspective to the question of how to leverage mobility and extended enterprise applications to achieve operational success. [Register Today: http://www.mitcio.com/]
Managing The Extended Enterprise
The classical vertically integrated enterprise has given way to the multi-company ecosystem in many industries creating new opportunities, but also presenting new challenges for coordinating activities across enterprises. When a company becomes adept at leveraging and managing a multi-company ecosystem it achieves what the Boston Consulting Group terms “Systems Advantage.”
What does it take to build and maintain an advantaged system of relationships between a company and its customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and managers? Certainly you need robust, “extended enterprise” applications to achieve tactical success. But to achieve “Systems Advantage,” you also need a clear understanding of the strategic value of these systems, innovative management approaches, as well as seamless and flexible interactions between your company and its partners, customers, and suppliers.
The need is urgent. How will IT rise to the challenge?
This panel will address the “extended enterprise” topic from two angles:
1. What are the strategies and challenges in building the multi-enterprise ecosystem?
2. How to achieve the systems advantage by enabling seamless and flexible connections within the ecosystem?
Mobility – The Next CIO Innovation Opportunity
Enterprises seem to squarely confront and adopt, periodically, at least one irreversible, transformational trend within IT. Mobility may well be the next frontier for innovation and progress within businesses in general and IT in particular.
This panel will explore how key stakeholders are innovating in this emerging space. There will be a moderated discussion and debate around underlying industry, process, people and technology drivers of next generation enterprise mobility. There will also be early lessons for CIOs seeking to innovatively shape the mobility S-curve within their respective companies..
Be a part of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium,
May 18, 2011
Register Today – http://www.mitcio.com/
By annie shum | March 9, 2011
By Jason Hiner | January 3, 2011, 4:30am PST
5. The enterprise warms to Apple and Android
4. The shrinking private data center
3. IT consumerization marches on
2. Desktop thinning
1. Business units absorb more IT
The biggest trend of 2011 will be the continued decline of the traditional centralized IT department. More companies will continue to align their IT professionals with individual business units rather than in a central services group. The demand for corporate-savvy IT professionals who can serve as business analysts and project managers will continue to grow.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/five-hot-business-technology-trends-to-watch-in-2011/43096
By annie shum | March 4, 2011
Howard Anderson’s new post titled “Michael Bloomberg And The CIO Hall of Fame”
@ InformationWeek.com. Building on the success of NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg who’s a former Salomon trader and its computer chief, Anderson used it as a testament to why IT leaders should be rotated into other business roles. http://goo.gl/ViPDj
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg was in town the other day, and I had a short conversation with him (Howard, you shameless namedropper). Bloomberg grew up near Boston and was a less-than-stellar high school scholar before he shipped off to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Years later, when he was so successful, Bloomberg was named the university’s chairman of the board and has been “more than generous” with his riches (read: a $100 million-plus donation). The joke at Hopkins: There are three statues on the campus: Johns Hopkins, Michael Bloomberg — and the admissions officer who let him in.
Bloomberg’s business and political accomplishments got me to thinking: Is he the most successful ex-CIO in American industry? Jim Barksdale went from FedEx CIO to become CEO of McCaw Cellular and then Netscape. Bob Crandall was CIO at American Airlines before rising to CEO. But, no, Bloomberg and his $20 billion fortune still stand above them all.
I use Bloomberg’s story in my MIT classes. Bloomberg went to work at Salomon Brothers right after getting his MBA from Harvard and worked as a trader. Then he got caught in a power squeeze and was “relegated” to running the computer department. Then he got fired — and left with $10 million when Salomon got sold.
Instead of starting another boutique investment banking firm, he started what became Bloomberg LP. His insight was that he knew more about computers than the traders and more about trading than the IT folks. Bloomberg’s first real client for his Market Master terminals was Merrill Lynch, where his proposal was pooh-poohed by the internal IT staffers, who said they could build the application that he was proposing cheaper than Bloomberg’s upstart firm.
That is the same argument we often hear. The internal IT guys don’t want to lose face or power and insist on keeping application development in-house. The CIO at Merrill at the time was DuWayne Peterson, who cut a terrific deal which I’ll get to later. Mike Bloomberg asked when Merrill Lynch’s development team could start this project and was told it would be a year.
So he made them an offer: He would finish the project before the internal guys could start it, and if he and his team didn’t deliver, Merrill Lynch wouldn’t have to pay him. How could Peterson say no? And Peterson got a kicker: 20% of the equity of Bloomberg’s company, which eventually was worth $4 billion. So maybe Peterson belongs in my CIO Hall of Fame as well.
One of the problems most companies have is stovepipe management, and IT is no exception. So why not cycle the hot new MBA hires through IT, and why not cycle the computer science grads through the rest of the company? The quick answer is that the MBAs know nothing (OK, true) and will just get in the way (OK, for awhile) and that the computer science grads may get enamored of the rest of the company and not want to go back (so what?).
In any case, the corporation would benefit. Let’s face it, what we call technology management is more often than not just common sense. Furthermore, IT is too critical to be left to just the IT folks. Look at Goldman Sachs, where the IT managing partner sits on the firm’s management committee and makes more money than the GDP of some Third World countries.
When all is said and done, IT delivers a service. It buys hardware, software, and communications and integrates them into a service-level commitment, very much like a telephone company. It must meet certain levels of performance and it scans for new methods and new technology — just like the rest of the company.
There’s another case for such cross-fertilization: career advancement. With IT growing at a slower rate than it once did, people don’t see the career opportunities they once did. Often, their only upwardly mobile option is to go elsewhere. But if the best and the brightest could see that the whole company is open to them, they would thrive.
By Howard Anderson , InformationWeek
March 1, 2011 08:00 AM
By Administrator | February 23, 2011
As the world economy emerges from a painful recession, organizations are challenged to retain bottom-line diligence while pursuing market sustaining and gaining innovation, in an environment riddled with uncertainty, increased regulation, consumer reluctance and tighter credit. To execute in this “new normal”, organizations seek new ideas and techniques to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.
At the inaugural Optimization for Innovation conference, executives, senior-level practitioners, experts and thought leaders will share real-world experiences and pragmatic 90-day action items to harvest savings and trapped value from existing processes, resources and capabilities. Mark your calendar for March 22, 2011, in Arlington, Va., and register now!
The Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) is an advocacy group managed by the Symposium’s partner, the Object Management Group (OMG).
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