Barton's Blog

The week before last Dell Services held a think tank out in Silicon Valley at the venture firm, NEA.  We had 10 panelists representing both old school and new school organizations:  Intel, Safeway, American Cancer Society, Puppet Labs, NGINX, Stormpath, Stanford Business School, 451 Research and TechCrunch (see complete list of participants below).  I had the honor of moderating the panel.

The group discussed the challenges of the new app-centric world as well as how to leverage both the “Four horsemen of IT du jour”: Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data, and the “three enablers”: Open Source, DevOps and APIs.

You can see more pictures from the event as well as watch the entire think tank, which ran a bit under three and half hours, here.  Additionally, over the next few days I will be posting blogs around four short video snippets from the event.

• Video 1:  What do customers expect
• Video 2:  IT is facing competition for the first time ever
• Video 3:  The persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era
• Video 4:  The web of C level relationships

Some Take-aways

I was really impressed how well the participants gelled as a group, with just the right amount of tension :).  Below are a few of the interesting tidbits I took away (I was surprised how much of the conversation came back to culture)  You can also check out SDNCentral’s summary of the event .

Q: What are the customer expectations of services today?

• They are personalized and immediate (friction is a killer)
• They are agile and rapidly improve
• Available from any device, anywhere and are always on

Q: What big bets are you making?

• “Open Source all the way” — Barry Libenson, CIO,  Safeway
• Mobile first, platform agnostic – Jay Ferro – CIO American Cancer Society
• Hire learners, not vertical experts, we want entrepreneurial problem solvers – Ranga Jayaraman – CIO,  Stanford Business School
• Everything must be services – Das Kamhout – IT Principal Engineer, Intel
• Set up a learning culture, that is tolerant of failure – Luke Kanies, Puppet CEO
• Clean APIs and modularity – Alex Salazar –  CEO, Stormpath

Q: If your son or daughter wanted to be a CIO, what advice would you give them?

• Be really choosey about the company you work for
• Learn to entertain opposing ideas and paths
• Agility, flexibility, adaptability
• Learn to let go
• Learn to be a hacker
• Learn mindfulness

Watch the whole event here.

Participants

• Barry Libenson-SVP and CIO,  Safeway
• Jay Ferro – CIO, American Cancer Society
• Ranga Jayaraman- Associate Dean & CIO,  Stanford GSB
• Luke Kanies – Founder & CEO, Puppet Labs
• Alex Salazar – Co-Founder & CEO, Stormpath
• Alex Williams – Blogger & Journalist, TechCrunch
• Michael Cote – Research Director, Infrastructure Software at 451 Research
• Sarah Novotny- Tech Evangelist, NGINX
• Das Kamhout – IT Principal Engineer, Intel
• Jimmy Pike – Sr. Fellow and Chief Architect, Dell

Extra-credit reading

• IT can’t thrive unless CIO’s can change the culture – SDNcentral
• New Age of Apps” Think Tank to be streamed live –  Barton’s blog

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Monday, February 3rd, 2014 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.