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…
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