Key ideas, thoughts and stats from day two. Another interesting day, especially the dialogue I’ve had with other energy and utilities organizations from across the region.
Key ideas from day 2:
- Had some excellent dialogue with a bunch of other Energy & Utilities attendees. We seem to all have the same issues around IT/OT convergence, asset management, knowledge management and data integration/quality. In some respects we are once again a bit more advanced, at least in our thinking about some of this stuff.
- There is some interest in the CIM standard but more are dabbling. Ausgrid seem to have made some progress in this space by all accounts.
- I’m having lunch with Kristian Steenstrump tomorrow so will get a chance to get his perspective on some of the E&U stuff
- The CIO track sessions are becoming a bit repetitive with respect to the challenges IT faces and how it should respond.
- The CIO Power Politics tackled a subject which can be taboo and so is often done poorly. I really enjoyed the direct and strong style of delivery during this session. Dependency is a source of power but most IT leaders aren’t prepared to pull that trigger.
- You have politics when there is more than one person in the room. It’s a reality and you’ve got to leverage it to make things happen.
- Influence is one of the crucial elements of true power. No surprise there but it’s very clear that CIO power comes from coalition power.
- Calling stakeholder ‘customers’ has power dynamics Implications - the customer is always right. We should move to something which grows partnership power dynamics.
- Attendance at the Mobile Device Management session was a clear indicator of the dact that this is a hotspot - it was packed with people lining the corridors.
- I spent some time with a few vendors talking through our mobility requirements for field applications and it would be fair to say none of them have a 'complete’ solution for us - Citrix is probably closest now that they have acquired Follow Me Data (a corporate Dropbox capability).
- A Enterprise Architecture vs SOA session suggested that modern businesses need both an overarching architecture as well as agile design - once again, nothing new there. It felt almost like a semantic debate.
- The licensing rules around tablet are complex. Some scenarios require additional licenses and some don’t. We need to get to grips with what that means for us, we don’t want surprises around license costs.
- Many users are experiencing data fidelity issues with using tablets because of application compatibility issues -e.g. Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint 2010.
- Apple’s proprietary approach in fact makes it more enterprise friendly than Android. Amazon will adopt the 'curated’ app store model for the Kindle Fire.
Key stats from day 2:
- More than 4 trillion dollars are spent on IT globally per year.
- One big bank I spoke with had 30% duplication in its service catalogue after 18 months because they didn’t get their governance right.
- Apple offers only 4-8% discount on enterprise bulk orders of their devices.
An attendee survey on mobility found some interesting stats:
- 56% of you have an iPhone. 22% have a Blackberry. 6% have a Symbian phone. The remainder are equally divided between Windows and Android devices (8% each).
- 58% of you say that most of the use of your phone (75% of the time or more) is for applications other than voice communication.
- 70% of you have an iPad. Another 9.5% of you plan to get one. By contrast only 6% of you have a non-iPad tablet device, with another 6% planning to get one. Only 8% of you have no plans to get any kind of tablet device.