By Mike Anderson
Two weeks ago in Dallas, I presented our Workplace Scenario to more than 100 CIOs who were at a SIM dinner event the night of the BCS football championship. I had the opportunity to meet many of the CIOs during the reception. All of them were facing our hottest workplace issues. Mobile devices are a given. Nearly every CIO acknowledged that their business is introducing social software, and collaboration was moving to the cloud.
Each of the main points of the scenario struck a chord with the CIOs. Business trumps IT. When it comes to driving priorities and pushing new approaches to solving today’s problems, it’s clear that the business is calling the shots.
It’s now a mobile-first application world. Everything has to be mobile enabled, and mobile delivered. When I polled the audience on the number of devices they use, none of them used less than three. Most of the CIOs used four, and a few used six different devices.
Activity streams caught everyone’s attention. Few have started to gain experience with existing implementations. Less than half had a sense of the impending changes about to sweep across their nice and comfortable email-centric communication environment. Most were looking for some reason for this approach to appear, and take root.
I had gotten a warning before my presentation. This was a group of really busy CIOs. They have a history of frequently leaving these events early, so I shouldn’t be concerned that it was the presentation if my audience headed for the exits early. And, by the way, this was BCS championship football game night and many of the CIOs had already said they were anxious to head out early, since my session lasted until kickoff. Nice.
The revolution in the workplace resonated well with this group of CIOs. They were plugged into the issues, and there was a lot of interaction. As a group, these CIOs get the implications of the transformational changes they have to confront. They asked a lot of great questions. And not one of them left before the end.