Last Thursday I attended a breakfast event put on by the Toronto Board of Trade, where the keynote speaker was Dean Prevost, President, Enterprise Solutions for MTS Allstream. Dean is definitely one-to-watch in the exec ranks of Canadian telecom, and he had some great insights about the challenges facing today's CIOs.
Oh, and if it's any indication of Dean's rising star, our affable host - DAVE Wireless CEO Dave Dobbin - mentioned more than once that this breakfast was a bigger draw than Nadir Mohamed, who's now running Rogers. How's that for star power?
It's not news to hear that CIOs must balance many competing priorities, and are being asked to do more with less. To get beyond the obvious, Dean provided several definitions of the CIO acronym, all of which fit the job - Capex Intensity Officer, Corporate Innovation Officer, Collaboration Improvement Officer, Customer Interaction Officer. They all apply, right?
Dean went further to explain the many paradoxes CIOs must balance, such as managing simple vs. complex technology, open vs. closed networks, fast data speeds vs. slow time for thinking, people working apart vs. collaborating together, etc.
To provide some strategies for CIOs to manage all of this, Dean has coined some catchy phrases and explained each in ways that made sense even if they sound counterintuitive at first - such as Integrate Messiness, Architect Intuition and Institutionalize Flexibility.
From there, he went on to talk about seven trends that are happening in the marketplace today and are shaping the demands of the CIO's role from the outside. Again, he used thought-provoking titles such as Accelerated Nomadism, Visibility Filtering, Content Scrubbing, and my favorite, Excessive Network Dependency.
Aren't you just dying to know what he's trying to tell us? Well, you should be, especially if this is your job! Dean has a great presentation style and I really liked his use of slideware - sparse but effective. I don't have those to share, but will gladly provide the transcript of his keynote. It doesn't include the audience banter - which was quite good, but it's the next best thing. By all means, drop me a line and I'll be happy to send it on.
Prior to Dean's keynote, the breakfast was kicked off with a presentation by ITWorld Canada's own, John Pickett. He presented highlights from a recent survey of Canadian CIOs (I won't name the research firm - am not in the habit of citing competitors - hope you understand - I love blogging, but it's not how I make a living - maybe I can do that survey for you next time, John!). That said, if you want to see the results yourself, I'm sure John will happily oblige.
Anyhow, he talked about what's most important to CIOs, and these days, it's no surprise that keeping down costs was tops. Equally surprising, though was how relatively low the ranking was for things that drive growth and help create competitive advantage via IT - things like developing new applications or ways of working together more efficiently. An opportunity lost? I think so - but as Dean explains, it's hard for CIOs to be so forward thinking in this economy.
