A couple of weeks ago I attended MIT’s CIO symposium that focused on Digital. Let me share with you some of my key learnings

• • Agile is foundational to transformational efforts. Where CIO have had success is bringing customer experiences to the developer to help shape priorities, designs, and solutions. Agile was mentioned by most of the CIO on various panels throughout the day.My view – You need to work on getting the C-Suite truly on board with agile transformation.

• • The workplace of the future was by far my favorite panel of the day bringing several different perspectives on empowering and extending the workforce with digital capabilities. “The workplace of the future is driven by self-selection – someone having the skills stepping to solution,” was Allison Mnookin’s, CEO of citizen development platform Quickbase, explained. Mike Morris of crowd sourcing platform TopCoder view is that “A workplace is a perk” and that “Organizations need to find the best person in the world that can help solution.” So either bring new digital tools to your workforce and let them step up to solution, or bring the best skills from the outside to solution for you. This panel asked and answered a difficult question, “Are you paying for effort or rewarding for results?” More on Citizen Development

• • Corner off innovation budgets is a key step CIO are taking and acknowledging as a best practice to ensure that innovation driven experimentation can occur outside of slower financial and governance practices.They agree that portfolio and ideation tools are useful to promote the best ideas, assign to the most capable teams, and provide them sponsorship to enable experimentation and learning from accepted failures. My view on calculating ROI too early in Digital Transformation.

• Is IoT a platform? Not yet, said a panel of experts including George Collins (CTO, Deloitte Digital), and MIT Professor Sanjay Sarma. “IoT is a series of capabilities, for it to become a platform it needs focused standards that develop an ecosystem. Tipping point for IoT becoming a platform given is when there is semantics and syntax for coordinating between things.” Basically, that means that the protocols that have been developed are proprietary and primitive – my analogy the TCP/IP of IoT – and that the industry will need easier to use, interoperable, and semantic protocols – for it to scale to wider use, My view – AI will be key to scaling IoT.

Other posts about MIT CIO 2016

• The Gig Economy Benefits “Superstar” Employees
• Widespread Blockchain Adoption will Take Time
• Cooperation vs. competition in the digital ecosystem
• Enterprise Projects Highlights