Jam-packed with first person insight from acclaimed CIO’s, sessions were brilliantly facilitated by Thornton May.  Cogent information delivered through interactive working groups kept a large room full of CIO, CTO and IT leaders fully engaged.  The value takeaway was so rich in leadership content that I’m devoting this week’s blogs to what I learned from each member of what Thornton refers to as the CIO Posse.

I’ll start with the takeaways from Thornton’s remarks sprinkled between CIO Posse working sessions.  As a Futurist, Thornton maintained relevance to the future and the concepts of collective learning, it’s history and where we are today… “We will always be behind” and the thought that “Tomorrow is going to be crazier than today”.  There is no way to deny our current state… my takeaway is that it is easier to accept our condition and work incrementally toward solutions than think we can gain full control in our rapidly changing IT environment.  Failure to accept some chaos and work toward incremental progress would seem to frustrate and impede progress.  We need our creative minds to solve problems not worry about our inability to control, much the way a believer might access faith instead of fear or hope instead of fatalism.

Curve jumping, the notion that paradigm shifts move us from the progression of one problem solving focus to another.  Whether addressing a technical or leadership challenge it seems we are moving from one curve to the next in succession.  Knowing the historical curves and where we are today help us move more rapidly to the next with creative solutions. Watch Thornton discuss Curve Jumping.

Green IT is intrinsic to new technology, particularly virtualization and more optimized efficiencies as we move toward cloud computing.  This is even more important to military applications where one must bring all power and cooling along.  It was discussed that better instrumentation and network management allows the US military to manage systems remotely, with the savings being greatest in the number of support personnel that are not deployed through better remote management.  Not only does the military have to bring its own power and cooling but huge numbers of contractors, leading to even more support resource requirements.  Imagine if Apollo 13 brought 10,000 support people to the moon with them instead of expertly instrumenting the spacecraft and using experts on Earth to solve complex problems! That is the future potential of enabled Network Centric Warfare.

IT Voting Booth, the concept that IT leaders vote on technology using money as ballots… this seems so simple yet true.

The 43 hour day… multi-tasking we leverage today brings us to a 43 hour day… and it keeps getting longer.

Finally, Thornton’s talk on the planning and objectives of Christopher Columbus’s mission to the New World compared to the CIO’s leadership objectives was not only funny, but true.  None of the stated objectives of the Columbus mission had the requisite resources allocated to its accomplishment.  No diplomats, no businessmen, no soldiers, no priests were on board the ships to accomplish the stated missions… you’ll have to attend a future session to get the full picture.

Stay tuned for a future blog on each of the CIO Posse salient points.

Read more about Thornton May.