Profile of top IT leaders at MIT CISR Summer Session 2012

Equinox Business Change Practice Director John Barris recently attended the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) Summer Session 2012 in Boston. The Summer Session was held during the week of 18 June and included workshops and presentations from MIT Sloan researchers and IT leaders. As a sponsor of MIT Sloan CISR, Equinox was invited to attend.

I met up with John to find out some more about his experience at the MIT CISR Summer Session 2012, and in the process received a profile of the top IT leaders presenting at the MIT CISR Summer Session 2012.

Brendon: What was the MIT CISR Summer Session 2012 all about?
John: The session focused on organisations generating business value from IT and succeeding in a digital economy. For me the event was really inspiring, as it took up major topics such as globalisation, exploiting digitised platforms, and innovation.

Brendon: What was the thing that impressed you the most?
John: I found it very valuable from several perspectives. One was being able to socialise with people who are at the top of their game. I was also able to get key learnings regarding the business usage of technology and it stimulated my thinking in regard to working smarter. One of the top highlights was listening to how top executives and leaders transformed their businesses.

Brendon: Why were the top leaders and their presentations a highlight?
John: They seem to have some unique traits, including:

• A total focus on their business and supporting their business’s operating model. They use technology to standardise and optimise the core of that model and innovate around the edges. In other words, the things that don’t change in their businesses are optimised to become more efficient and innovation is encouraged and promoted when it comes to the delivery of services to the customer.
• They don’t think of technology as solutions, but rather as capabilities to exploit.
• They also appreciate that within a complex and challenging world you can’t do everything, so you focus on what matters.
• They keep some money aside for corporate or strategic projects that not one business unit alone would be prepared to fund.
• They lead people by promoting a vision. They are very conscious of getting buy in from their direct reports and very focused on ensuring that their leadership team are all on board, which sometimes means turnover when this is not achieved.
• They always approach issues with an ‘it can be done’ attitude, which resonated with me as a Kiwi.
• They are known for making evidence-based decisions, which ties in strongly with their relationship with MIT CISR where they could obtain current and relevant evidence-based research to support their decisions.

Brendon: So what’s next?
John: One of the cool things about our relationship with MIT CISR is that it is a very interactive relationship. We have MIT CISR Research Scientist Dr Peter Reynolds visiting Equinox this week to run an internal training session with our consultants and also together with Equinox he will meet with some of our clients.