Dispatches from The Ideosphere

This is the second of two dispatches about the evolving role of the CIO.

Changing IT Roles

With the transition to the cloud, we now need highly skilled vendor managers, contract negotiators, and service managers. We also need more specialists in data integration, security, and privacy. Data enterprise architects are necessary to successfully determine how to best take advantage of cloud services. In the future, we will need fewer systems administrators and application developers.

Data Analytics

This is the Holy Grail. How can we build data analytics to best support executive decision-making towards achieving institutional priorities? Since the late 1990’s we have a number of tools to make this more real. But these tools have been expensive and require costly, expert staff resources. Big data portends greater insights, yet most organizations are not yet exploiting the opportunity due to the high barriers of entry. How do we break through?

Relationships Really Do Matter

The primary role for all CIOs is to build strong, trusting relationships. This will never change. You must create and nurture authentic business relationships with those you serve; your boss, executive leaders, direct reports, all your staff, customers, peers and influencers, and strategic vendor partners.

Best advice from a 40-year faculty veteran after becoming the CIO at UT Austin was: “Get out of the office and let them know that you give a damn!”

Thoughts?

My hope is that this blog becomes a virtual forum where thoughts and experiences are shared and ideas will be created, discussed, and evolve. Ideosphere is kin to the “noosphere” (from the Greek nous “mind”) introduced to the world by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922.
 

In my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to study in Oxford, England. One of my tutorials was in philosophy. My tutor introduced me to “The Phenomenon of Man,” by de Chardin who was a Jesuit priest. Published in 1955 after the death of de Chardin, his work presages the spanning of our planet in thought.
 
De Chardin observed how human waves expanded over the surface of the globe. From the Neolithic age onwards, these waves began to fold on themselves. The spread of humanity went from the sheer physical influence of a few miles to that of a web of communication extending to every corner of the Earth.
 
Underwater cables laid in the late 1800’s across the English Channel led to undersea cables across the world. Telecommunication satellites in the mid 1970’s started to further web the planet. And the advent of the Internet has unified the world’s rise of consciousness.
 
Teilhard used the analogy of a boiling pot with a tight lid. The finite sphere of thought on Earth will “boil” faster. His positive take was that this coalescence would create more complex states of consciousness. Unfortunately, we have seen this boiling pot of thought can work towards good and evil.