IBM CIO Leadership Exchange, Shanghai, Feb 09

This is a report from a IBM Conference titled, "CIO Leadership Exchange". It is the third in a series and is in Shanghai (first time held in the East).

CIOs asked IBM to run the series of Exchanges.
The title this year is: Building a Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda

--> Main theme of the meeting is to consider the CIO role in creating a 'smarter planet' - which means primarily smarter use of information, and the consequences of the current financial crisis.

... Overall - there were some interesting and challenging presentations, others were superficial.

(I) Smarter Planet - A mandate for CIO Leadership: Interesting session with relevance to HE

Sam Palmsano: Chairman, President and CEO for IBM

Leadership Exchange originated by academic institutions three years ago (Harvard), supported by IBM. Much has changed over the three years.

The central theme is that the world is smaller, flatter and smarter. Every day systems and processes are connected, instrumented, with embedded intelligence. This has profound effects for innovation. There are 2b people on the Internet, by 2010 there will be a billion transistors for every person.

The digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.

Challenges:

• 40-70% of electrical energy is lost due to inefficiencies in the grid
• Healthcare systems are not systems
• Financial markets spread risk but cannot track it
• Consumer products and retail industries lose about $40b annually due to inefficient supply chains
• A world where 820m are undernourished

A review last August by IBM found activities in many areas which are addressing the challenges. Since then $3trillion will be applied to stimulate growth and jobs. IBM advised the Obama team last autumn: broadband, healthcare, and better electrical grids.

CIOs have new challenges; need to balance cutting costs while preparing and connecting for the future. Avoid just battening down. Means bridging between technology and future business direction.

The financial crisis will last beyond 2009; CIOs have opportunities as the world is ready for change. Change in the business model, change in role in the company, change of use of embedded intelligence. The key is to come out of the crisis stronger than you went into it.


Mark Hennessy (VP and CIO): CIOs - Catalysts of Change: Leaders for a Smarter Planet

As CIO, walk tightrope. Manage legacy system <> develop new capabilities. Long term thinking <> short term execution. Have three teams:-

- Run team: smart datacentres; social networking. Datacentre: sensors manage energy consumption, virtualisation, automation simplifies provisioning. Use cloud (Tivoli)

- Transform team: business process simplification (don't automate chaos). Agile development methods. SOA flexibility and savings.

- Innovate team: IBM changing from multi-national corp. to globally integrated organisation. Global talent management: outcome-based model; high-performance culture.

Richard Williams (CIO, AstraZeneca) - The CIO as a Catalyst for Change

It can take 8-12 years to develop a new drug to market (cost $800m).

AstraZenica strategy is:

• Renew, but not abandon, our strategy; industrialize service in federated environment; power of one
  
• Resolve to drive business value; sense of purpose; connect the network
  
• Release through strategic partners; Service effect contracts (I am going to measure partner on basis of business outcome, not SLA - you have as much accountability as I do)
  

Very clear business objective: "new medicines for patient health"; what is our equivalent objective(s)?

Discussion (moderated by Peter Williamson - Univ of Cambridge)

Need to get CEOs involved with CIOs work on regular basis. Visibility of where CIO spending time and investment is important. How does investment translate into efficiency of organisation change, quality of product.

Social networking is growing in importance. Half of IBM uses wikis. Blogs and IM are important. These cannot be measured in terms of ROIs, but are seen as strategically important and will improve the collaboration.

AstraZenica does not have an IS strategy, it has a business strategy of which IS is a part. Then there are regular reviews to see if business value is achieved.

(II) Applying New Intelligence and Knowledge - A Systems Approach: Very company specific and not especially relevant to HE...

Gini Rometty (Senior VP, Global Sales and Distr. IBM)

Faster
Right
Predictive: remove risk in a decision

Dan Deasy (CIO, BP):

IT innovation is dramatically changing the way BP works: Instrumentation, interconnected, business intelligence.

BI is crucially important to enable them to predict customer need.

Use 185Tflops of compute power to improve seismic accuracy to predict well positions.

Agnes Mauffey (CIO, Michelin)

Collaboration tools are essential for the company. Intelligence used to give competitive advantage.

Discussion (moderator Dr Marianne Broadbent):

Clear that IBM is helping both companies is many aspects of their operation. Much of their IT is outsourced.


(III) Smarter Planet - IT for the 21st Century - interesting session

Mike Daniels (Senior VP, GTO, IBM)

The average utilisation of Intel processors is 6%.

A smarter planet needs a smarter infrastructure. There is: 54% increase in storage each year.

Eric Clementi (VP, Strategy, IBM)

Need dynamic infrastructure: virtualisation + automate + standardised.

30b embedded RFID tags by 2010
1/3 of world's population on the web by 2011
4b mobile subscribers globally at end of 2008

Cloud computing is emerging in the enterprise from the consumer Internet. It is a consumption and delivery service.

For the enterprise it will be a hybrid delivery model: private cloud and public cloud. This is followed up in the subsequent Cloud break-out session.

Frank Gens (Senior VP and Chief Analyst, IBM) - Convener of Discussion

Successful industrial clouds have well defined rules, regulations, management; and often a third party providing the service to enable separate users to have independence.

A key issue within this is Identity Management.

(IV) Breakout Session - Cloud Computing: Dr Willy Chiu, Dr Jim Comfort, Robert Rosier, Paul Lu - interesting session - led to new thoughts for Oxford

Cloud computing - a disruptive new paradigm. See Economist article. There is an interesting IBM perspective on cloud computing.

IBM has 9 Cloud centres around the world.

Grid computing (1990s), Utility computing, Software as a service, Cloud computing: so evolutionary.

• Software as a service (eg Googlemail)
  
• Platform as a service (SOA)
  
• Infrastructure as a service (Green, virtualised and scalable - optimised for security, data integrity)

Develop in the cloud; Deploy in the cloud; Deliver services from the cloud; Overflow to another cloud

China has an cloud computing centre built by IBM, 11 more being created. Promotes s/w start-up company growth.

Moving towards: Private Cloud - Public Cloud - with single management view (can 'pull' applications from one to the other). IBM uses - C loud management tools.

Google/Amazon are not full Public Clouds as do not have security or full service quality guarantees.

iTricity Cloud Computing Centre (Netherlands) - IT as electricity. Infrastructure as a service, which is compliant (to Basel-II, SO, Healthcare). Will provide cloud computing on customer premises! if excess, then trade back resources.

(V) Breakout Session - Using New Intelligence - Real Decisions in Real Time: Mark Chapman, Jeff Jonas, Brenda Dietrich, Nina Schwenk (Mayo clinic) - really interesting and thought provoking session

How do you drive intelligence from all the data?

The Smart Planet is all about intelligent decisions. Data is both structured and unstructured. Analytics can be: descriptive, predictive, prescriptive. An example IBM has worked on is Traffic Prediction in Singapore.

Healthcare is messy; data are not clean. In the 21st century - more evidence based treatment is expected, more pressures to provide regulatory data, expectation that personalised treatment. Genomics is foundation for what healthcare can be in the future, but technologies for gathering, analysing, storing not in place. Knowledge gradient is important.

The data is the query -- More data is better and faster -- bad data is good for you (in some areas). The data must find the data ... and the relevance must find the user!

Need to extract and enhance information as data is collected.

(VI) Deepening Enterprise Capability - Intelligent, Interconnected Leadership - not very CIO focused

Harvey Koeppel

CIO Leadership: Developed competency model for CIOs. "The three top competencies for CIOs are: leadership, contribution to business strategy, and talent management. CIOs have to convert their teams as themselves so they all have new capabilities."

Dr Marianne Broadbent (Senior Partner, EWK International)

How do you invest in the downturn? Experience isn't what it used to be.

[Some case studies were considered of companies which have already refocused in view of the financial downturn.]

Some organisations have addressed the downturn, changed focus, accelerated succession, invested now for streamlined future - should the University do the same?

Joe Locanndro (Director, CLP Group)

Based on a five-year research project, Good to Great answers the question: “Can a good company become a great company, and, if so, how?” Jim Collins

Use human capital strategy balance scorecard; improvements evident.

Seek to understand, seek to be understood.


(VII) Building a Smarter Enterprise - Leading Change, Embracing Disruption - disappointing apart from summary from Sam Palmsano

Bruno Di Leo (General Manager, IBM)

IBM is committed to being number 1 IT partner.

Disruption speaks to 'driving change'.

Peter Williamson (Prof of Int. Man., Cambridge)

Best selling book: 'Dragons at your door'.

We need to move beyond 'cost cutting' to 'cost innovation'.

15% of today's market leaders used the recession to vault to the top.

CIO agenda in a value-for-money world:

• Business cases for IT investment based on Cost Innovation: reduce cost of variety and customisation, roll-out products to mass market quickly.
• Enabling Global Innovation: need to globalise innovation and globalise the supply change

Quality vs cost becomes value for money
High technology at high end becomes high technology to mass markets

Dr Jai Menon (Dir, Bharti Enterprises)

Bharti Artel are growing by 2.5m customers every month.

Time to evolve from 'best practices' to 'next practices'.

Conversation

Use the mobile as your PC.

The view expressed is that the CIO has to run more than a technology function and build a business function, so that no longer issue of IT being business aligned. Thus, IT staff through the department spend part of their careers working on business functions.

Sam Palmisano - Closing Remarks

CIO Leadership: began role definition, mentoring, ...
Do CIO survey every few years with benchmarking analysis.

So now need to set goal that CIOs do role beyond technology function.

Now is the time to change the Business model.

CISCO meeting: Future of the Internet

The future of the Internet: what's keeping the CISCO engineers awake at night.

I attended this CISCO presentation to the University of Oxford today.

The first presentation was from Fred Baker (CISCO fellow and ex-IETF chair).
Talk focused on growth of INternet and current limit of number of computer addresses. The goal is to, "Continue the growth of the Internet and its businesses"; for CISCO the goal is, "Continue the growth of the Internet with maximised application options and minimalised additional cost."

RFC521 - John Curran's Internet Transition Plan for ISPs: explains transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Fred explained how the two systems would have to co-exist.

CIDR put off the need to go to IPv6 to deal with the shortage of addresses.

A particular issue is the amount of information that is needed in the routing if you put an address on everything you want to track. IPv6 routing scales better than IPv4.

There are serious IPv6 trials in enterprise services. Total traffic is still less than 1% of total traffic.

The second presentation was from Klass Wierenga (consulting engineer in the office of the CTO) entitled the Mobile Internet

Billions of new users onto the Internet, most mobile access.Tens or hundreds of billion things connecting.

Radio access: RF is a major bottleneck - does not scale.

• Need to optimise airlink efficiency.
  
• Need to make networks a lot less expensive to build and operate on a cost per bit basis.
• Need to optimise routing; possibly not use tunnels, expose mobility to hgher layers and make it clear that host is moving...

Who decides who gets access to a network? Likely to require some kind of roaming agreement and technology for remote authorisation.

There are three identity spaces: SAML, OpenID and CardSpace. Trust is the foundation of any security model.

Network access: eduroam: authentication by home institution, authorisation by visited institution.

Application access: Shibboleth: UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research. Developed by Internet 2, uses SAML.

Conclusion: The issues of the Internet relate to scalability.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As go through transition, Internet industry need a lot of help from academia. Internet is an open confederation and so everyone needs to contribute to evolution.

Is it true that the Internet has done as much good as it has done bad (a statement made at the meeting)?

Email culture kills interaction between campus colleagues

There is an interesting in the THES today which states that, "Email culture kills interaction between campus colleagues".

Do you agree?

The article starts:- "V-cs in 'state of denial' about quality of internal communications, survey reveals. John Gill reports

An overbearing "email culture" and a shortage of staffrooms and areas where people can meet and chat are being blamed for hindering internal communications in universities.

In addition, communications directors consider academic managers to be much weaker at communicating with staff than their counterparts in purely administrative roles.

The initial findings of a sector-wide research project led by the University of Leicester also suggest that the views of vice-chancellors on internal communications strategies are often far removed from those of the people employed to oversee those strategies".

CISCO08 Public Services Summit

Have attended the CISCO Public Services Summit in Stockholm and Oslo - see http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le21/le34/nobel/2008/index.html.

CISCO has given it a real Web 2.0 feel by encouraging delegates to blog, twitter and flickr with the results of this activity captured on http://www.cisco08.com/. It will be interesting to see how delegates respond to this initiative. The flickr entries are at: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cisco08.

A thought provoking and challenging conference.

First Day:-

Paul Johnston - Exploring technology enabled change. Themes are: sustainability, innovation and inclusion.

Ulla Hamilton (Vice Mayor of Stockholm): 98% broadband penetration in city. Stockholm has infrastructure to enable traffic congestion to be reviewed on the web.

Simon Willis (VP Public Sector, CISCO): Recommendation - look at NASA's web sites looking at early civiliations up to 5000 years ago. All have complex distributed networks - connect, trade, specialise, using the commons of the river delta.

We face the most extraordinary challege with the climate - and we stand ready to make the wrong decsions. The credit crisis has made it even more difficult.

Carlata Perez (Unversity of Cambridge): looked at the roles of markets and states in shaping a sustainable age. Five technological revolutions in 240 years: industrial revolution; age of steam, coal and iron; age of steel and heavy engineering; age of automobile; age of ICT - half way through; and to come -> age of biotech. Each takes 40-60 years to spread, reach maturity and produce conditions for the next revolution.

In 1990s we had cheap oil and cheap Asian labour which favoured the old marketing and consumption patterns. Still struggling to move on from this. The shift to "ICT green" is possible; gradual redesign of patterns of good-life needed. Much institutional innovation is now needed for feasible sustainable global growth.The innovative power of ICT must be harnessed to facilitate this. The paradyne is not to make everyone the same, every region will bring out its identity - but have common ambitions in environmental friendliness and sustainability.

CISCO's connected sustainability book addresses many of the issues.

Government 2.0: New Directions for the Public Sector:- Interactive Panel consisting of: William Perrin (UK Government), Peter Shergold (former permanent sec. of Australian dept. of the PM), Christian Sautter (former French finance minister) and Christian Rupp (executive sec. e-Government in Austria).
What should Government 2.0 look like?

• Web 2 is a fundamental democratisation - makes it easy to publish:
• makes it possible to engage democratic process - e-Petition (1.7m in one petition in UK);
• new types of public services and public information - netmums web site - not under governmental control;
• ultra-local communities - able to empower communities but might unsettle.

• Important for social inclusion, quality of life - but - have to fight digital divide:
  
• improve technology - everybody has access - fibre optic into poor housing - sponsored;
  
• all primary schools have access - include e-Learning in home;
• senior people - special programmes for these people.

• Gives chance to be local and act globally if we want.
  

The UK has started a wiki to find the best way to use public information: www.showusabetterway.com It has a very large take-up.

Tom Steinberg brought in to UK activities to give: power of innovation, and that, "the Government should work in partnership with the best of citizens' efforts, not replicate them".
Would be like advice to choose best schools, hospitals on same basis as we take decisions on best electronic products.

Interesting student room web page for students wishing to find the best University and resources.

Fixmystreet has moved knowledge of what needs to be done from the local authority to the public.

Strategies for National Broadband Policy (afternoon day 1)

In the past: labour/resources/capital were the production factors. 'Connected knowledge' has been added. Scarcity was the common denominator of the three classical factors.

Recorded outputs of every human language: 6exabytes. In 2006 it was 15 exabytes digitally.

Richard Allan -
Broadband accelerates social and economic growth.
Need to have quality of ICT ecosystem (policy and regulations.) and extent of ICT infrastructure . Being advanced has been shown to give higher productivity..
Barack Obama, 6 December 2008, US ranked 15th in world in broadband adoption -renew information superhighway.

Key questions for a New Strategy

• Policies and regulations: need to be based on IP convergence (have they shifted from telephony)
• Market structure: need competitive markets, and sustainable
• Bottlenecks: is balance of private and public investment right? Are incentives and the public/private balance of investment adequate?
• e-Government strategy
• Does lack of ICT user skills constrain use of the Internet?
• Applications and tent - is the business environment conducive to take up

Sweden casestudy - Maria Hall Large public investment, 500mEuro. Project: electronic services - whenever and wherever.
Accessibility, robustness, more secure, IT-standardisation, electronic identification, openness in the networks


Lebanon casestudy - Kamal Shehadi
Need:

• to start from almost scratch
• separate broadband and mobile licenses;
  
• to incorporate existing service providers (who have reserved bandwidths of the spectrum), this is a serious problem;
• any new developer to meet new requirements for providing connectivity across the building - reduce costs of broadband
• to bring the country back to the internal telecommunications scene through market liberalization.
  

An interesting recurring theme is Paul Baran's vision of a network of networks. This led to the architecture used by the Internet/web. But is a network of networks resilient to rapid growth?

The world Internet project is an interesting review of the use of the Internet across 2 countries (UCLA).

Second Day

Richard Allan (CISCO) led session with William Perrin (UK Cabinet Office) and Hannah Brogren (City of Stockholm) to discuss Power of Information.

The UK's drive is to allow citizens to specify the need and to drive the response through mash-ups. By contrast, in Stockholm the drive is from the authorities, guided by citizen needs established through blogs, polls, and interviews.

An interesting development in Stockholm is that each page has RSS feeds.

Top 5 e-Government counties are those who have started from scratch - Slovenia, Latvia etc (can start a company within a day).

Wordpress makes it possible to set up blogs easily.

Richard Allan - what needs to be done? Theyworkforyou scrapes information from various sources to provide information on MPs (run by charity - some public service money).

BBC spends £120m on websites, central Government spends £250m on their websites. The BBC websites are generally considered to be better - and they took a strategic decision to reduce their number.

Obama is very keen on making data reusable.

planningalerts.com enables you to find planning requests close to where you live.

Day two afternoon session

Jorge Sampaio - former Portugese President

Compared digital revolution with Portugese revolution in the 1970s. Better informed public improves democracy. Emerging collective intelligence. Recent presidential campaign in US used Internet heavily for the first time.

Narendra Jadhav - Ho. VC of Pune University, India

University has 650,000 students with 480 courses - all on web site.

Charles Leadbetter - UK based think-tank; author of 'we-think'

We-think a 4 minute video on Youtube -worth a look.

Web could go in many different directions. Jonathan Zittrain's views.

Funtwo - 53million hits for guitar solo. Amazing story of the Internet. Boy not having to respect authority, not have to use traditioanl means, just get on and do it yourself.

Design principle for new world is 'think with'. We have been brought up with the world doing things for you or to you. :ogic of Internet, wikipedia is working with people.Environmentally, logic of working woth people. Needs new kinds of leadership.

Professor Lawrence Lessig 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'

Readonly culture- iTunes
Read-write - Wikipedia
-> Now remix - taking images and sounds and remixing
-> Sharing -> YELP.

So:

• Commercial
• Hybrid
• Sharing
  

Microsoft - Community Technologies - even uses Hybrid

Hybrids comes in different types. Is there a 'just hybrid'?

Change.gov - Abama's web site gives people a sense of ownership - as citizens produce value for the Government.

Democracy must be a priority. Is democracy threatened by increased scepticism? Gore: Crisis of democracy.

Guido Jouret - VP Emerging Technologies Group, CISCO

The Art and Science of Innovation.

Innovation as a Process

• Changing world: Consumerization, technology flattening the world, social networking, green consciousness
  
• Innovation comes from interface with customer.
  

The Power of Disruption

• Private company in 2001, Eli Lilly - Innocentive
• Large companies struggle with innovation
• The Innovator's Dialemma 2000
• Cloud computing is disruptive from virtualisation and from pay-for-use
• IP traffic will increase 6X from 2007 to 2012 - video and IP TV
• Video now is like the web in the 90s -> mashing video with business case. Video puts the human element back into the equation. Moving to medianet
• I-prize www.cisco.com/iprize
• Simple big ideas@CISCO - telepresence
• Recipe for innovation
  
• - think big; bold vision
• - try something new
• - solve simple points well
• - 5 phase plan
• - start, lead and others will follow
• - communicate, often and simply
• - do it with passion
  

Future success requires continuing focus on innovation.

Encyclopaedia Idiotica

The THES has an article this week which starts, "Wikipedia is created mostly by teenage male computer nerds, so Martin Cohen worries about its growing clout among 'scholars'

What is it about Wikipedia? It didn't exist in 2001. Not so long ago, it was just an obscure website full of biographies of sports figures and esoteric details about TV shows such as Star Trek.

But now it is big business. Wikipedia has unexpectedly become the most dominant "scholarly" source on the web. Now its aim is no less than "to become a complete record of human knowledge".

See: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403327

... and there are interesting comments.

2008 IBM Academic Days Conference

Today it is the IBM Academic Days Conference...

Ian Abbott-Donnelly, European CTO, spoke on 'Big Green Innovations'

'Big Green Innovations' refers to IBM innovations. There is a separate IBM initiative to make datacentres more efficient (not really covered in the presentation).

Similar statistics were shown as at the Gartner briefing yesterday.

IBM advertised all the environmentally friendly activities they were engaged in...

IBM claims a retro fit to a datacentre will give 30-40% improvement. Re-building from scratch would give an 80% improvement in energy efficiency.

http://www.top500.org is said to have electricity costs for different supercomputers (but I cannot find it).

A comment was made re. reducing electrical consumption. This is likely to be necessary, not just to reduce carbon, but because the infrastructure will not be able to supply enough.

Gartner Higher Education Briefing: e-Learning, Green IT

An interesting meeting in Barcelona with two main topics.

The Future of e-Learning in Higher Education:

By 2001, many institutes had created established course management systems (as opposed to their teachers using a variety of management systems).

The question asked was: are we starting to see the end of the institute course management systems? Are many of the functions in the CMS being replaced with Web 2.0 services; which are supplied externally to the institute (wikis, social networks,...)?

It was agreed that the answer would be to use SOAs with well defined standards, so that it would be possible to integrate added services to a CMS framework. Cardiff is using this approach with Sakai as the underlying framework.

Many people are concerned that Blackboard acquired WebCT (and the forced migration of users of the latter) - and universities are now actively looking for Open Source alternatives (Moodle is the favourite, then Sakai).



Green IT

It is estimated that IT 's carbon contribution is 2% of the total (roughly the same scale as aviation).

But within higher education, for universities which do not run large pieces of scientific equipment, the IT share is estimated to be between 15 and 20% total.

{http://www.ghg.protocol.org enables you to do your own calculations.}

The consequence is that changes to IT can offer significant carbon savings within a university as a fraction of the whole.

The effects of ICT on environmental sustainability:

• Negative: Greenhouse gas emission in manufacture. waste, hazardous substances, use of scarce resources
• Positive: Travel substitution, transport optimisation, e-Business and e-Government, environmental controls systems

ICT's Global Emissions:-

• Printing (6%): mainly paper and not the energy to print
  
• LAN and Office Telecoms (7%): difficult to tackle
• Mobile Telecoms (9%)
• Fixed-Line Telecoms (15%)
• Servers including cooling - data centre (24%)
• PCs, etc (39%): focus should be here

The embodied energy for a PC (building and delivery) is estimated to be 70-80% of the total energy used by the PC (but this ratio is questioned by the manufacturers).

It is recommended to undertake an environmental assessment, and set targets for power consumption and carbon levels.

It is estimated that 2,500 PCs and laptops cost 64kEuros in electricity over a year. it is relatively easy to halve this.

Data Centres are intending to cut power by:

• virtualizing
• stopping over-provisioning
• using power management to throttle power based on use
• using a low power state or shutting servers down when not in use
• smart energy management (directing cooling)

http://www.epeat.net/ is a good site to help purchasers evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.