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You can't have an event at MIT without an Academic Panel.
The academic panel was moderated by Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus from CIO Magazine.
If featured Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, Schussel Professor of Management and Director
MIT Center for Digital Business (CDB), Prof. Thomas Malone Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management and Director MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) and Dr. Jeanne Ross Director Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).
So the CDB, the CCI and the CISR - MIT has alot of academics and alot of centers to keep the academics in.
The academic panel always has a caveat that it could be an ivory tower view of IT and the CIO's job but this panel did a great job.
Brynjolfsson spoke of the current economic condition as a "gale of creative destruction" where the landscape gets cleared by clearing dinosaurs (old business models) and invents new business models and reinvented companies who reinvent by taking advantage of technologies and using IT.
He spoke of this innovation coming from experimentation, measurement, scale - three pieces... exploiting 1 or 2 or 3 in a synergistic way. He used Google as an example saying that they experiment upwards of 300 times a day.
Malone spoke about "collective intelligence" which he should, he runs the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and he referenced Threadless and how they promote T-shirt designs and work collectively. He spoke of the next generation of data processing, he was asked how different this was from traditional business intelligence and I think the answer is that the data will come from various sources both internal and external or even third-party. Traditional BI reporting comes from mining internal data sources and reporting on it, an example of collective intelligence is anonymous health mining from multiple hospitals for public health purposes.
Ross spoke about "unhappy suprises from IT" and the idea that too often IT comes to the business not with "happy suprises" rather "unhappy suprises" and she said IT needs more "happy suprises". IT needs the CEO and the business not to look at IT requests as needing more money or downtime, she advocates that upgrades should be flawless and then self-promoting. She spoke about IT needing a common platform vs. "spaghetti" and that common platform was important.
Not a bad panel, the academics we really plugged in. I wish Ross had spoken in a bit more detail about the "common platform" but I think she was referring to try and unify application.
This may be an echoing of Bob Brennan, CEO Iron Mountain who was eschewing - Don't do more with less. Do less with less. Strategy is about deselection/focus. And when you generate the common platform - you may have to delesect some things, consolidating your operating systems and your databases or moving your backups to a third-party provider allows you to focus on what remains.
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