Mark P. McDonaldSunday afternoon starts the last in this spring’s series of CIO leadership forums. With more than 400 CIOs registered to attend, this year’s forum series has brought more than 1,000 CIOs together in sessions held in Dubai, London and now Phoenix. The focus of the forum remains on the idea of Amplifying the Enterprise, which is the theme for Gartner’s 2012 CIO agenda.
Amplification reflects the role of technology in changing not only the way the enterprise works, but also the nature of how it creates value and generates revenue. These are critical topics in today’s environment as global economic conditions continue to change. That constant change drives demand for technology, information, connectivity and collaboration. Constant change also requires adopting new ways of thinking, acting and executing to create results. The tools, techniques, ideas and experiences associated with winning today and for the future form the agenda for this year Phoenix CIO Leadership Forum.
CIOs know that they face a future where old answers to old questions are no longer sufficient. How they change the customer experience, remove distortions and generate enterprise adaptability all pose new challenges that require new answers. That need for new ways of managing, leading, working, etc. within the organization. It is driving a unique feature of this year’s CIO Leadership Forum – an invitation to a Hackathon.
A hackathon is an event where people with a shared interest in a collaborating intensively on answers to that issue. Originally applied to developing software, the creativity and energy of a hackathon can also be applied to complex issues, like management and IT innovation, where there are no simple answers.
At this year’s forum, Polly Labarre from the Management Innovation Xchange or MIX, will kick off a jointly sponsored management hackathon dedicated to exploring new ideas on the topic of:
IT’s role and strategic relevance in creating an ‘adaptability advantage’ for their organization.
IT has been both the hero and villain when it comes to enterprise adaptability. A hero as IT has creating the management information systems that support decision-making, collaboration and coordination. A villain in terms of the speed of strategy execution as often times IT is both the long lead-time and bottleneck for strategy execution.
IT needs new answers and insights into the area of adaptability and how it plays in IT’s strategic relevance. Business executives are more technology savvy than ever before. They are using that technology savvy to open markets, attract customers, increase efficiency, innovate products, etc. All using technology that is not necessarily limited to IT. This is creating a situation where
How will the hackathon work?
We have all seen email chains, group discussions or ‘Gerry McGuire’ style white papers on this or similar issues. While passionate and potentially game changing, these materials are not readily accessible to us as a group or individually. Creating just enough structure in support of a deep, meaningful and actionable discussion defines how the hackathon will work.
The Gartner Executive Programs / MIX hackathon will be in three phases. These phases give structure to the issue and more importantly provide a guide for the collaborative community to create meaningful results.
First we will build a definition of what ‘adaptability’ means, how do you recognize it, what does it do for an organization, how it drives IT’s strategic relevance. Here we will ask you for your ideas, rules of thumb, definitions and descriptions of adaptability, why its important, what it means to IT’s strategic relevance.
Next, with a description of the problem, we will then look at the issues holding back adaptability to get a clearly defined problem set. This is where we identify business, implementation, leadership, management, technical and other issues that are keeping the organization and IT from realizing the adaptability goals.
We hope then that people will come together to share their answers, ideas, experiences in resolving those problems – thereby creating new ‘management code and practices’ for greater adaptability and IT strategic relevance.
The hackathon will end with two events. The first will be a virtual event where we publish the ‘best’ ideas and practices. That will happen in June giving you all plenty of time to consider and incorporate these ideas into your future plans. The second event will be a session with the thought leaders at Orlando Symposium in October 2012 where you will get a chance to network with and learn from each other.
Executive Programs members, and their IT organizations from around the world are invited to participate in the hackathon. Just because we are launching it in Phoenix does not make the hackathon exclusive to the Americas. More information will be shared on Monday of CIO Leadership Forum and on the EXP web site.
Welcome to Phoenix and we are glad that you are here.
Category: 2012 CIO Leadership Tags: 2012 planning, Business Leadership, CIO Leadership, CIO-Forum-NA, Technology Leadership
1 response so far ↓
1 Ben Simonton March 26, 2012 at 7:07 am
I dearly hope that you will cover what all executives want.
Executives dearly want a workforce of highly motivated, highly committed, and fully engaged people. They certainly do not want disengaged, poorly motivated and uncommitted people or people somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the two extremes.
But they don’t know exactly how to achieve this goal and certainly don’t know that they could achieve the goal in the normal business routine. So they are willing to try almost anything including expensive foreign travel. Unfortunately, that is like putting lipstick on a pig and won’t achieve the goal of a highly motivated workforce.
How people are treated by their leader, meaning the extent to which the leader meets the five basic needs of the people, determines where in the spectrum between poorly motivated/uncommitted and highly motivated/committed any group of people will perform. Though most leaders don’t know it, the choice is up to the leader.
In other words, there are managerial actions that will create a high performing group of people and there are other managerial actions that are destructive to that goal. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had a couple of revelations that permitted me to discover the right choices and to prove they were right in successful turnarounds, productivity gains >300% per person and almost everyone loving to come to work.
Best regards, Ben
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