"The next generation    of   employees increasingly look to Do It Yourself (DIY) communities to solve
technology-based issues."

ARI LIGHTMAN

Director

CIO Institute University

Ari is the Director of the CIO Institute (CIOI) at Carnegie University. CIOI is an executive education center focused  on providing needed skills for the next generation of IT    manager. The center provides an open enrollment executive education to organizations including: DHS, Pentagon, NIH, Accenture, Oracle, and Cisco. Ari is responsible for strategic execution, operation and growth of the center.

Challenges in technology to meetenterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.

I think the big hurdle isn’t necessarily technology as it is perception, culture and organizational  behavior. Most enterprises only use a fraction of the available technology and not to its’ full  extent. This is most likely due to a combination of embedded processes, improper technology  roll out, and inappropriate incentive systems that allow for technology saturation. So, I would like  o see a re-thinking of how we introduce and gain adoption of new technology as well as  how we motivate and incentivize employees around technology adoption and innovation. I think  this will also permeate to technology vendors and consequently the sales process. We will see   ore solution oriented selling, based on the needs and limitations of the corporation and  less product based selling. 

 The areas in business environment wheresolutions do not yet exist or not up to the ark, and  which if existed, would've made job easier.

Security and a comprehensive understanding of privacy (employee and consumer) are not adequately addressed. We have tremendous technical capabilities within enterprises using applications in the cloud, mobile resources, social collaboration, etc. but not a holistic understanding of it means to have and maintain all this available data. With an increased urge  to drive innovation and share knowledge, the business community needs to understand all the  different types of threats that exist, put together policies that don’t stifle innovation but secure the  nterprise and educate employees on appropriate data stewardship.

Technology Trends Impacting EnterpriseBusiness Environment
One of the most profound trends is the  shortage of trained data analysts/BI to keep up with the  rowing demands around “big” data. To be competitive, companies need to think about real time  nalysis to leverage opportunities and justify decisions. In order for this to occur, employees with  different skill sets need to be found. This involves a combination of statistical analysis,  redictive modeling, simulation development, etc. There are programs being developed such as our BIDA  rogram at the Heinz College at CMU but one of the challenges will be to apply their education into a specific industry – finance, healthcare, entertainment, etc. I think we are going  o see programs develop to on-board these types of folks into the company and their  epresentative industry. 

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

I have seen a renewed emphasis on the CIO position as a provider of strategic competitive differentiation and less as a simple support group for the enterprise. Data is becoming increasingly important for organizations in a multitude of different capacities and the CIO’s group is the one that usually charges with data aggregation, maintenance, analysis and development. If you define data as a common vernacular between different groups’ i.e marketing and customer service, the CIOs group becomes the arbiter between the needs of  different groups (around data) and the capabilities/limitations of the organizations. In turn, they  will also be developing a strategy to get the necessary capabilities to met the needs of different departments.

Lessons I learnt as a CIO that can help you

Understand how communities of intent play a role within your organizations. The next generation of employees will increasingly look to Do It Yourself (DIY) communities to solve technology-based issues. This empowers them and provides near real time resolution as  opposed to submitting trouble tickets and waiting for technical help. This provides a number of  different benefits including: freeing up the CIO ‘s organization to work on  more challenging  support issues, developing a repository of information that can be mined for intelligence,  understanding where knowledge leaders/problem solvers exist ithin the organization, providing  cycles for the CIO’s group ARI LIGHTMAN Director, CIO Institute University The next generation of employees will  increasingly look to Do It Yourself (DIY) communities to solve  technology-based  issues.This empowers them and provides near real time resolution as  opposed to submitting trouble tickets and waiting for technical help. This provides a number of  different benefits including: freeing up the CIO ‘s organization to work on more challenging  support issues, developing a repository of information that can be mined for intelligence,  understanding where knowledge leaders/problem solvers exist within the organization,  providing cycles for  the CIO’s group.