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While the technology industry often speculates about the Future of the IT Organization, today’s business leaders are much more focused on the best way to Organize IT for their firm’s Future. As information technology pervades virtually every aspect of the modern firm, and as an ever-more powerful Internet ‘cloud’ emerges, companies are rethinking the way that technology is deployed, used and managed across their organizations. This is especially true in today’s turbulent and unpredictable business climate.
The Leading Edge Forum has recently conducted several major studies of how world class firms are simultaneously positioning IT for the future, while responding to unprecedented global market pressures. In this intensive one-day session, we will share the results of this work, while integrating the views of business leaders, CIOs, academics, and other forward-looking thinkers. Successfully leveraging IT is increasingly a boardroom issue, even as IT itself becomes consumerized and largely inseparable from our day to day work and lives. The implications of this strategic commoditization go far beyond the bounds of the central IT function in both good and challenging economic times.
Monday, May 18, 2009
08:30 – 09:00
Registration and Breakfast
09:00 – 09:10
Chairman’s Introduction
Richard Davies
Managing Director – Executive Programme, Leading Edge Forum
09:10 – 09:20
The Voice of the Boardroom
Perspectives on Cloud Computing and social media-based applications. How do they impact the business and the way it is run?
09:20 – 09:50
IT and the Board – Rethinking Strategy and Risk
David Moschella
Research Director, Leading Edge Forum
Over the last year, client interest in the future of Enterprise IT has risen sharply. In this session, David will describe the LEF’s research response, focusing on those findings most relevant to the morning session’s emphasis on business/IT strategy and governance. He will show how changing economic conditions affect IT strategies and perceptions, even as business and IT change remain increasingly inseparable.
He will also explain why the impact of information technology will increasingly vary by industry, and why the organization of IT must mirror the firm it serves, in good and challenging times alike.
09:50 – 10:50
IT Leadership in Turbulent Financial Times
F Warren McFarlan
Director of Business Administration and Professor, Harvard Business School
This talk is keyed off HBS’s recently completed Global Centennial Business Summit. The Summit identified three major themes shaping the business environment for the next 50 years. They were respectively: leadership, globalization, and the changing face of market-based capitalism. This session teases out what each of these items mean to the CIO during the most financially-challenging times since the early 1930s. On the one hand, technology continues to offer new opportunities for creating value and lowering costs; on the other hand, many organizations are deeply financially stressed and only the most pressing of projects can be funded. Deploying resources around the globe continues to be more important, but new risks, both technical and political, have arisen that constrain activities. Finally, the very scope and sphere an organization can operate in is dramatically changing as the roles of government, vis-à-vis private enterprise, are being deeply transformed.
10:50 – 11:20
Break
11:20 – 11:55
Bridging the Gap Between the CIO and the Board
Amir Hartman
Founder and Managing Director, Mainstay Partners
Despite broad support for IT which is deeply integrated into most every company activity, senior business leaders are still questioning if they are getting enough value from their IT investments. For most companies, more than 70 per cent of IT costs are fixed costs, and when you take into account the prior year ‘carry over’ spending, and depreciation, a very small percentage of IT spending may be creating real value for the company (and that is assuming those initiatives are successful). CIOs find themselves needing to walk a tightrope between functional necessity and business relevancy. Nowhere else is this balancing act brought to life than in the boardroom.
Leading Edge Forum advisor F Warren McFarlan published an article in the Harvard Business Review on
Information Technology and the Board of Directors, which focused on a framework for Boards to develop IT policies that fit the companies they oversee. As a follow on to that research, we will share the results from our current research into the relationship CIOs have with the Board of Directors and the next practice advice on how to advance their IT priorities and agendas, as well as the approaches and techniques to best do so.
11:55 – 12:40
Views from the Floor
12:40 – 13:40
Lunch
13:40 – 14:15
Organising IT for the Future – Retooling for Recessions and Beyond
David Moschella
Global Research Director, Leading Edge Forum
Organizations have never had more technology options – outsourcing, offshore, the cloud, software as a service, business unit ownership, and so on. But what are organizations actually doing and how much change really lies ahead? In this session, David will discuss how some of the world’s leading CIOs really feel about the future use of IT in their organizations, the importance of the cloud, the role of the Central IT function, and even their own CIO profession.
14:15 – 14:25
The Voice of IT Leadership
Perspectives on Cloud Computing and social media-basedapplications and their impact on the roles of IT and the business.
14:25 – 15:00
Advanced Models for Business/IT Innovation
Kirtland Mead
Senior Consultant – Executive Programme, Leading Edge Forum
Driven by global competition, firms in the developed world are seeking new approaches to adding value, searching for unmet demand beyond today’s highly contested markets. At the LEF, we see three basic approaches to this. The first is
smarter products that have more functionality and can command a premium price. The second is a
superior customer experience through careful design of the customer interface and a ‘customer centric’ culture. The third is
enhanced services that offer value and support that the customer cannot easily realize for themselves.
These strategies are interdependent and support one another. All three increasingly rely on technology for their effectiveness. Kirt Mead, who leads the LEF EP research in this area, will discuss how the most advanced firms are innovating along these three dimensions, how these strategies are being affected by recent economic events, and on the implications for both the business and the IT organization.
15:00 – 15:40
Agility and Informal Structure
Charles Armstrong
CEO, Trampoline Systems
Historically, IT’s responsibility in regard to organizational change has been primarily operational; making sure departmental systems could interoperate or bringing merged entities onto central infrastructure. However, as businesses focus on increasing agility and harnessing human capital, IT must prepare to take on new strategic responsibilities.
Business leaders will require detailed real-time intelligence on informal networks and expertise across the organization to identify key personnel, resolve blockages and monitor change. The only practical way to deliver this insight will be by analyzing corporate data sources such as messaging, phone logs, knowledge stores and other collaborative systems. As a result, IT will be responsible for gathering, processing and delivering this strategic intelligence.
The wave of restructuring, mergers and downsizing triggered by the current economic downturn puts exceptional pressure on businesses’ ability to rebuild competitiveness rapidly during and after change. Firms that harness IT to obtain accurate organizational diagnostics will be best placed to survive and prosper.
15:40 – 16:10
Break
16:10 – 16:45
Lessons from Early Adopters: Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud
Doug Neal
Research Fellow – Executive Programme,
Leading Edge Forum
Cloud Computing is part of a bow wave of change that is washing over IT organizations. Components of the wave include the consumerization of IT, the rise of much more IT-savvy employees and a shift in business models from vertical integration to horizontal, networked businesses.
Backed by the massive scale of consumerized offerings, the Cloud is a source for new services for enterprises at multiple levels including infrastructure, platform, software application, and process. In this session, Doug will point out where firms are having success today, as well as where capabilities still need to evolve before enterprises can make full use of the Cloud. In developing their roadmap to the Cloud, clients will need to keep in mind that for many the future of their horizontal, networked business is collaboration. And that the future of collaboration is in the Cloud.
16:45 – 17:45
Rethinking the Technology of Management
Dr Jules Goddard
Research Associate – Management Lab (MLab),
London Business School
The prevailing model of management is obsolete. It has become the performance bottleneck in most organizations.
Designed in the late 19th century to coordinate and control huge numbers of unskilled people in vast manufacturing sheds, the technology of management has hardly changed over the last 130 years. Contrast this to the meteoric rise and developments in computer technology and a profound gap can be seen between management’s ability to innovate and their ability to respond effectively to the social paradigm now emerging.
Best practice is simply not good enough anymore, based on old-fashioned notions of hierarchy, bosses and subordinates, standardization and compliance, centralized planning and budgeting, specialization and job descriptions. It is high time we challenged these orthodoxies and experimented with radically new ways of inspiring talented people and organizing complex work. Using many examples of radically new management practices, Jules will ask whether IT is a catalyst or an impediment in this revolution.
17:45 – 18:00
Concluding Remarks
18:00
Cocktail Reception