Communications of the ACM
Four Elite CIOs Share Lessons
Clockwise from top left: Tim Schaefer of Northwest Mutual; Colin Boyd of Johnson Controls; Philip Loftus of Aurora Health Care; and Denis Edwards Manpower.
Credit: Society of Information Management
A recent panel at the annual meeting of ACM's Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems included four chief information officers (CIOs), who shared real-world information technology (IT) trends with academics to help them prepare students for IT careers.
Northwest Mutual CIO Tim Schaefer says financial advisers are eager to adopt technology in ways that can help the company. "I'm in all kinds of settings where I would never expect the conversation to turn to technology, and it does," Schaefer says. There are three main types of IT users, says Johnson Controls CIO Colin Boyd. One is end-user companies, another is IT providers and creators, and a third is data center infrastructure operators for cloud services and Web applications.
Aurora Health Care CIO Philip Loftus worries that it will be difficult for IT professionals to shift among tech tracks, and that well-rounded technologists may become hard to find in the future. Although many people are nervous that cloud computing will move more IT operations outside the company, there is some recognition that the cloud is a good idea, says Manpower CIO Denis Edwards.
All four CIOs agreed that technology has become so critical to daily operations that IT must have a "zero outage, never down" mindset.
From InformationWeek
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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