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Optimization for Innovation Conference – Call for Participation

I’m working with the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) on a new Optimization for Innovation Conference series.  The inaugural conference is “Optimization for Innovation: Reset; Joint Business & Technology Actions for the New Normal”:

As the world economy emerges from a painful recession, organizations are confronted with the challenge of retaining bottom-line diligence, while pursuing market sustaining and gaining innovation, in an environment riddled with uncertainty, increased regulation, consumer reluctance and tighter credit. This is the “new normal.” To execute in the “new normal,” organizations are seeking new ideas and techniques to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

At the inaugural Optimization for Innovation conference, executives, senior-level practitioners, experts and thought leaders will share real-world experiences and pragmatic 90-day action items to harvest savings and trapped value from existing processes, resources and capabilities. The conference will consist of a combination of invited guest speakers, keynotes, case studies, presentations and tutorials.

By attending this conference, direct reports and senior staff of the COO, CFO and CIO will learn:

• How leading organizations are optimizing for innovation
• Business Optimization Techniques and Practices
• Business & Technology Partnership Models
• Business Performance Analysis and Measurement Practices
• Business Risk Identification & Mitigation in a Connected World
• Business-Technology Enablers

The conference is December 6 – 8, 2010, in Santa Clara, CA USA.  December 6 is tutorials.  December 7 & 8 are full conference days. 

This morning, we issued a call for participation.  We are seeking proposals for presentations including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Program Topics

• Optimization for Innovation Success Stories
• Business-Technology Reset: Optimization for Innovation
• Governance Models for the New Normal
• Business Analytics as Optimization Foundation
• New Normal Linchpins: Business-Tech Savvy Professionals
• Business-IT Alignment is a Dead-End
• Business Optimization Techniques

Tutorials Topics

• Instituting a Business Performance Measurement Framework
• Cyber Risk Analysis: Assessment, Policy, & Economics
• Business Process Modeling and Business Instrumentation
• Lean / Six Sigma in the New Normal

Presentations and tutorials proposed should be geared toward an audience comprising direct reports and senior staff of the COO, CFO and CIO. All presentations and tutorials  must include a 90-day action plan for attendees to pursue post-conference.

The submission deadline is August 13, 2010. Please note, submissions that are direct pitches for product or services will not be considered. Submissions should be prepared in English, containing the following information:

• Presenter name, title and affiliation
• Presenter Bio
• Session Title
• 2 - 3 paragraph description of proposed session
• 3 - 5 bullets on what attendees will learn
• Target audience characteristics: role, skill and industry
• 90-day action plan items

Submit abstracts as described above to Program Chair Brenda M. Michelson (me) via e-mail.

[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

gone (business-technology-capability-value) dot-linking …

Ok, even my brother is giving me grief about not blogging.  And he’s not even in tech. Yes.  I’ve been varying degrees of quiet.  Guilty as charged.

As my former CIO always presumed, the longer my silence, the greater likelihood I was up to something.  She was right. Extrapolating forward, I must be up to something.  In fact, I am. 

Over the last 12-18 months, I’ve had several ah-ha moments.  Resulting in seemingly random ideas scattered throughout the business-technology universe.   Luckily, I’ve been doing this long enough to know when I keep circling the same ideas, something will come.  Eventually.

Well, that finally happened.  Emerging from the mystery of background processing, I began to link-these-dots with each other, and within a business value context.  I was so close.

Oddly, a recent rant of mine on Twitter, about the impedance mismatch of the tech industry’s product-orientation with enterprises’ capability-orientation, ended up being my missing link.

Now, I’m quietly (yet excitedly) weaving everything together in a compelling narrative.  No surprise, I started with the framing diagrams.

So, to my brother Alan, and my many supportive readers, please bear with me a little bit longer.  I have a good feeling about this. 

And yes, Guillermo, I will now seriously revisit the “book thing”.

Dean Kamen’s FIRST: Celebrating & Inspiring Science and Technology

Last Wednesday at IBM’s Innovate Conference, I had the opportunity to catch Dean Kamen’s inspirational keynote on the life changing (and saving) inventions he has pioneered at DEKA, as well as his mission to inspire future generations of engineers, scientists and technologists via his FIRST program.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Sciences and Technology) is an annual robotics competition for students of all ages, starting with Lego Leagues for elementary school students and progressing in materials, skills and complexity from middle school to collegiate levels.

Kamen shared that his purpose in speaking at Innovate was self-serving.  He is seeking mentors and support for the FIRST program.  An article on Kamen, entitled Mr. Segway’s Difficult Path, is featured in the Economist’s current Technology Quarterly:

“Their answer, Mr Kamen hopes, will name-check FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a glitzy robotics competition that he started in 1989 and which now attracts over 200,000 entrants annually from schools in 56 countries. Working in teams supervised by a professional scientist or engineer, children construct and control robots in a series of competitive challenges, egged on by cheerleaders, screaming parents and the prospect of scholarships worth $12.2m in 2010 alone.

If that all sounds suspiciously similar to American high-school sports, it is no accident. “I want kids to realise that engineering and problem solving are every bit as fun and rewarding as bounce, bounce, bounce, throw,” says Mr Kamen. “I want FIRST to compete with the Superbowl, the World Series and the Olympics. The next generation of real wealth is going to be produced in fields like proteomics, genomics and nanotechnology. For that you need world-class technology people, and if kids don’t get on the train very early, it’s left the station.””

The article concludes with Kamen’s vision of his robotics competitors:

“Which brings him back to FIRST, the invention of which Mr Kamen is most proud. “It really is an invention because it was a different way to attack a fundamental social problem,” he says. “For any one product I worked on, if I didn’t do it, someone else would have. Maybe they would have done it a little later, or a little differently, but they would have done it. But when I look out in the stands at tens of thousands of kids each year during FIRST, I see all the scientists that are going to work on the really exciting stuff that’s going to happen over the next 15 years. They will be making materials that have no resistance and can carry millions of amps, creating materials that can make, store and transform energy, understanding how to build at a molecular level to synthesise proteins and fix health problems, literally by engineering life.””

If you have an engineering, science or technology background, or curious children, consider getting involved in FIRST. 

For more on Kamen’s work, check out his visits to the Steven Colbert Show.

@ Forrester IT Forum: “make.believe” Business Technology Transformation, Drew Martin, SVP and CIO, Sony Electronics

Keynote Speech: “make.believe” Business Technology Transformation, Drew Martin, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Sony Electronics

Business technology (BT) transformation means different things to different companies. The challenge is to identify which technological trends have the greatest opportunity to transform your business and then to rally people around believing they can make that transformation a reality. This session will highlight how Sony Electronics’ IS department is doing this to contribute to Sony’s overall transformation. It will focus on harnessing the power of social networking and on seamlessly connecting electronics products with content for consumers.

Participants in this session will take away the following:

• Practical real-life examples of making BT a reality in consumer electronics.
• How to foster a culture of innovation while also managing day-to-day operations.
• Lessons learned from pursuing innovation and managing associated risks.

Martin starts with an overview of Sony Electronics.  Lots of mobile devices in the picture, including the “bloggie” video camera. From there, Martin explains “make.believe” spirit and the fit with IT. 

First, as a CIO you can’t pick one model of IT – low cost, catch and fetch (projects), innovative.  Need to do all three.  Second, can’t pick same handful of individuals for all the innovative projects. Third, inspired from a Harvard Business Review article in August 2008, platforms are they key for accelerating future innovation in your company.

Next, the “make.believe” approach.  Need both introverted and extroverted engineers.  Show the magic, not the trick.  Believe the hype.  On the hype, temper at the start, but believe for the longer term.  Calls out cloud computing as an example.

Third, Martin shares his Rules for IT Radicals:

• Re-distribute the wealth
• The Willie Sutton Rule – Translate innovative ideas into the money. Go to the CEO with money-making ideas.
• Keep your friends close…
• Find the umbrella – From Dilbert – every budget has room to innovate

Finally, Martin advocates Having Fun:

• Separate church and state – remove the religion
• Play to win – huge difference in playing not to lose versus playing to win

For more of Drew Martin’s perspectives and Sony’s use of social media, check out this interview in Forbes, published yesterday.

@ Forrester IT Forum: Joe Eng, EVP and CIO, JetBlue

Keynote Speech: Enabling The Transformation Of The Business Through IT At JetBlue, Joseph Eng, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, JetBlue Airways

Better enabling the business through IT starts at a very foundational level. Simplification of infrastructure, services, and processes enables a more flexible and predictable model that allows an IT organization to truly partner with the business. And most importantly, it’s about the business and not technology. Joe Eng, JetBlue’s EVP and CIO, will share how JetBlue has innovatively used IT to transform how the company does business and to successfully position itself to head into its second decade of operations.

This session will cover the following themes:

• Alignment with the business.
• Leading, not just following.
• Consistent, predictable, improving.
• Maximizing IT investment.

JETTITUDE = Customer Engagement.  How does this translate in IT?  IT doesn’t deal directly with the customer [Jetters like me]. 

1. Align with Business: Not Just IT projects, but business capabilities.

2. Lead, not Just Follow: Plan, Engage, and Deliver with the business. Bring Enabling Solutions forward proactively. Do not wait to be asked.

3. Consistent, Predicable, Improving: Meaningful Metrics: measuring the business process. Standardize the process: both business and IT. Ongoing quality improvement culture.

4. Maximize IT Investments: Buy over build, Platform over best-of-breed, Services over ourselves.  Business leadership engaged in IT prioritization.

Eng is walking us through many of JetBlue’s flight features, promotions and the new T5 terminal at JFK, including my station near gate 19 with the free wifi & power.  He’s showing us a spoof video of a “CEO’s guide to Jetting”. 

T5 was not only a big construction project, but a big technology project.  All the JetBlue systems at T5 are virtualized.  No applications reside on the agent stations. 

JetBlue IT doesn’t talk to the business about technology, they talk about the business.  On IT as an order-taker, “If we get an order, we are already too late”.

A note to future CIOs, Eng uses a tremendous amount of business language, including industry specific metrics, revenue vs. risk tradeoffs, delivery capabilities that monetize seats, creating a culture for innovation and such.