Tweets from Gartner Symposium 2012

My first Gartner Symposium. Meg Whitman, John Chambers, and Collin Powell were the keynote speakers. I went to several CIO workshops, round tables, and analyst presentations covering innovation, CIO leadership, big data, analytics, and financial management.

Listed below are my tweets from the conference.

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The CIO Paradox - A Must Read

The CIO Paradox by Martha Heller

One day, I hope to write a book and share my best ideas, secrets, and wisdom with fellow CIOs and CTOs. Martha Heller, CIO Magazine columnist, just published her new book The CIO Paradox and has delivered a must-read, must-have reference for IT executives. It is also a great read for CEOs and CFOs who will learn a great deal about the CIO job and its complexities. So when my day comes, Martha will be a tough act to follow.

Martha presents the complexities of the CIO job as a series of paradoxes. Should the CIO focus on cost management, or innovation? How can a global CIO streamline processes yet still support regional and local solutions? How can CIOs be more successful when they are accountable for project success but need business leaders to own the project? How can a CIO communicate IT success when its failures are so visible and impactful to the business?

Great questions and Martha presents CIO stories and general advice throughout the book. I've met several CIOs interviewed in the book at the CIO Global Forum, and they are an exceptional bunch with a lot to learn from. Geir Ramleth, Bechtel Group's CIO, uses a simple formula, Speed = Innovation * Simplicity to remind IT to keep solutions simple in order to target 80% of the payback. Tom Conophy, CIO of the Intercontinental Hotels Group, provides advice to CIOs who need to take on cultural challenges and transform IT's mission to drive innovation. Then there is Ramon Baez, former CIO of Kimberly Clark and now with HP shares some of his secrets about communicating and engaging a global IT workforce.

Part 3 of the book shares some secrets on recruiting IT talent, establishing successors, and hot topics like CIO Board seats and CIO career paths. While some of these are advanced topics, these chapters should help the CIO think expansively about their role and career.

The CIO Paradox is packed with a wealth of advice, and I highly recommend it to CIOs and CXOs.

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Big Data's Managerial Challenges

In my last post, I declared that Big Data Needs to Scale. In particular, CIOs and technology leaders have to get beyond the data management challenges of the volume, velocity, and variety of data and step up to the leadership, management, and talent challenges in using the data to drive decisions. CIOs need to help justify the investment in the organizational change efforts to support big data analytics. They also must cultivate new skills and roles such as data stewards and data scientists.

Harvard Business to the Rescue

Harvard Business' October/2012 issue has several gem articles on Big Data and Big Data: The Management Revolution by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson is a must read. Here are a couple of highlights:

 

On Big Data ROI

The more companies characterized themselves as data-driven, the better they performed on objective measures of financial and operational results. In particular, companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors.

On Big Data managerial challenges

The technical challenges of using big data are very real. But the managerial challenges are even greater. “What do the data say?” Where did the data come from?,” “What kinds of analyses were conducted?,” and “How confident are we in the results?”  
The article ends with five management challenges, and while technology is on the list, it is not in the pole position. I suggest reading the article to get the answer.

About those Managerial Challenges

In my post, Dear Spreadsheet Jockey, Welcome to Big Data I suggested that the era of using spreadsheets as the Swiss army knife of data is over. More advanced tools with such business friendly names like ETL, Data Quality, MDM, and BI are delivering more functionality and data processing transparency, at a cost of developing new talent, expertise, processes, and governance. So an investment in Big Data - even if your data is not that "big", is a journey. CIOs have to train their data subject matter experts to play out the more defined role of data steward, where they are given tools to maintain the integrity of data sources. We have to make sure that Data Scientists are not this generation's spreadsheet jockeys with shiny new tools. Scientists have to be educated on not just providing the answers and insights, but on delivering dashboards and other discovery tools to equip decision makers to make more informed, data driven decisions.

My next post on this topic will cover Data Scientists. Until then, the media is finally catching on to the managerial challenges and while some of these posts are hyped up, they do provide some insight.

Companies would do better at satisfying and retaining customers if they spent less time worrying about big data and more time making good use of ‘small data’ — already-available information from simple technology solutions — to become more flexible, informative, and helpful. - You can't fix stupid, and other arguments against big data.
So, when the advertisements claim that big data will transform your business, remember that big data brings the potential for transformation, not the actual transformation. - The big data fairy tale
Pursuing big data with small, targeted steps can actually be the fastest, least expensive, and most effective way to go.- Big data doesn't work if you ignore the small things that matter

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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.