Most important trends from CIO Trend 2019
Did you miss out on the annual IDG event, CIO Trend 2019? Don’t worry. Sofigate will fill you in with the most talked about tech trends from the event.
The CIO Progress Report
CIO Trend is an event that focus on the year’s trends and priorities for Sweden’s CIOs and IT leaders. After last year’s GDPR focus, the CIO spotlight once again turned to digitalization and AI. Attracting, and keeping, talent is another big priority for CIOs as the need for competence is enormous. Other areas that become both more interesting and important is the cloud, agile working methods, security, and IT-driven innovation.
The open source way of digitalization
To speed up the digital transformation hundreds of companies and organisations have been helped by the Business Technology Standard, an open source framework that provides a thorough understanding of the overall technology management landscape and helps to build the needed capability for managing digital transformations. Björn Olofsson, Managing Director of Sofigate Sweden, presented to foundation of the framework and why it’s been successful. You can get the full framework here.
Niclas Karlsson, Director of Corporate IT Projects & Processes at ICA Gruppen, presented how they worked with Business Technology Standard and the positive effects it had on their business, and how the framework is essential in IT organizational change processes.
A success factor for ICA Gruppen was their big room meetings where the management clearly conveyed that “we do it together”. It created confidence and security for those who worked directly with the implementation.
– The most significant reason for the great result was an expectational change management. Had we not used Business Technology Standard, we would have had much more work and insecurity within the organization during the process, said Niclas Karlsson.
How to integrate IT and marketing with agile methods
Helena Bergstrand, Head of Governance & Technology and Linda Wetterborg, CMO at Telenor Sweden introduced their work with becoming a faster and more adaptive company by integrating IT and marketing with agile working methods.
They presented three tools in order to succeed with the integration:
- Objectives and key results – a method of setting goals that generate transparency. The goals shall be ambitious and measurable.
- Big room planning – a regular get together where all involved parts in the project meet to sort out who is in need of what.
- A common leadership – going from hierarchy to empowering. This resulted in more effective teams.
Recruiting the most qualified employees, and also being able to keep them, was emphasized during the day.
– To be able to attract the talents of tomorrow we need to create a workplace with a supporting culture. Instead of hierarchies, we should work towards empowering. After all – we are people with both brain and hearts, said Linda Wetterborg and Helena Bergstrand.
And of course – Artificial Intelligence
AI was the word on everyone’s mouth. The psychologist Per Naroskin explained how our self-image could be influenced by AI. Will we humans be the masters or will technology be masters over us? In order to understand our way of thinking about robots and AI, it is important to be conscious of the anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is about humans’ tendency to attribute non-human things consciousness and emotions. Per Naroskin went on to explain that our ability to respond to faces and human expressions works in exactly the same way with robots.
– I think we all know someone who has baptized their robot lawn mower, and talks to it, right?, Per Naroskin said.
What is the meaning of life?
Per Naroskin ended his seminar by talking about the new religion Way of the Future. They believe technology will relatively soon be able to surpass human abilities, and therefore they want to help educate people about this future and prepare a smooth transition. Their vision is to create a super computer with the ability to answer all of the human’s questions.
– But is super intelligence really the answer to everything? In the end it might be just like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe the answer simply is 42, Per Naroskin ended.
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