Intelligent Information Management (IIM)
As many of you know, well-known futurist Thornton May (and a former AIIM Board Chair) is one of the keynote speakers at The AIIM Conference 2014 (April 1-4, in Orlando). Thornton is one of those keynote speakers you won’t forget – suffice it to say, he is not a shy person!
I usually start my research for introductions at Conferences not by looking at all the boring CV/Resume data points about schools and jobs, but rather by looking at things a speaker has actually said and whether these things jar my conventional assumptions. With Thornton, there is no shortage of great quotes.
Here are a few samples to get your juices flowing for some of the issues we'll address at AIIM14. As I've told many people, our objective is to create a "head-scratching, this sure ain't a trade show, gosh I never thought of that" kind of Conference. I think this short sample from Thornton will give you some idea of what we're up to...
“We are at the big bang of social, economic, political, and evolutionary change.”
“The old think was that information overload is a problem. We’ve got to change our thinking. Having all this information available to us is not a bug; it’s a feature. Speaking realistically, there is nothing we cannot know.”
“There is so much waste in the enterprise today. People don’t know what’s going on in their enterprise. We reengineered in 1995 and then stopped. The whole term ‘process’ has disappeared from the vocabulary. “
“IT is still relegated to the role of turning machines on and missing the real action. If you focus on integrating value-creating IT behaviors into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, the future will be bright.”
“For some reason, subscription research firms in our industry insist that the role of the CIO is in decline and will soon be relegated to the dust heap of history. This is patently absurd. Think about it. We are on the cusp of a digital renaissance. Yet, the CIO will have no role to play in the new era that is dawning?”
“In the 1976 film Network, Howard Beale (a newscaster played by Peter Finch) induces his viewers to shout out their windows, ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’ In 2014, the IT community will rise up and with one voice shout, ‘We're mad as hell.’ My IT ethnography research reveals that our community is fed up with subscription research firms hiding behind a ‘nexus of forces,’ blowhards spewing erroneous stereotypes, and academics with 14 data points in their samples telling us that IT is doing a bad job. IT is doing a great job.”
“I suggest we all become chief ‘in your face’ officers when people start bloviating about IT's failure to create value.”
“I am pleased to report that in 78% of the Global 2000, IT does not suck…Most of the ‘turnaround’ CIOs who were airlifted into troubled IT shops have stabilized computational resources and succeeded in rendering enterprise IT nontoxic to key stakeholders…That was accomplished in the face of ridiculously low budgets, a vendor marketing approach in which more money is spent on golf outings and sporting events than on R&D or thought leadership and a tragically tech-illiterate corps of executives.”
“Hardly any … people understand how all this gear works, where all the data that makes this magic happen comes from, how to fix things when they break and the implications of our technology usage behaviors on information security and privacy. This is the bomb that's ticking away in every infosec manager's nightmare: user ignorance. The question facing not just chief information security officers but all of us is, ‘How do we fix stupid?’”
“Bear in mind, though, that while IT may not suck at long last, that won't last for long. Change is upon us. Is your organization prepared for the disruptions associated with the ‘SMAC stack’ -- the mix of social, mobile, analytics and cloud? Have you adjusted your talent pipeline? Have you put in place the appropriate risk-adjusted "experimentation sandboxes" to gain experience with these technologies ahead of deploying them at scale? Have you created a network of smart people doing smart things on the edges?"
