Where in the room is the CIO?

Here is another recent finding that talks about the apparent ‘downsizing’ in the influence of the Chief Information Officer.

http://www.networkworld.com/research/2008/040708-cios.html?netht=rn_040708&nladname=040708

• How do you see the pendulum swinging? 
• Where do you find CIO’s getting ‘placed’ in the executive pack? 
• How are you building the necessary competencies within your CIO team to be on par with partners in Finance (aka CFO), Operations (the COO) etc? 
• What can you do to get back in the room if you are looking outside-in? 

Let us know what you think … let the discussion continue!

The B Word - Should Facebook be b****** @ work?

Facebook has taken ‘Generation Next’ by storm.  Is Corporate America ready for the Facebook Generation?  eWeek explores this question in an interesting article at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Should-Facebook-Be-Banned-from-Work/?kc=EWKNLEDP041108A

What do you think?  Should Facebook be banned in the workplace?  Even the experts are divided … read on.   Read what some of us think but most importantly let us know what you think.   Do you think corporate America is ready for the Facebook generation?  What is your company doing to be best positioned to leverage the opportunity and balance the risk?  What are the real leaders in this space upto?

Perception is reality - but what about the other way around?

While researching a new talk, I came across a study on the role the brain plays in adjusting reality to better fit our perceptions. Think about that for a second. In support we have long believed that perceptions become a customer’s reality. But this research shows that even realities like touch and taste can be altered by our perceptions.

Expectations have long been studied by psychologists. What we expect plays a big role in determining how effective certain medications are, for example. Now there is additional research showing the brain does even more active ‘adjusting’ of our senses than previously thought. Consider the following experiment done on volunteers by scientists from Caltech and Stanford.Volunteers were asked to take a sip of wine, swish it in their mouths for six seconds, swallow it and then rate it. Before they tasted each wine, they were told what the wine cost (between $5 and $90 a bottle). The catch? The wine prices were random and arbitrary. But you can probably guess the results. When rating how much they liked the wine, they gave the more “expensive” wines higher scores.

Analytics are the heart of Balancing Innovation and Cost Leadership

Analytics are the heart of Balancing Innovation and Cost Leadership In Your Business.  With ever increasing business drivers and unlimited choices to customers across the globe, you not only need to know what, but why business events are occurring. What is going to happen and how to prepare for the unknown business challenges?  Here, the Analytics, when embedded within the business events, will determine how your business will remain competitive and profitable. Traditional Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence solutions do not serve well in today’s business models because they were designed to capture information purely from transaction systems (structured) and importantly,  after the fact. Later when intelligence is derived from the captured information and interjected back in the business process, it is too late – the opportunity (customer!) is gone.  You are left with a lost-click impression.

Enterprise 2.0 Technology Enabler - Hype, Hope or 2010 Mainstream?

With the advent of Web2.0 tools and services such as Blogs, wikis, RRS, social networking, social bookmarking and mashups, the enterprise has more innovative tools than ever for collaboration, knowledge sharing, search, discovery and collective intelligence among distributed workforces, partners and customers.

This panel will offer insights into Enterprise 2.0 and discuss how companies can embrace it to gain competitive advantage. The panelists will discuss such questions as:

• How should CIO respond to Enterprise 2.0?
• How do people adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools for the workplace?
  How are these tools linked to corporate strategy and performance?
• What kinds of Enterprise 2.0 tools are appropriate for your organization and various business functions?
• What are the primary risks of using Enterprise 2.0?
• What are the best practices of Enterprise 2.0 implementation?

Come ready to listen to and engage in an interactive session exploring the following questions and more…

Don’t Multi-task as you read this!

Newsweek recently ran an article that spoke about the downside of something many of us take for granted, and perhaps even tout as a ‘core competency’ - multi-tasking.  Researchers have apparently found a negative correlation between multi-tasking and rational decision making. 

Now, if that’s not scary enough, consider this - a survey of 5000 people conducted in Finland found that 79% of the respondents engage in multi-tasking.  And women apparently mult-task better than men!  In that survey half the respondents believed they were ‘productive’ while multi-tasking and 31% described themselves as ‘busy’.

What do you think?  Are you multi-tasking even as you are reading this blog?  In your experience, does multi-tasking help you do more, or are you more efficient being ’sequential’?  How do your teams function best?

Read the Newsweek article here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/130563

Find more about the Nokia survey at: http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1170280

Innovation Rules

Read this fascinating article by Professor Heskett on Management Innovation.  http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5887.html

“Hamel envisions a future in which the goal of management is to build “nimble” organizations in which innovation is everyone’s job”

In an age where generation X’s and Y’s are coming on board with new ideas and insights how do you think organizations will adapt, accept and eventually adopt the high energy, low-threshold for hierarchy style of the next generation of recruits?

Are you blazing a path in creating avenues for these ‘community colleagues’ to offer break-through ideas and innovation in your enterprise?

What does your ‘established’ management team think of this new wave of energy?  Are you poised to channelize this energy and innovation, or is this just a fad? 

Let us know … share your comments right here at the MIT CIO Corner.

Enterprise 2.0 - The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration

Check out this fascinating article in the MITSloan Management Review on Enterprise 2.0.

“There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users. This article offers a paradigm that highlights the salient characteristics of these new technologies, which the author refers to as SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals).”

Click the link to learn more … http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2006/spring/06/

Super Early Bird Registration ENDS TOMORROW!

We know you are going to attend the CIO Symposium, so why not save some $s while you are doing that.  Maybe you can even bring another person along with some of the cost saves!  After all this symposium is about balancing innovation and cost leadership in your firm, so lead the way…

http://www.mitcio.com/registration.html

Welcome

Welcome to the MIT Sloan CIO Syposium ‘CIO Corner’ blog.  We are excited to offer you a ‘virtual commons’ where you can discuss and debate the hot topics that our star studded panelists and esteemed participants will deliberate on in May.

The CIO Corner is your space so feel free to share your ideas, thoughts, analysis, judgments, opinions (you get the idea) on any of the symposium topics or related domains.

For ease of use we have created some standard categories that mirror the symposium tracks and topics.   Feel free to use these as a starting point, but don’t feel limited by them.  If you post content “outside” of these areas, we will be glad to help categorize them for ease of use (ignore the men and women behind the curtain!).

Well, without much ado … let’s chat.  Welcome again to the MIT CIO Sloan Symposium CIO CORNER … we hope you will make this your desitination of choice for conversations and commentaries leading up to the symposium and well beyond.

Ciao, MITCIO 2008 Team