Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The 2009 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

Last week I participated in the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.  The CIO Symposium is an annual one-day conference on the MIT campus, now in its sixth year, “where CIOs and other senior business executives from around the world gather to explore how leading-edge academic research and innovative technologies can help address the challenges faced in today’s changing economy.”  The theme of this year's Symposium was Sustaining CIO Leadership in a Changing Economy. 

The MIT Symposium consisted mostly of interactive panel discussions, including broad audience participation.  Two key themes kept recurring throughout all the panels and discussions.  One was cloud computing, the other was the evolving role of the CIO. 

As is typically the case, panelists used somewhat different definitions of cloud computing, as they each talked about clouds from his/her own point of view.  This is what you would expect if you agree with the view that cloud computing refers not to any one product or service, but to an emerging model of computing beyond the centralized and client-server models of past decades.

The Mass Customization of Services

A recurring theme in the world of technology over the past few decades has been the potential convergence of the IT and telecommunication industries. 

This all started in the 1980s, when the telecommunications industry began to seriously transition from analog to digital technologies in all their voice equipment, from central office and private switches to the phones themselves.  Given that these digital telecommunications products were essentially special purpose computers, many thought that it would not be long before the telcos would develop versions of their products for the general computer markets, and IT companies would adapt their general purpose computers for the more specialized telecommunication applications.

In the early 1980s, everyone was geared for the marketplace battles between these two industries, and in particular, for the battle of the titans between the original American Telephone & Telegraph and IBM, the undisputed leaders in their respective industries.  Both were planning major market expansions after no longer having to worry about being shackled by the US government, since in 1982, the Justice department settled the major antitrust suit it had brought against ATT, and dropped its antitrust suit altogether against IBM.

Smart Cities and "Liveability"

In the last week of April, I participated in a workshop on Smart Cities at Imperial College.  The workshop was organized by the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group of the Imperial College Business School, as part of a new multi-disciplinary research initiative, Ecocit, whose goal is to study how to help urban environments around the world thrive both ecologically and economically.

The study of cities has become a very important topic.  The workshop invitation writes that:  “The infrastructure of future cities needs to support vibrant, innovative and entrepreneurial communities that take advantage of the digital environment and realize their potential to become ‘smarter’.  However, resource constraints, the effects of climate change and growing population with migration to urban areas will all have an effect on the cities of the future and the infrastructure that will provide for communities’ needs.”

Over the last year, we have started to apply the term smart to our ability to infuse intelligence into the very way the world’s systems and processes work.  What makes this now possible is that just about anything we care about can be sensed and measured - any person, any object, any process or any service, can become digitally aware and networked.  We can then make all these various people, things, processes and services much more intelligent by turning the mountains of information we gather from the instrumented components and their interactions into real insights using sophisticated analysis and powerful supercomputers.

The Intelligent Enterprise

What do we mean by intelligent enterprise?  Wikipedia defines human intelligence as “ . . . an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn.” 

Another major use of intelligence relates to information gathering and analysis.  This is the kind of intelligence practiced by government agencies, like the CIA and NSA in the US; the Secret Intelligence Service in the UK, better known as MI6 and perhaps most famous as the home of Secret Agent 007; and the KGB of the former Soviet Union.

Information-based intelligence has become increasingly important to enterprises and other organizations over the past couple of decades.  The use of business and market intelligence has gone way up in recent years, as the Internet and World Wide Web have unleashed a torrent of information, which increasingly powerful computers can analyze and thus help companies better understand what is going on out there.