Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Adjusting to Life in a Hyperconnected World

In the spring of 1997, during a presentation in Paris on IBM’s new e-business strategy, the CIO of a major European retail chain mentioned that his company had just spent a lot of money remodeling their stores.  He was wondering if they had done the right thing, given all this new economy talk.  We were in the middle of the dot-com frenzy, and the buzz in the air was that in the Internet-based new economy, brick-and-mortar businesses, like other businesses grounded in the physical world, could not possibly compete in this fast-moving digital space and were therefore headed for extinction. 

Similar questions were being raised all around us.  In my local library, in whose advisory council I have been serving since those days, we were making plans to leverage the new Internet capabilities, such as introducing an online catalog and providing wireless Internet access in the library building.  But we were also wondering if a library building would be needed at all in the future, given the growing digitization of books, music, videos and just about all content. 

As it has turned out, the Internet, along with the overall digital revolution has proven to be a transformation of true historical proportions, propelling us from the industrial society of the past two centuries to a new kind of information society and knowledge-based economy.  But, it has not quite worked out the way some predicted back in those dot-com bubble days.

Measuring the Forces of Long Term Change

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore described what became known as Moore’s Law in a 1965 paper where he observed that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention in 1958, and predicted that the trend would continue for at least ten years, a prediction he subsequently changed to a doubling every two years.  The semi-log graphs associated with Moore’s Law have since become a visual metaphor for the technology revolution unleashed by the exponential improvements of just about all digital components, from processing speeds and storage capacity to networking bandwidth and pixels.

But, while the dramatic advances in digital technologies have been well measured and quantified, their impact on firms, economies and individuals has been more anecdotal.  We talk about how this digital revolution has been transforming just about every aspect of business, society and our personal lives, bringing us both near-magical products and services as well as their accompanying creative destruction and pain.  But, how can we quantify this revolution beyond its technological foundations?

This is the task undertaken by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge in its ambitious Shift Index project.  The Shift Index is an attempt to quantify the long term impact of the digital revolution through 25 metrics grouped into three overlapping waves of deep change which is referred to as the Big Shift.  First published in 2009, the study has been updated twice since, most recently in November of 2011.  The study is led by the Center’s co-chairmen John Hagel and John Seely Brown. 

Design Principles for Complex, Unpredictable, People Oriented Systems

An IBM Global CEO Study conducted in 2010 concluded that complexity was the primary challenge emerging out of its conversations with 1,500 CEOs and senior government officials.  “CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex.  Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways.”  

These same CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality they look for over the next five years.  “CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics.  Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation.  To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.”

A similar view was expressed by Roger Martin, the dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in an excellent January, 2010 article in the NY Times - Multicultural Business Theory.  At B-School?.  For over a decade, Professor Martin has been advocating “what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting.  More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.”

Over the past several years, we have seen a rising emphasis on design, creativity and holistic thinking in business to help us deal with an increasingly volatile, unpredictable complex world.  This is reflected not just in studies and articles, but in the growing number of design consulting firms like IDEO, as well as of design centers in universities, such as MIT's Media Lab and the d.school in Stanford.

Business and business schools are supposed to be all about applying hard, that is, quantitative, analytical approaches to management.  What then do we mean by bringing seemingly soft topics like design and creativity to business and why is it so important in today’s world?

The Complex Transition to the Age of the Cloud

In June of 2008 I participated in a conference on cloud computing.  After a full day of talks and discussions, the sense of the meeting was that cloud computing has the promise to bring a real paradigm shift to the IT world, although, as the conference organizer succinctly put it in his closing remarks: “There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is.”  In other words, something big and profound seems to be going on, although we are not totally sure what it is yet. 

Where are we now, almost four years later?  Just about everyone agrees that cloud computing is one of the major trends in IT, with important implications not only to IT but to business and society in general.  Many books and articles have been written on the subject.  A number of companies have cloud-based offerings in the marketplace, with more to come.  But, while many of us feel that cloud is even bigger and more profound than we thought back in 2008, lots of questions remain on its intrinsic nature and its value to the business. 

In November of 2011, Andrew McAfee published an article in the Harvard Business Review: What Every CEO Needs to Know about the Cloud.  McAfee is Principal Research Scientist and Associate Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, where I am a Fellow.  

He writes that cloud computing is “ . . . a sea change - a deep and permanent shift in how computing power is generated and consumed.  It’s as inevitable and irreversible as the shift from steam to electric power in manufacturing, which was gaining momentum in America about a century ago.”

Reflections on the Evolving Role of the CIO

Much has been written about the future role of the Chief Information Officer in the last few years.  Many opinions have been put forward.  All pretty much agree that fundamental changes, already underway, will take place over the next few years in how the IT function is organized and managed.  Some feel that the CIO role is likely to significantly diminish, with its various responsibilities distributed across the business or subsumed within the CFO organization.  Others are of the opinion that CIOs will play an even more influential role.  Given the growing importance of information technologies to all aspects of the business, the CIO role will likely be viewed as being as critical to the business as the CFO.  

I am very much in the latter camp.  I strongly believe that CIOs are in the eye of the IT storms that continue to rage all around us.  While their impact on business is hard to predict and unlikely to be the same for all institutions, few will dispute that over the past couple of decades IT has been significantly transforming just every company, industry, economy and society around the world, as well as our own personal lives.