Tools We’ll Create

Dave Girouard
Vice president and general manager, Enterprise, Google

Since its birth, IT has been about automation and has been designed around the needs of the business at the expense of people. So a procurement system or a manufacturing system has been designed to automate the business to reduce costs and to increase the speed of the business. That’s what IT has been about, and all those gains have been wrung out. Now the really interesting things are about moving from a business-centric model to a people-centric model. CIOs are still seeing gains from business process reengineering and getting the last bits out of that. Dell has proven that the supply chain model is fantastic, but it only gets you so far. You have to be more than an incredibly efficient supply chain. So what’s really going to define what the business does in the next five or 10 years is more about innovation in the tools people use and the environments people work in.

All Tomorrow’s Software

Grady Booch
IBM fellow, one of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language (UML)

Software-intensive systems will become increasingly invisible (as they weave into the interstitial spaces of society) and increasingly complex (for there is an essential, inescapable and growing complexity to such systems). Our civilization runs on software, and this reality will become even more true in the coming years. The continuing rise in computing performance and storage will contribute to civilization’s increasing dependency on software: the decreasing size of form factors; the dominance of intimately concurrent (multicore) systems, as well as massive, loosely coupled distributed systems; the presence of personal automated devices plus pervasive embedded systems and the advances in materials such as digital paper and the global economic pull toward software-intensive systems. There will undoubtedly be some technical breakthroughs that we cannot anticipate: quantum computing, robotics, practical AI. These are all areas ripe for advancement. However, that being said, one thing we know is true: Developing software-intensive systems has been, is and will remain fundamentally hard.

Whither the CIO?

June Drewry
VP of the Society for Information Management’s Leadership Development Institute and global CIO, Chubb & Son

The CIO role has been increasing over the years with no indication that this is just a short-term situation. Technology permeates everything we do today. The technical choices, integration and execution get more and more complex. Only a very naïve person could imagine these technical responsibilities disappearing. Additionally, many CIOs are being seen as the best people capable of taking on new enterprisewide responsibilities of innovation, execution or integration.