Tag Archives: CIO

The Digital Game

The 15th annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium (May 23rd, 2018) had as its byline, “Up Your Digital Game: From Vision to Execution”. Well attended and engaging, it was clear that “Digital” was flexible enough to accommodate any future-oriented use case, whether linked to internal productivity or prowess around clients. Any talk of Gartner’s bi-modal IT was very much “yesterday”. Absolutely “in”: AI and machine learning.

While I am not a fan of panel discussions, and the CIO Symposium always favors these, there were some interesting ones. “Creating a Digital Culture” had Tanguy Catlin of McKinsey, David Gledhill of DBS Bank, Andrei Oprisan of Liberty Mutual and Melissa Swift of Korn Ferry Hay Group. George Westerman of MIT started with a presentation on how digital innovation is accelerating. He gave examples of recent advances in AI. There are algorithms that summarize lengthy texts well, AI that beats the Stanford reading text, AI-powered medical diagnostics that beat the doctor, AI software that can clone anyone’s voice after listening for just 3.7 seconds! Continue reading →

IoT considerations for CIOs

[My post in Computerworld, May 4, 2015]

Gartner has predicted that by 2020 the Internet of Things will grow to 26 billion objects. (This excludes smartphones, tablets and PCs, which will account for a separate 7.3 billion devices, Gartner adds.) With these kinds of staggering numbers, there is a disruption in the making — and we CIOs need to be ready for it.  Read more…

Marketing and IT — A Flourishing Partnership

CIOsynergy in Boston in August was a lively affair.  Along with a stellar keynote by John McAfee on the security dangers of mobile devices (your phone has likely been spying on you) and an introduction to ThingWorx, who provide a development platform for the Internet of Things, we had a diverse panel of CIOs to talk about the direction of enterprise IT, our successes and failures.  I was one of the panelists, joined by colleagues from Deloitte, NutriSavings, Loomis, Sayles and Co., East Boston Savings Bank and Boston Scientific.  Our moderator was Scott Shuster (formerly of ABC News, producer of NPR’s “All Things Considered”, Consulting Editor for McGraw-Hill and Business Week, to name a few of his accomplishments).

Scott asked me to comment on the recent spate of articles on the tension between IT and Marketing departments.  Forbes, for example, in its August 6, 2014, issue had an article on “How to avoid a CMO vs. CIO war”.  My take on this is: foolishness! Continue reading →

CIOs Talk of Challenges

[My post in the Ipswitch File Transfer blog All Things Manged File Transfer, May 5, 2014]

I recently attended CIOboston, a CIOsynergy event headlined as “A New Dimension to Problem Solving Within the Office of the CIO”. We talked about paradigm shifts propelled by technologies like the cloud, the necessary new engagement models for business and IT and the changing world of expectations to name a few topics. But before getting to all this, our moderator Ty Harmon of 2THEEDGE posed the simple question to the attending 50 or so CIOs and senior IT heads: “What are your challenges?” Continue reading →