A couple months ago 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, both big and small: Intel, Safeway, American Cancer Society, Puppet Labs, NGINX, Stormpath, Stanford Business School, 451 Research and TechCrunch (check out the complete list of participants and session questions).
A cross-section of voices
The idea was to use this cross-section of the tech industry to really learn what was happening in IT today and where it will be tomorrow. As a group we discussed the challenges of the new app-centric world as well as how to leverage both the four mega trends: Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data, and the “three enablers”: Open Source, DevOps and APIs.
We have a series of 10 videos from the event, grouped into three, sections that I will be posting over the next few weeks:
- CIO and IT skills needed for success
- Applications and software strategy
- Cloud and Infrastructure thoughts
Today’s Topic
This week’s topic is, CIO and IT skills needed for success and this first video features Jay Ferro, CIO, American Cancer Society and Barry Libenson, SVP and CIO, Safeway.
As Barry points out, the role of the CIO is completely different from how it was five years ago and the ability to be agile and nimble are no longer nice-to-haves but rather, essential for success. Additionally, as Jay states, it is imperative for the CIO of today to simplify their architecture and virtually become an app shop themselves.
Dell would agree with both Barry and Jay. IT is in a big period of transition and you can learn a lot from the these gentleman and the rest of the think tank :-).
Coming up this week:
- What skills and types of people does IT need today
- What skills does the CIO of the future need
Watch the entire Think Tank
Here are the two sessions that made up the think tank. Each are about 90 minutes:
New Age of Apps and the Delivery Gaps
- Session 1– Welcome to the application-centric world – best practices in the ‘greenfield’
- Session 2– Nexus of forces – CIOs under pressure and the rise of the enterprise developer
Extra-credit reading (previous videos)
- App Think Tank: What do customers expect
- App Think Tank: IT is facing competition for the first time ever
- App Think Tank: The persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era
- App Think Tank: The Web Of C-Level Relationships
Pau for now…
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