By Administrator | August 24, 2010
As the global economy slowly begins to emerge from the downturn, companies are evolving their focus on cost cutting to look for opportunities to emerge in the new “normal” more competitive and positioned for growth. The role of technology in innovating out of the downturn is far-reaching, and the opportunities for CIOs to take the lead are wide-ranging.
The Center for CIO Leadership – a community dedicated to advancing the CIO profession – is looking to explore what CIOs can do now to exploit the opportunities the downturn has created or opened up, as the leader of innovation in their organization. In their role as technology leader, CIOs have the opportunity to impact both the process of innovation within their organization as well as the nature of what is being innovated.
The Center has teamed up with Cranfield School of Management to convene CIOs to uncover ideas and strategies for both of these aspects of the changing nature of innovation. On Wednesday, October 6, the Center and Cranfield are co-sponsoring an in-person education program, “The Changing Nature of Innovation and the Role of the CIO to Drive and Lead the Opportunity.” The day-long program, taking place on the Cranfield campus outside of London, will examine these key themes:
- Creating frameworks to drive collaboration and embed innovation within the business culture
- Identifying and implementing technologies to lead product and service innovation
- Innovating to transform the business model
- Self-funding for innovation
We invite CIOs and other IT leaders to join their peers for :
- Event: “The Changing Nature of Innovation and the Role of the CIO to Drive and Lead the Opportunity.”
- Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2010, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm BST
- Audience: Senior executives including CIOs, Directors of IT, VPs
- Location: The Cranfield Management Research Institute, Cranfield University, College Road, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL
- Registration fee: £100 + VAT
The one-day program includes panel sessions, breakouts and networking opportunities that will connect you with other industry leaders. You will come away with practical approaches and techniques that will help you to take action, and lead your organization to emerge stronger in today’s economy. The agenda for this interactive program will feature peer presentations and provide real life examples of how CIOs have led innovation in their own organizations.
Visit the Center for CIO Leadership to see the full agenda and learn more.
Click here for the Cranfield University Registration Form to register for this event.
About the Center for CIO Leadership
The Center for CIO Leadership provides CIOs from around the world with access to a global community of academic and practitioner experts, peer CIOs and business leaders with a common goal of advancing the CIO profession and providing engagement that leads to change. Visit the Center for CIO Leadership to learn more and to become a member.
By Administrator | August 16, 2010
The symposium partner, Center for CIO Leadership, a member driven community to advance the CIO profession, is hosting an exclusive executive event for CEOs, CIOs, CFOs and other members of the C-Suite on Thursday, October 21, 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm in New York City.
- Salon Theme: “CEOs See Technology as Growth Driver; CIOs Don’t… a Discussion”
- Date: Thursday, October 21, 2010 from 5:30–8:30 pm
- Audience: CEO, CFO, CIO and other C-suite executives
Recent IBM studies show that CEOs view technology as a game changer for the future of their businesses; whereas CFOs and CIOs don’t share this perspective. This session will feature CEOs, CFOs and CIOs who will discuss this gap and will offer their thoughts on the future that technology will enable in their businesses in 2011 – and what CIOs can do differently to seize the opportunity to lead the way.
Join panelists:
- Marianne Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Omgeo
- Jim Metzger, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President, Finance & Administration, TM Forum
- Lou Trebino, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, The Harry Fox Agency
This exclusive session will also include other leading CIOs and academics that will lead round table discussions that will focus on the perception of technology in organizations and the role that CIOs can take to enable and drive business growth.
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Thursday, October 21, 2010 from 5:30-8:30 pm |
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Hotel Plaza Athenee, Le Trianon
37 East 64th Street (between Madison & Park)
New York, NY 10065-7003
(212) 734-9100 |
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There is no fee for this event, however this is an event exclusively for c-suite executives |
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For more information on the event including a detailed agenda and hotel information for out of town guests, please visit the Center for CIO Leadership.
By annie shum | August 2, 2010
Through the Prism of IT Transformation for Tomorrow’s Enterprise Datacenters: Interview with Annie Shum
As indicated in our recent post “Extending the Scope of the Agile Executive”, Cote and I have recently reached the conclusion that The Agile Executive needs to cover structural changes in order to give a forward-looking view to its readers. We start the coverage of structural changes that are relevant to Agile with an interview with Annie Shum, VP of Advanced Technology, Amdocs Corp.
We cover a broad panorama in this interview with Annie. Here are some items that may be of special interest to the reader who focuses on Agile methods, processes and governance in a broad sense – from programming to IT operations and anything in between:
•Unleashing disruptive transformations
•Supply and demand – the two sides of the IT “coin”
•Open source software in general and OpenStack in particular
•The impact of social networking and other Web 2.0 tools
•Three billion downloads and counting…
•Finding the “right” balance between hierarchical command-control and bottom-up empowerment
•“Self-service” IT service delivery/deployment
•Forthcoming changes in IT system administration and the rise of DevOps
•How to gain freedom from a variety of low-level operational tasks and controls of physical infrastructure
•Provisioning and over provisioning
•Many others…
To read the entire Q&A interview, here’s the URL link :
http://theagileexecutive.com/2010/08/02/through-the-prism-of-it-transformation-for-tomorrow%E2%80%99s-enterprise-datacenters-interview-with-annie-shum/
By annie shum | July 1, 2010
Optical Flow Switching (OFS) for High Speed Internet with Low Cost Posted By Bob Gourley
Imagine the possibility of an Internet 1000 times faster than the one of today. Dr. Vincent Chan, a great hero of modern telecommunications (and a mentor I’ve been honored to serve on an advisory board with) is leading research into developments that can produce just that. Dr. Chan has been leading a research team at MIT in design efforts that have produced demonstrations that would eliminate inefficient conversion processes in optical signal processing, resulting in dramatic increases in Internet speeds while actually reducing the amount of energy consumed by transmission devices. This method is called Optical Flow Switching (OFS). OFS exploits optical switching, routing and transport technologies to continue lowering costs while providing this higher speed. The following is from research announced on the MIT website:
QUOTE:
One of the reasons that optical data transmission is so efficient is that different wavelengths of light loaded with different information can travel over the same fiber. But problems arise when optical signals coming from different directions reach a router at the same time. Converting them to electrical signals allows the router to store them in memory until it can get to them. The wait may be a matter of milliseconds, but there’s no cost-effective way to hold an optical signal still for even that short a time.
Chan’s approach, called “flow switching,” solves this problem in a different way. Between locations that exchange large volumes of data — say, Los Angeles and New York City — flow switching would establish a dedicated path across the network. For certain wavelengths of light, routers along that path would accept signals coming in from only one direction and send them off in only one direction. Since there’s no possibility of signals arriving from multiple directions, there’s never a need to store them in memory.
Reaction time
To some extent, something like this already happens in today’s Internet. A large Web company like Facebook or Google, for instance, might maintain huge banks of Web servers at a few different locations in the United States. The servers might exchange so much data that the company will simply lease a particular wavelength of light from one of the telecommunications companies that maintains the country’s fiber-optic networks. Across a designated pathway, no other Internet traffic can use that wavelength.
In this case, however, the allotment of bandwidth between the two endpoints is fixed. If for some reason the company’s servers aren’t exchanging much data, the bandwidth of the dedicated wavelength is being wasted. If the servers are exchanging a lot of data, they might exceed the capacity of the link.
In a flow-switching network, the allotment of bandwidth would change constantly. As traffic between New York and Los Angeles increased, new, dedicated wavelengths would be recruited to handle it; as the traffic tailed off, the wavelengths would be relinquished. Chan and his colleagues have developed network management protocols that can perform these reallocations in a matter of seconds.
In a series of papers published over a span of 20 years — the latest of which will be presented at the OptoElectronics and Communications Conference in Japan next month — they’ve also performed mathematical analyses of flow-switched networks’ capacity and reported the results of extensive computer simulations. They’ve even tried out their ideas on a small experimental optical network that runs along the Eastern Seaboard. Their conclusion is that flow switching can easily increase the data rates of optical networks 100-fold and possibly 1,000-fold, with further improvements of the network management scheme. Their recent work has focused on the power savings that flow switching offers: In most applications of information technology, power can be traded for speed and vice versa, but the researchers are trying to quantify that relationship. Among other things, they’ve shown that even with a 100-fold increase in data rates, flow switching could still reduce the Internet’s power consumption.
Growing appetite
Ori Gerstel, a principal engineer at Cisco Systems, the largest manufacturer of network routing equipment, says that several other techniques for increasing the data rate of optical networks, with names like burst switching and optical packet switching, have been proposed, but that flow switching is “much more practical.” The chief obstacle to its adoption, he says, isn’t technical but economic.
Implementing Chan’s scheme would mean replacing existing Internet routers with new ones that don’t have to convert optical signals to electrical signals. But, Gerstel says, it’s not clear that there’s currently enough demand for a faster Internet to warrant that expense. “Flow switching works fairly well for fairly large demand — if you have users who need a lot of bandwidth and want low delay through the network,” Gerstel says. “But most customers are not in that niche today.”
But Chan points to the explosion of the popularity of both Internet video and high-definition television in recent years. If those two trends converge — if people begin hungering for high-definition video feeds directly to their computers — flow switching may make financial sense. Chan points at the 30-inch computer monitor atop his desk in MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics. “High resolution at 120 frames per second,” he says: “That’s a lot of data.”
By Administrator | June 16, 2010
Original article by Thomas Wailgum on Tue, June 15, 2010
Yesterday, coffee-purveyor Starbucks reversed course on its long-standing in-store Wi-Fi policy by announcing that starting July 1, Wi-Fi would be free in all its U.S. establishments.
Starbucks Free Wi-Fi
Though CEO Howard Schultz broke the news, CIO Stephen Gillett stands at the center of Starbucks (SBUX)’ new and expanded Wi-Fi strategy. Gillett’s other title is general manager of Digital Ventures, a relatively new group driving Starbucks’ evolving in-store tech offerings.
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