Approximately 700 CIOs, senior IT and business executives attended the tenth annual MIT CIO Symposium recently to better understand and explore with colleagues the changing enterprise IT environment.
“Many of the organizations here today have had to fundamentally change in order to remain vital,” said Christopher Reichert, director of MIT Sloan Club in Cambridge, Mass.
The most common theme to emerge from the conference was nearly universal discovery that CIOs must become innovation leaders by driving the use of technology within the organization to address the rapidly changing business and economic requirements.
The day began with a CEO panel on the use of power and influence during the process of innovation. The moderator, Joe Chung, managing director and co-founder of Redstar Ventures, said that the problem with IT decisions today is that they tend to be made by HIPPOs (highly paid person’s opinion).
“A recent survey showed that one of the top things that CIOs are tasked with by the CEO is how to bring the company’s value up through innovation. IT systems are the drive of the company’s value. The driver may be the CEOs putting pressure on the CIOs, but priorities are changing and CEOs are looking more to IT to increase company value rather than just focusing on cost,” said Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO, NTT America, Inc.
Next, a panel of MIT professors discussed the growth of Big Data and the effects of mobility, cloud and other emerging IT trends on the amount of data there is today.
“There’s been a lot of hype of what’s been happening with big data. To be successful in IT, there must to be a revolution in management, culture decision-making rather than just being a revolution in technology. Great revolution in science begins with great revolution in management,” said prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business.
As we walk around with smartphones, we are a walking cloud of data that creates more data in one second than there was in the entire Internet just a few years ago, said Brynjolfsson. So what will we ultimately do with all of that information?
Another session focused on the traditional CIO responsibilities and how they must be able to do all of those things in addition to innovating to stay current. The panel was moderated by Shawn Banerji, managing director of Russell Reynolds Associates, an organization focused on leadership succession and search of senior-level executives.
Banerji began with the results of a survey of 985 IT professional respondents in the fall 2012 study by Russell Reynolds Associates and Columbia Business School. According to the survey, CIOs believe the key to IT leadership is driving results and change through people and skills rather than technical ability.
CIOs must fully understand their concrete responsibilities before innovating. According to Russell Reynolds Associates, the traditional CIO responsibilities include: delivering complex programs on time and on budget, managing multiple stakeholders inside and outside of the organization, ensuring the highest standards of information security and serving as an effective strategic partner to the line of business.
