futuramb's wider net

CIO in hot water

Hinssen recounts the story of a recent lunch he had with a CIO from a large Belgian company. During the meal, the CIO received an angry call from his CEO who had e-mailed a presentation from home to his Google Mail address (it was too big for the corporate inbox). “The CEO was having a problem accessing his Gmail account at work and the CIO had to tell him access had been blocked on the corporate system. I could hear the CEO shouting through the phone receiver from the other side of the table and it wasn’t pretty.

“When the CEO of one of the biggest companies in Belgium almost fires the CIO on the spot because he can’t access his Gmail, it is a clear sign that these types of technology are gaining a broader foothold in business than simply Generation Y.”

So why aren’t more IT departments embracing the technology? Hinssen believes a major factor is the rise of what he calls “governance thinking” in IT.

“A lot of IT departments are using governance and security as a shield, so if anything goes wrong they cannot be held liable,” he says. “It is stupid. There is plenty you can do within ‘safe’ boundaries. If you say you must wait until a technology is completely mature, that means businesses shouldn’t have done SOA, ERP, CRM the list goes on.

“What IT needs right now isn’t people who focus on what could happen if things go wrong, but people who think about the possibilities if things go right.”

Interesting article about what Peter Hinssen say about the future of the IT department.

Everybody must see this mindblowing presentation of the innovative Sixth Sense user interface technology. This is already what I would call Augmented Reality 2.0 or Augmentation^2. It gives a hint to where ICT is taking us.

And in the Q&A after the presentation Pranav tell us that he will release this technology as Open Source in December of this year!

Interesting model, which I haven’t seen before. Looks really useful!

Read more in the post at CleaveFast blog.

A really interesting presentation by the anthropologist Michael Wesch who is here using Youtube to talk about how we are changing in the networked and individualized media society.

Found through the writing by @klang in the article: Vem tänker på skolan och biblioteket?

(via @klang)

Everyone has the same servers and IT equipment and ERP applications. Competitive distinction, and innovation, will be expressed through the predictive rules and business processes developed within companies.

To me this is about using all available data (internal AND external) to create end evaluate scenarios of how the future might unfold in order to take the right decisions on the most robust strategy.

Since the fundamental uncertainties in all predictive activities will make this process generate a number of scenarios and not just one everybody will be challenged by the fundamental strategy question that in fact exists already today: do we pick one of these possible futures and gamble that it will happen or will we rethink our strategies to be be robust considering the fundamental uncertainties?

This development will make this important but often implicit choice explicit for many organizations. In next turn this explicit choice will most likely polarize organizations towards the two extremes of gambling vs hedging bets.

Why, then, don’t people routinely create robust sets of scenarios, create contingency plans for each of them, watch to see which scenario is emerging, and live by it? Scenarios are in fact harder than they look—harder to conceptualize, harder to build, and uncomfortably rich in shortcomings. A good one takes time to build, and so a whole set takes a correspondingly larger investment of time and energy.

It is interesting that suddenly this McKinsey article got a huge effect. There have been other articles about the subject recently, but even if I think this was better written than others I am surprised that it was retweeted. so much…