The $35 Tablet That Is Changing The Education Landscape In India
by Peter High, published on Forbes
11-19-2014
As anyone in the US with children of school-age can attest, technology enhanced learning has become a standard. Increasingly, that computing is embedded in the methods that children learn. Moreover, “flipped classrooms” are taking hold. Under this model, lectures and homework in a class are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. This model has proven to be quite effective. Naturally, the cost of computing has been prohibitively expensive in many developing countries, and as a result the digital divide between the developed and developing world has grown.
For all that we read about India’s rise as a technology powerhouse, the country has relatively poor infrastructure. Less than 20 percent of mobile towers deliver 3G service, and therefore, 3G data services are used by less than 5% of active subscribers. The country also has the slowest internet penetration growth in the Asia Pacific region at only 12.5 percent. Compare that to China’s rate which is over 42% or even Bangladesh’s, which is 21 percent.
It should also be noted that in India, the drop-out rates of school children remain appallingly high. 16 percent of students drop out during grades one through four, 43% drop out during grades five through eight, and 68% drop out between grades nine and 12. As a result, there are roughly 142 million children who should be in school but are not.
A few weeks ago, I spoke at a gathering of IT executives at former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s presidential library, Centro Fox. Another speaker at the conference was Suneet Tuli, an Indian who now lives in Toronto. Tuli is the founder and chief executive officer of DataWind, a Canadian wireless web access products and services developer. Having become familiar with the discouraging data regarding the digital divide, Tuli elected to do something about it. As Tuli explains it, “Although I was born in India, I grew up in Canada, and had access to Canada’s world-class public education system. But in various family trips over the years, I realized that in India the quality of education one received was in direct correlation to one’s economic class. I felt very strongly that access to the internet would level the playing field.” He developed a goal for his company to develop a tablet computer that would be affordable for the masses in India. PCs became ubiquitous in the US once the cost of the PC dropped to below 25 percent of a person’s monthly income. In order for this to work in India, Tuli realized that his tablet would need to cost $35.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Forrester’s Top Emerging Technologies To Watch: Now Through 2020
11-18-2014
Forrester recently released its biennial report on the top emerging technologies to watch: now through 2020. The authors of the report note that “enterprise architects struggle with the speed of new technology delivery and constantly changing business strategies and requirements. To improve, enterprise architects must shift from an IT agenda focused on internal process improvement to a BT (business technology) agenda focused on increasingly powerful customers and the emerging technologies that can help win, serve, and retain them.”
They break down four major categories:
CIO Innovation Budgets Are Increasing
11-17-2014
A CEB survey of 166 IT executives determined that 33 percent of the 2014 IT budget is categorized as “business opportunity and innovation.” CEB defines business opportunity as “Investments that deliver new capabilities that drive the realization of business benefits; typically involve initiatives that expand your organization’s current line of business (e.g., a new customer-facing system).” Innovation is defined as “Transformative sources of competitive advantage; investment returns are typically hard to measure; typically involve initiatives that are outside your organization’s current line of business, (e.g., a system for sharing competitive intelligence).” This is up from 31 percent of the budget for 2013.
This is an encouraging sign that is indicative of optimism IT leaders have, the greater role that they play in innovation generally, but CEB assesses that it is also partially driven by the reduction in the share of the budget allocated to maintenance spending, which is at 57 percent in 2014 compared to 63 percent in 2011.
Another striking finding from the survey is that those IT departments that allocate a larger share of their budget to innovation and business opportunity – over 40% of budget – do not have more staff on average, and often have lower budgets overall, indicating that they can do more with less.
79 Percent Of CIOs Hope To Move Beyond That Role
11-12-2014
Last week at the Forbes CIO Summit in Naples, Florida, we gathered an elite group of chief information officers to talk about the evolution of the function, the growing span of influence of great IT leaders, and learn about trends that are ascending in importance in the minds of these executives. A poll question asked of the group was “Do you aspire to move beyond the CIO role?” Interestingly, 79 percent of the CIOs gathered indicated that they are interested in moving beyond the role to become CEOs and COOs, for example.
On the one hand, this is not so surprising for a group of high performing CIOs, but considering the fact that it was not so long ago that CIO was believed to stand for “career is over” because CIOs could rarely move beyond this role, it is all the more heartening. I have profiled a great number of Beyond CIOs, and several of them joined us to lend further insight into this trend.
We All Compete With Amazon
11-10-2014
In recent speeches at conferences, I have asked the executives gathered to guess the industry that the company with the best stock performance in the US during the 1980s represented. The three guesses most often offered are energy, financial services, and technology. Each is a reasonable guess. Only once has someone guessed the correct answer: retail. That the highest flyer of the 1980s came from retail is all the more remarkable when one considers the capital intensity of retail during the 1980s, before the advent of ecommerce. Physical stores needed to be built, inventories needed to fill those stores. Of course, employees needed to fill those stores, as well.
Circuit City was that top performing stock. The company went public in 1984, and in less than six years as a public company, it returned 8,265 percent. The company was a pioneer in the big-box retail segment, and much of its success could be attributed to creating a new customer experience bringing together nearly all aspects of consumer electronics together under one roof. Now, as customers visited stores to purchase a television, they could see the VCR that would go with it. They could see how different sound systems fit together and determine which computers and which peripherals were right for them. Knowledgeable sales associates demystified the complexity of consumer electronics for curious but intimidated customers.
It continued to perform remarkably well in the 1990s, and it used the windfall from its strong performance to start a number of other companies, including Divx Video, North American Banking Company, and in 1993, CarMax, today a $12.5 billion company.
Their success continued in the early part of last decade, as the company was featured in Jim Collins’ bestselling book Good to Great in 2001. Collins profile of Circuit City indicated that it had a number of practices that companies no matter the industry should follow. Remarkably, only seven years later, the company entered Chapter 11 protection, and the following year, the company was liquidated. It went from good to great to gone. (This was the title of a book written by Alan Wurtzel a former CEO of Circuit City whose father was the company’s founder.)
IT Learns to Trumpet Its Contributions to the Business
by Peter High, published on CIO.com
10-29-2014
Let’s face it, most CIOs aren’t very good at marketing IT’s value to the business. The IT group tends not to celebrate its successes, or if they do, they do it internally without letting other departments in on the good news. Not only does this mean that other departments aren’t aware of the value IT contributes, but it may even contribute to a false impression that IT is underperforming.
In my book Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation I discuss how high-performing CIOs constantly make the enterprise aware of IT’s contribution to bottom and top lines of the business. One of the rare IT leaders doing a great job of that is Intel CIO Kim Stevenson, who has developed an IT version of the corporate annual report. Just like the typical company’s overall annual report, Stevenson’s IT version covers accomplishments from the past year, projections for the year ahead and (this is especially important) financial information. That means an analysis of the money invested in IT and the value created from that investment.
To read the full article, please visit CIO.com
Developing an IT Mission Statement
by Peter High, published on CIO Journal
10-27-2014
Of the CIOs that I counsel, I would say that about 50% develop IT mission statements that help clarify the IT organization’s purpose, and another 50% do not. Crafting a mission statement is not necessary if you have a well-articulated strategic plan, but even in those cases, it is good to define one to provide another layer of strategic clarity.
In my new book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, I note the advantages of creating IT mission statements as a first step toward setting an overall IT strategy. They are especially useful in scenarios where no IT strategy yet exists, because it provides the first insight into what is sacred for IT. It provides a discussion point for IT employees, and colleagues outside of IT alike. The more it is made available to colleagues across the company, the more they will realize what IT “stands for.”
To read the full article, please visit CIO Journal
An Omni-Channel Pioneer Explains His Methods
Omni-channel retailing refers to the development of a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels, such as brick-and-mortar stores, smartphones, tablet computers, personal computers, direct mail, catalog, and the like. There are a lot of retailers who have made an attempt to establish the Omni-channel opportunity. Most have not thought enough about the overall customer experience as he or she passes through the various phases of the day, and when that customer is likely to use which device or visit which store, tying all of that together.
Chico’s FAS is a $2.6 billion specialty retailer of private branded, casual-to-dressy clothing, intimates, complementary accessories, and other non-clothing gift items. The Chief Information Officer of Chico’s FAS Eric Singleton has led the creation of the FAS Digital Retail Theater. As he explains it, the company elected to refer to this body of work as a theater in reference to the theater of life. In collaboration with other departments of the company, Singleton has created an innovative Omni-channel experience for the women who are his company’s customers. The fact that he has played a leadership role in this process provides a model for IT executives in retails and beyond on how the CIO should become more customer savvy, and drive top-line innovation.
Johnson Controls’ CIO Helps 125 Year Old Company Become Leader In The Internet Of Things
10-20-2014
On the face of it, you would not think of Johnson Controls as a leading candidate to be an innovator in the world of the Internet of Things. Johnson Controls is a 125-year-old company based in Milwaukee that produces more than $40 billion in revenue per annum. The origins of the company were in building systems, which was primarily heating, ventilation and air control (HVAC). The company’s diversified in recent times to include three other divisions beyond HVAC:
For the past six years, Colin Boyd has been the chief information officer of Johnson Controls, and he has been one of the leaders in the company responsible for the transformation toward being a leader in this trend. In fact, he said that the companies leadership in the trend predates the name of the trend. The company has been involved in what it calls “the Internet of Buildings” for more than a decade. Boyd’s role has been an important one, and it offers a look inside how the CIO might get more involved in taking advantage of this trends, while being mindful of the number of other divisions of the company that are necessary to engage along the way.
FedEx, Home Depot, GE, H-P To Headline Forbes CIO Summit
by Bruce Upbin featuring Peter High, published on Forbes
10-15-2014
The relaunched Forbes CIO Summit is only a few weeks away and we couldn’t be more excited. Yes, there are a ton of CIO conferences, but none are as focused as this one on redefining the role of technology leadership. Best part: there are still seats left. So if you’re an active-duty CIO, by all means request an invite. It’s taking place Nov. 2-4 at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla.
Chief information officers are in the middle of all the big changes in enterprise tech: cloud, mobile, social, security, virtualization, consumerization. The best CIOs nail the basics while looking beyond to create real value for their organizations. Real IT leadership means focusing on the hard stuff in between tech and the customer and between cost and opportunity. One thing is for sure: It’s not about plumbing any more. As Box cofounder Aaron Levie (who will be speaking at the event) says, “The first 20 years of the web were won by those that built the best infrastructure. Now it’s won by those that build the best experiences.”
The goal for the truly ambitious CIOs is to become so strategic to an organization that he or she assumes more responsibilities than just IT. Peter High, president of Metis Strategy and a Forbes contributor as well as my editorial partner in producing the event, calls them “CIO-pluses,” tech executives who take on operations, sales, manufacturing or marketing. The ‘best of the best’ rise beyond to become CEOs and COOs, or nab a seat on the board of directors.
