11th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium to Address How Organizations Can Lead Digital Enterprises Forward

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, a world class, one-day conference of over 700 CIOs, senior IT executives and MIT academic thought leaders will allow attendees to network, collaborate, and explore how innovative technologies and leading-edge academic research can help lead digital enterprises forward and prepare for the next digital revolution. The Symposium will take place from 7:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on May 21, 2014 at the MIT Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, MA. Registration is still open.

“With the rapid acceleration in digital technology taking place, CIOs need to reinvent their digital enterprises, again. Both new technologies and a cultural transformation will be essential ingredients to success,” said Lindsey Anderson, the 2014 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Chair. “Attendees will leave the Symposium armed with new leadership skills, essential to identifying and implementing compelling new technologies and overcoming organizational obstacles.”

The Symposium will feature invaluable keynote panel discussions with world leaders in their fields of expertise. All of the day’s sessions will help attendees learn how to effectively use technology to improve business performance while sustaining their leadership. The full agenda is available at www.mitcio.com/agenda. Highlights include:

• Executive Leadership Keynote Panel: “Working with the CEO and the Board” will discuss what executive leaders expect of CIOs and what CIOs expect of their CEOs and Boards. Executive leaders, board members, CIOs and a MIT Sloan faculty will explore the best way for the CEOs, Boards, and CIOs to communicate, their respective roles in leading the Digital Enterprise, the right pace of change and who should be creating the digital roadmap. Featuring Narinder Singh, President of [topcoder]™ and Member of Appirio’s Board of Directors; Peter Weill, Chairman, MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR); Mark Holst-Knudsen, President of ThomasNet, Stephen Neff, Enterprise CTO of Fidelity, and Michael Hickins, Editor, The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal.
• MIT Academic Keynote Panel: “Are you Ready for the Shifting Frontier of Mind and Machine” will highlight a portion of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s New York Times best-selling book, “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.” Self-driving cars, Jeopardy! champion supercomputers, 3D printing, and a variety of useful robots have all indicated that we’re at a tipping point where technologies once found only in science fiction are becoming everyday reality. This panel will discuss what attendees need to understand about the nature of technological progress in the era of digital hardware, software, and networks.
  
  Featuring Erik Brynjolfsson, Director, MIT Center for Digital Business; Prof. John Leonard, Mechanical and Ocean Engineering, MIT CSAIL; Prof. Sandy Pentland, MIT Media Lab; and Prof. Tom Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan.
• CIO Keynote Panel: “Leading the Digital Enterprise” will discuss the organizational and technical challenges CIOs face when leading their organization’s transformation to its future Digital Enterprise. It will review how to overcome organizational obstacles, the best way to work with other executives in establishing priorities, strategic planning, implementing the right technologies and more. Featuring Adriana Karaboutis, Global CIO of Dell; Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinix (NYSE: EQIX); Rebecca Rhoads, President, Global Business Services and CIO of Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN); and Roger Gurnani, EVP & CIO of Verizon (NYSE: VZ).
• Closing Keynote: In this session titled “Closing In On The Second Machine Age,” Andrew McAfee will follow-up on his co-author Erik Brynjolfsson’s morning presentation to discuss our current inflection point, where technology continues to advance at a pace that is outstripping the educational system and skill development for workers, business models and the types of companies in our economy. As part of this presentation, McAfee will address actions we can all take to help prepare ourselves, our children, our businesses, and our economy to embrace the pace of technology now.

Other panel sessions driven by key IT leaders, practitioners, and MIT researchers include: “Transforming ‘Digital Silos’ to ‘Digital Care Enterprise,’" “Big Data, Analytics, and Insights,” “Security, Privacy, and Availability in the Digital Enterprise,” “Capitalizing on the Internet of Things,” “Maximizing and Communicating the Business Value of IT,” “CIO, CMO, CDO Perspectives on Digital Transformation,” and “Evolve or Perish: Becoming the CIO of the Future.”

The Symposium will also feature this year’s Finalists for the prestigious MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award on several panels and include an “Author’s row” book signing by Sandy Pentland, author of “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science,” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, New York Times best-selling authors of “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies,” and Tom Davenport, author of “Big Data at Work.”

The Symposium will conclude with The Innovation Showcase, which connects CIOs and senior business leaders with ten carefully selected early-stage technology companies which have the potential to impact CIOs’ top and bottom lines through innovation value.

For more information about the 2014 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium visit www.mitcio.com.

About the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is the premier global event for CIOs and senior IT executives to become better business leaders. In one day, CIOs and senior IT executives receive actionable information that enables them to meet the challenges of today’s changing global economy. The annual event offers a day of interactive learning and thought-provoking discourse on the future of technology, best practices, and business that is not available anywhere else. The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is organized and developed by a team from the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association and the MIT Center for Digital Business. Visit www.mitcio.com for more information and registration.

To stay connected to the Symposium and its community, follow updates on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mitcio.