Gabriella Frick: This year is the first ever
virtual MIT Sloan CIO symposium. And the theme is
the big reset digital enterprises shift into high
gear. So based on that, what are you seeing in
terms of the CIO role changing? What are they
doing differently over the last year?
Allan Tate: Yeah, well, let me say this is the
first digital edition of the symposium. We've been
doing this symposium for, like 18 years. And in in
terms of, you know, CIOs, roles changing, I guess
the biggest cliche is that COVID brought two years
of digital transformation in two months. And you
know, CIOs, first of all had to really focus on
operations, they had a lot of people scatter
having to work remotely, customer habits had to
change. So they had to take care of that. What I'm
hearing a lot from CIOs is that they are really
becoming more and more integrated into the
business becoming partners with the business
rather than, you know, being in the back office.
And so they're getting more involved in strategy,
getting more involved in planning, especially as
companies are embracing some of the new
technologies like cloud and AI. They're really
seeing new opportunities, both to save money and
also venture out into new products.
Gabriella Frick: Right. And so you mentioned this
push for digital transformation and the
acceleration of it. And and you mentioned digital
technologies. So which of these digital
technologies are you seeing CIOs embrace more or
less of over the last year during the pandemic?
Allan Tate: Yeah, well, so as I mentioned, so the
first thing is, obviously, the, you know, the
online infrastructure. So as 1000s of employees
moved out, the CIOs had to make sure that they
could get connectivity that the data was secure,
that they were able to conduct online meetings. Of
course, everybody is on zoom all the time now. And
so that was, you know, first and foremost, was
just keeping the operation running. But what I'm
hearing from a lot of CIOs is a move to the cloud.
And you know, one CIO put it really, in an
interesting way. He said that often, CIOs were
working on the plumbing, right, and, and so they
were looked at as kind of a back office, you know,
bring in the plumber when you need to get
something fixed. And otherwise, you know, the
business does their thing. But as they've been
moving into the cloud, and getting their processes
in place, using agile and DevOps, they've begun to
be able to think more abstractly about the
business problems and partner with the other
business leaders. And it leads to an opportunity
to bring in artificial intelligence as well as
data analytics. Because they can identify problems
that can be solved, and then bring in those
technologies to solve them. And so we're seeing a
lot of I guess what I would say CIOs moving up to
a higher level of abstraction as they look at the
bigger business problems and try to bring value to
their clients, as well as their employees. Right.
And Gabriella Frick: you mentioned the word agile,
which I'm seeing a lot of and it almost seems as
if CIOs and the organizations as a whole are
adopting this agile mindset, taking those
principles, from agile and just applying it across
departments so that they all have this, this
mindset to innovate and to empower teams and to
kind of adapt to this new normal. Are you seeing a
lot of that?
Allan Tate: Yeah, and, and actually, in a number
of different ways. I mean, agile, as as you know,
kind of grew out of the software development
community, as people were trying to figure out,
you know, how to build these large software
systems, but now it's become something that I
think has been embraced across the corporate
culture more generally. And I mean, when you think
about what the CIO CIOs have to do, they have to
manage their products and infrastructure, not just
from a digital point of view, but also they have
their supply chains. So for example, we have Yossi
serif, talking about you know, the impact of the
pandemic. on businesses and you know, part of that
was supply chain disruption, which we all
experienced. But if you think about it, you know,
to a large degree, it's a, it's a data problem in
terms of planning and logistics and, you know,
connecting with all the different vendors. And so
resiliency, one of the ways to deal with
resiliency is to be more agile and to be able to
adapt more quickly to changes in the environment.
And I think that's one of the things that, you
know, COVID really has taught people,
Gabriella Frick: right. And you guys have the CIO
Leadership Award, which takes place during the
symposium. So given this major disruption that we
all experienced, are there any CIO projects or
endeavors that surprised you over the last year
ones that stood out?
Allan Tate: So what I would say is that there's
that the pandemic has really brought about a lot
of shifts and people's mindset, that's the thing
that stands out for me. So, you know, cultural
shifts in terms of company, real companies really
embracing, you know, the need for digitization,
the need to integrate digital into their products,
and how to figure out how to bring that value.
There's a lot of work going on to train employees,
and so that they can have people thinking at all
levels of the organization. Also talent
acquisition, you know, the where do you find
talent? And where can that talent live? I don't
think we're going to go back to working in
offices, although we will, to some degree, but
it's going to be a mix. And people are finding
that they can find talent from a wider pool
because remote work has been more embrace. I also
think that there's shifts in education. People are
starting to wonder, you know, do we always need a
four year degree or how do I keep up as a
professional? online education has become both
prevalent and accepted in many ways and consumer
habits have changed, you know, contactless
transactions and and customer expectations in
terms of ordering products online, do they want to
go into the source? So there's, I think that what
really strikes me about the time that we're in
right now is just that everybody shifting so many
different directions and CIOs are really at the
hub of keeping up with those shifts, and adapting
the technology and working with the other business