Wednesday 11 February 2009

IBM CIO Leadership Exchange, Shanghai, Feb 09

This is a report from a IBM Conference titled, "CIO Leadership Exchange". It is the third in a series and is in Shanghai (first time held in the East).

CIOs asked IBM to run the series of Exchanges.
The title this year is:
Building a Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda

--> Main theme of the meeting is to consider the CIO role in creating a 'smarter planet' - which means primarily smarter use of information, and the consequences of the current financial crisis.


... Overall - there were some interesting and challenging presentations, others were superficial.


(I) Smarter Planet - A mandate for CIO Leadership: Interesting session with relevance to HE

Sam Palmsano: Chairman, President and CEO for IBM


Leadership Exchange originated by academic institutions three years ago (Harvard), supported by IBM. Much has changed over the three years.

The central theme is that the world is smaller, flatter and smarter. Every day systems and processes are connected, instrumented, with embedded intelligence. This has profound effects for innovation. There are 2b people on the Internet, by 2010 there will be a billion transistors for every person.

The digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.

Challenges:
  • 40-70% of electrical energy is lost due to inefficiencies in the grid
  • Healthcare systems are not systems
  • Financial markets spread risk but cannot track it
  • Consumer products and retail industries lose about $40b annually due to inefficient supply chains
  • A world where 820m are undernourished
A review last August by IBM found activities in many areas which are addressing the challenges. Since then $3trillion will be applied to stimulate growth and jobs. IBM advised the Obama team last autumn: broadband, healthcare, and better electrical grids.

CIOs have new challenges; need to balance cutting costs while preparing and connecting for the future. Avoid just battening down. Means bridging between technology and future business direction.

The financial crisis will last beyond 2009; CIOs have opportunities as the world is ready for change. Change in the business model, change in role in the company, change of use of embedded intelligence. The key is to come out of the crisis stronger than you went into it.


Mark Hennessy (VP and CIO): CIOs - Catalysts of Change: Leaders for a Smarter Planet

As CIO, walk tightrope. Manage legacy system <> develop new capabilities. Long term thinking <> short term execution. Have three teams:-

- Run team: smart datacentres; social networking. Datacentre: sensors manage energy consumption, virtualisation, automation simplifies provisioning. Use cloud (Tivoli)

- Transform team: business process simplification (don't automate chaos). Agile development methods. SOA flexibility and savings.

- Innovate team: IBM changing from multi-national corp. to globally integrated organisation. Global talent management: outcome-based model; high-performance culture.

Richard Williams (CIO, AstraZeneca) - The CIO as a Catalyst for Change

It can take 8-12 years to develop a new drug to market (cost $800m).

AstraZenica strategy is:
  • Renew, but not abandon, our strategy; industrialize service in federated environment; power of one
  • Resolve to drive business value; sense of purpose; connect the network
  • Release through strategic partners; Service effect contracts (I am going to measure partner on basis of business outcome, not SLA - you have as much accountability as I do)
Very clear business objective: "new medicines for patient health"; what is our equivalent objective(s)?

Discussion (moderated by Peter Williamson - Univ of Cambridge)

Need to get CEOs involved with CIOs work on regular basis. Visibility of where CIO spending time and investment is important. How does investment translate into efficiency of organisation change, quality of product.

Social networking is growing in importance. Half of IBM uses wikis. Blogs and IM are important. These cannot be measured in terms of ROIs, but are seen as strategically important and will improve the collaboration.

AstraZenica does not have an IS strategy, it has a business strategy of which IS is a part. Then there are regular reviews to see if business value is achieved.

(II) Applying New Intelligence and Knowledge - A Systems Approach: Very company specific and not especially relevant to HE...

Gini Rometty (Senior VP, Global Sales and Distr. IBM)

Faster
Right
Predictive: remove risk in a decision


Dan Deasy (CIO, BP):

IT innovation is dramatically changing the way BP works: Instrumentation, interconnected, business intelligence.

BI is crucially important to enable them to predict customer need.

Use 185Tflops of compute power to improve seismic accuracy to predict well positions.

Agnes Mauffey (CIO, Michelin)

Collaboration tools are essential for the company. Intelligence used to give competitive advantage.


Discussion (moderator Dr Marianne Broadbent):

Clear that IBM is helping both companies is many aspects of their operation. Much of their IT is outsourced.


(III) Smarter Planet - IT for the 21st Century - interesting session

Mike Daniels (Senior VP, GTO, IBM)

The average utilisation of Intel processors is 6%.

A smarter planet needs a smarter infrastructure. There is:
54% increase in storage each year.

Eric Clementi (VP, Strategy, IBM)

Need dynamic infrastructure: virtualisation + automate + standardised.

30b embedded RFID tags by 2010
1/3 of world's population on the web by 2011
4b mobile subscribers globally at end of 2008

Cloud computing is emerging in the enterprise from the consumer Internet. It is a consumption and delivery service.

For the enterprise it will be a hybrid delivery model: private cloud and public cloud. This is followed up in the subsequent Cloud break-out session.

Frank Gens (Senior VP and Chief Analyst, IBM) - Convener of Discussion

Successful industrial clouds have well defined rules, regulations, management; and often a third party providing the service to enable separate users to have independence.

A key issue within this is Identity Management.

(IV) Breakout Session - Cloud Computing: Dr Willy Chiu, Dr Jim Comfort, Robert Rosier, Paul Lu - interesting session - led to new thoughts for Oxford

Cloud computing - a disruptive new paradigm. See Economist article. There is an interesting IBM perspective on cloud computing.

IBM has 9 Cloud centres around the world.

Grid computing (1990s), Utility computing, Software as a service, Cloud computing: so evolutionary.
  • Software as a service (eg Googlemail)
  • Platform as a service (SOA)
  • Infrastructure as a service (Green, virtualised and scalable - optimised for security, data integrity)
Develop in the cloud; Deploy in the cloud; Deliver services from the cloud; Overflow to another cloud

China has an cloud computing centre built by IBM, 11 more being created. Promotes s/w start-up company growth.

Moving towards: Private Cloud - Public Cloud - with single management view (can 'pull' applications from one to the other). IBM uses - C loud management tools.

Google/Amazon are not full Public Clouds as do not have security or full service quality guarantees.

iTricity Cloud Computing Centre (Netherlands) - IT as electricity. Infrastructure as a service, which is compliant (to Basel-II, SO, Healthcare). Will provide cloud computing on customer premises! if excess, then trade back resources.

(V) Breakout Session - Using New Intelligence - Real Decisions in Real Time: Mark Chapman, Jeff Jonas, Brenda Dietrich, Nina Schwenk (Mayo clinic) - really interesting and thought provoking session

How do you drive intelligence from all the data?

The Smart Planet is all about intelligent decisions. Data is both structured and unstructured. Analytics can be: descriptive, predictive, prescriptive. An example IBM has worked on is Traffic Prediction in Singapore.

Healthcare is messy; data are not clean. In the 21st century - more evidence based treatment is expected, more pressures to provide regulatory data, expectation that personalised treatment. Genomics is foundation for what healthcare can be in the future, but technologies for gathering, analysing, storing not in place. Knowledge gradient is important.

The data is the query -- More data is better and faster -- bad data is good for you (in some areas). The data must find the data ... and the relevance must find the user!

Need to extract and enhance information as data is collected.

(VI) Deepening Enterprise Capability - Intelligent, Interconnected Leadership - not very CIO focused

Harvey Koeppel

CIO Leadership: Developed competency model for CIOs. "The three top competencies for CIOs are: leadership, contribution to business strategy, and talent management. CIOs have to convert their teams as themselves so they all have new capabilities."

Dr Marianne Broadbent (Senior Partner, EWK International)


How do you invest in the downturn? Experience isn't what it used to be.

[Some case studies were considered of companies which have already refocused in view of the financial downturn.]

Some organisations have addressed the downturn, changed focus, accelerated succession, invested now for streamlined future - should the University do the same?

Joe Locanndro (Director, CLP Group)

Based on a five-year research project, Good to Great answers the question: “Can a good company become a great company, and, if so, how?” Jim Collins

Use human capital strategy balance scorecard; improvements evident.

Seek to understand, seek to be understood.


(VII) Building a Smarter Enterprise - Leading Change, Embracing Disruption - disappointing apart from summary from Sam Palmsano

Bruno Di Leo (General Manager, IBM)

IBM is committed to being number 1 IT partner.

Disruption speaks to 'driving change'.

Peter Williamson (Prof of Int. Man., Cambridge)

Best selling book: 'Dragons at your door'.

We need to move beyond 'cost cutting' to 'cost innovation'.

15% of today's market leaders used the recession to vault to the top.

CIO agenda in a value-for-money world:
  • Business cases for IT investment based on Cost Innovation: reduce cost of variety and customisation, roll-out products to mass market quickly.
  • Enabling Global Innovation: need to globalise innovation and globalise the supply change
Quality vs cost becomes value for money
High technology at high end becomes high technology to mass markets


Dr Jai Menon (Dir, Bharti Enterprises)

Bharti Artel are growing by 2.5m customers every month.

Time to evolve from 'best practices' to 'next practices'.

Conversation


Use the mobile as your PC.

The view expressed is that the CIO has to run more than a technology function and build a business function, so that no longer issue of IT being business aligned. Thus, IT staff through the department spend part of their careers working on business functions.

Sam Palmisano - Closing Remarks

CIO Leadership: began role definition, mentoring, ...
Do CIO survey every few years with benchmarking analysis.

So now need to set goal that CIOs do role beyond technology function.

Now is the time to change the Business model.