I spent two very useful days at a CIO conference this week, so I thought I would share some thoughts and themes. These included
- The maturing of Data Analytics, and how to generate business value from the huge amounts of data we capture. Click here for a really good blog by Chris Skinner on this subject
- How commodity services are moving into the cloud – for example HR systems such as Workday (They now like to call it HCM – Human Capital Management!). What does this mean for IT Service Management, does it becom a broker of services? Will the cloud, and ability of end users to buy IT services, will have the same disruptive effect as the PC?
- Some interesting collaboration tools such as Jive that can sit on top of existing infrastructures to enable people to work better together. This stuff can also be used in customer facing roles, e.g. as a front end to service management tools.
As ever, much of the value of these events is the networking, discussions and CIO led workshops; my favourite was by Andrew Jordan. He is Operations and Technology VP for NBC who were US broadcasters of the Olympics. The subject was innovation – and importantly how to get value from innovation. Andrew talked about culture being central, as I have mentioned in other blogs. Ideas are only the first step, converting them to outcomes with value is the trick in a fast-moving world. At the Beijing Olympics 2008, IPads did not exist, MySpace (remember that!) was 10x bigger than Facebook, the first IPhone had just been released. What will the world be like when we get to Rio in 2016. Andrew’s session deserves a blog on its own another week.
Others talked about Agile methodologies. I wonder if we can apply the same principles Toyota used for transforming car manufature (small teams building a car v long production lines) in the IT service space. Are our narrow technology focused teams like an old style 1970’s car production line? And what does the continued shift caused by everything on mobile devices and power of social networking by customers and staff mean?
Overall, a great thought provoking couple of days.
Mark Jacot 