App Think Tank: The Web Of C-Level Relationships

February 6, 2014

Here is the last in a series of videos from the Dell Services Think Tank.

During the event’s first session I posed the question —  given the chance, how would you set up it for the CIO, CMO, business and developers to work together?

NGINX tech evangelist, Sarah Novotny jumped right in, having had a chance to do just this previously at a start up.  The model which she proposed, which many of the room liked, was one where IT would act as a consultancy to the business and provide an ecosystem of services.

Take a listen:

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

App Think Tank: IT is facing competition for the first time ever

February 4, 2014

Here is the second video snippet from the Think Tank that Dell Services held the week before last.  At the event we assembled 10 panelists representing both old school and new school organizations and discussed the challenges of the new app-centric world.

The short clip below features Barry Libenson, CIO of Safeway, Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs and Jay Ferro, CIO of the American Cancer Society.  The three men talk about the pressure IT is under these days as consumerization drives up expectations and shadow IT has crept in.

Videos still to come

  •  The persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era
  •  The web of C level relationships

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

App Think Tank: What do customers expect

February 4, 2014

The week before last, Dell Services held a think tank in Silicon Valley with 10 panelists representing both old school and new school organizations.   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.

The idea of the Think Tank was not to look at technology for technology sake but from the view point of how it could meet customer and business needs.

Given the above, we started with question, “What do customers expect in an application today?”  In the short clip below, Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, Barry Libenson, CIO of Safeway and Jay Ferro, CIO of the American Cancer Society give their thoughts.

Videos still to come

  •  IT is facing competition for the first time ever
  •  The persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era
  •  The web of C level relationships

Extra-Credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

App Think Tank – Some take aways

February 3, 2014

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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Posted by Barton George