(23:08)

In this podcast, C.K. Prahalad, author of The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit, talks about how CIOs can use innovative technology to reshape their company's business model, as well as drive new opportunities for poverty-stricken area. (He calls the latter the bottom of the pyramid.)

Despite the downturn in the economic, this's a great time to be a CIO or CTO. That's the conclusion from C.K, Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy and the author of best-selling management books such as The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit. He says, "Because some CIOs must work under the pressure of shrinking budgets and don't have much time for innovation, this might be a tough concept for some CIOs to grasp."

Prahalad lists four fundamental drivers that can create new opportunities for all kinds of businesses - everything from retailing to financial services to manufacturing. These drivers include the convergence of technology, convergence of industry boundaries of technology, the emergence of social networking, and the globalization of things such as the global supply chain, global markets, and global research and development in third-world countries.

He says, "Convergence of technology is all around us. For example, the cell phone and the PC are now merging into one device. We're seeing a dramatic reduction in the cost of digital technology. Social networking sites such as Facebook didn't exist five years ago. Meanwhile, many companies have taken advantage of global opportunities by expanding to new markets in China and India."

In this podcast, Prahalad provides specific examples of how senior IT executives can address new business opportunities for their companies, how new technology initiatives can drive business opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, why companies should embrace the concept of open innovation, and what the CIO role will be like 10 years from now.

Bio
C.K. Prahalad is the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and a globally recognized management thinker. He has consulted for the top management of many of the world's foremost companies, such as Ahlstrom, AT&T, Cargill, Citicorp, Eastman Chemical, Oracle, Phillips, Quantum, Revlon, Steelcase, and Unilever. Prahalad serves on the board of directors of NCR Corporation, Hindustan Lever Limited, and the World Resources Institute.

His best-selling management books include The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit (rereleased in 2009), Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (co-authored), and Competing for the Future, and The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. He has authored numerous award-winning articles, several of which won the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Prizes. Other prizes include European Foundation for Management Award in 1993, 1994 Maurice Holland Award as the Best Paper, and the 1997 ANBAR Electronic Citation of Excellence.

Resources
C. K. Prahalad Talks about How Changing Business Models in the New Age of Innovation Will Impact IT, Enterpriseleadership.org
http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/blogs/Articles/2008/07/23/c-k-prahalad-talks-about-how-changing-business-models-in-the-new-age-of-innovation-will-impact-it

C. K. Prahalad Talks about Business Models Driving the New Age of Innovation, BTM Institute
http://www.btminstitute.org/LeadershipInsight/CKPrahalad.html

How Strategy Guru C.K. Prahalad Is Changing the Way CEOs Think
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968089.htm

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Dr. Joel West, an associate professor at San Jose State University's College of Business, talks about the open innovation paradigm for technology development. His teaching and research focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. Along with Henry Chesborough and Wim Vandaverbeke, West is editor of the book, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Working and living in the heart of Silicon Valley, Dr. Joel West cannot get away from technology innovation. In fact, his course offerings and research at the San Jose State University's College of Business focus on technology innovation and strategic management in technology companies. San Jose State University ranks at one of the top 25 research business schools in the U.S.

Dr. West's interest goes beyond traditional innovation to the concept of open innovation. He defines it as the idea of using the market rather than the internal hierarchy, both as a source of innovation and a way to commercialize innovation. Open innovation also means treating innovation like anything else -- something that can be bought and sold on the open market not something that happens within a company. He says that a company can no longer depend on its internal resources to drive its innovation efforts.

His research in open source computing led him to looking at open innovation and a book on the subject. He was one of the co-editors with Henry Chesborough and Wim Vandaverbeke on the book, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (2006). He also writes several blogs about open innovation, including openinnovation.net, which describes his research and provides comments on other academicians' research projects.

In this podcast, Dr. West explores what powers the concept of open innovation and how it differs from traditional innovation efforts, such as research and development. He says that open innovation raises the question about how those companies that practice it differ from those organizations that have research and development programs. Henry Chesborough explored this in first book on open innovation published in 2003.

West says, "Companies that practice open innovation will do the same things they did before they adopted it. They might have a research and development department. Chesborough went one step further by looking at the revolutionary nature of open innovation. According to him, open innovation is a process that enables a company to find the best sources of innovation, and to find the best paths to commercialize that innovation. The company might accomplish these goals looking within company and looking outside the company. They might take other paths that they would not have considered if they did not know about open innovation."

Dr. West has two important takeaways for chief information officers, chief strategy officers, and chief technology officers: look for external resources who know how to make your products better or who have new products ideas, and find the best ways to bring these resources into your organization. He says, "You might look at university students, your suppliers and customers, or an open innovation community. You might have to look at all of these possibilities to find out which class of individuals or position in the value chain will provide the best ideas you want. Money does not always motivate people to share their ideas with you. Many people like the idea of a challenge to compete for recognition. You might have a content to find the best ideas."

Bio

Dr. Joel West is an associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Department of Organization and Management in the College of Business at San Jose State University. His research, teaching, and industry experience center on global technology industries, which provide the lifeblood of Silicon Valley.

His research findings have appeared in Asian Survey, Information Systems Research, Management International Review, R&D Management, Research Policy, Telecommunications Policy, and The Information Society, among other journals. He has won best paper awards for tracks of the Academy of Management and HICSS conferences, and has been active in service to the research community. Along with Henry Chesborough and Wim Vandaverbeke, West is editor of the book, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

West earned a Ph.D. in management from the University of California, Irvine.

Resources

Joel West's Personal Blog

http://http://blog.openinnovation.net/2010/02/joel-open-innovation-podcast.html

Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm

http://http://www.openinnovation.net/Book/NewParadigm/

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast Vid Byanna, executive director of Accenture's internal IT infrastructure, talks about his company's and collaborative computing, and cloud computing initiatives.

Each day the 177,000 employees at Accenture, a $19 billion global IT services company, must communicate effectively with 1,000 of customers in more than 120 countries. In fact, Accenture executives often find themselves looking for internal experts who can support specific customer engagements.  The traditional process has involved emailing one's network of colleagues to help with the search. Now these executives can use Accenture People, an internal version of LinkedIn, to search the company's global network of employees.

Accenture People comprises Accenture Collaboration 2.0, a global set of technology initiatives to improve knowledge sharing, enhance communication, and allow for dynamic collaboration within the organization. Technologies in this collaboration platform include social networking applications, greater search functionality, telepresence, and unified communications.

Vid Byanna, the executive director for Accenture's internal IT infrastructure capabilitities and Web 3.0 initiatives, says that Accenture Collaboration 2.0 allows employees quickly to get access to the information from experts who can help resolve an issue, or kick start things that deliver value to customers better than through traditional methods. For example, 30 minutes after looking in Accenture People, an employee was holding a telepresence sessions with an Accenture expert on digital media communications."

Meanwhile, with the help of the Accenture Cloud Opportunity Assessment Tools, the internal IT Accenture organization also has developed a cloud computing strategy. It consists of both internal and external cloud computing initiatives. He says, "We think of cloud computing as dynamic resource allocation of computing capacity, storage and other resources. It gives us the ability quickly to provide these resources for peaks and valleys in IT resource demand. We have heavily invested in our internal cloud by consolidating all of our business applications in a single data center. We also have virtualized our servers, databases, and storage. We are now looking at what external cloud providers can give us. Will these services supplement what we have, or will they give some more scale capabilities?"

In this Enterpriseleadership.org podcast, Byanna talks about the following:

• the catalysts for Accenture Collaboration 2.0 platform,
• the key technologies that comprise this platform,
• the different ways Accenture plans to extend its internal collaboration initiatives to partners and customers,
• the Accenture cloud computing strategy,
• and the benefits the company plans to derive from cloud computing.

Bio

Vid Byanna is the executive director for Accenture's internal IT infrastructure capabilities. He reports to Frank Modruson, Accenture's CIO. Byanna also drives the implementation of IT products and services to support the company's mergers and acquisitions organization.

Before stepping into his current role, he held other IT leadership position in Accenture's CIO organization. From 1989 and 1998, Byanna was part of the company's communications and high-tech operating group, where he directed large solution-oriented projects for global telecommunications providers.

Byanna received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and a M.S. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Before joining Accenture, he worked at Bell Laboratories.

Resources

Accentures Topples Communicatons Barriers, InfoWorld

http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/accenture-topples-communication-barriers-745

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/CIO/LeveragingNeeds.htm

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

In this podcast, Dr. Peter Beckman, director of leadership computing at Argonne National Laboratory. talks about both cloud computing and green IT at the Lab.

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) oldest and largest national laboratories for science and engineering research. ANL uses its annual $540 million operating budget to support 100's of research projects of interest to numerous federal agencies, and academic research institutions. ANL is one of DOE's two largest supercomputing centers. The other one is at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In addition to supercomputing, ANL also offers its researchers some less expensive alternatives, namely, grid computing, and soon, cloud computing. Peter Beckman, the ANL's director of leadership computing, says that grid computing is best suited for running applications at multiple sites in cycles available to users in many locations. He says, "On the other hand, cloud computing will enable scientists to build their own solutions as they need them and run them in the cloud. It will also enable the consolidation and sharing of Linux clusters hosted on our cloud. For example, hosting will enable you to expand your 32-node cluster to a 200-node cluster for a few days. "

Opportunities for cloud computing at ANL include everything form studying the genome to looking at data from CERN's supercollider to understanding the smallest particles in the galaxy.

Cloud computing at ANL will eliminate the need for scientists to do their work on a $100 million supercomputer. Beckman says cloud computing is very appealing to some of ANL's researchers. He say, "Cloud computing's bursty, pay-as-you go for cycles model will lower the cost of getting some projects done. It will allow for demand-driven, large allocations of resources, such as a 1,000's of processors for the next couple of week, better than going to a supercomputer. It will also eliminate the need to upgrade equipment." Beckman adds that ANL would like to push some of its cloud capabilities to commercial service such as amazon.com.

In addition to cloud computing, ANL is saving money by optimizing data center technologies, such as water-size economizing, to keep the supercomputer cool and energy efficient. In fact, the chip architecture of ANL's supercomputer uses the least amount of power possible to do its scientific calculations. Beckman says, "Our data center is a factor of two less power data centers that have a different architecture." During some of the winter months, ANL uses water-side economizing to reduce energy costs. The process involves sending the water outside to be cooled by the cooling tower, and then piping the cooled water through heat exchangers in the machine room. He says, "We can cool the machine for free. We'd like to expand the number of months we can do this for."

Bio
Since 2008 Peter Beckman has been the director of leadership computing at Argonne National Laboratory, where he oversees its supercomputing facility. After receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University, Beckman helped found the university's Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel languages, portable run-time systems, and collaboration technology. In 1997 he joined the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded the ACL's Linux cluster team and launched the Extreme Linux series of workshops and activities, which helped catalyze the high-performance Linux computing cluster community. In 2000 he founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in Santa Fe that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, he became vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the US, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Beckman joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002, as director of engineering, and later as chief architect for the TeraGrid. He designed and deployed the world's most powerful grid computing system for linking production HPC computing centers for the National Science Foundation.

Resources

Argonne's supercomputer named world's fastest for open science, third overall, Physorg.org
http://www.physorg.com/news133014256.html

Argonne Computer Goes Green, Power Management Design Line
http://www.powermanagementdesignline.com/news/212501723;jsessionid=1S14SOXKCF1QYQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN

Getting Control of the Cloud, Processor.com
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3114%2F69p14%2F69p14%2F69p14.asp

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Soon, it will be 4G wireless. This technology will not only provide a staggering amount of bandwidth, but it will create new business models, as well as a new platform for innovation. As a result, CIOs to become 4G wireless savvy immediately. That's the advice of Dr. Scott Snyder, author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in 4G Revolution. Now let's meet Dr. Snyder, author, professor, and CEO of Decision Strategies International.

Every now and then a disruptive technology comes along and dramatically changes the way we live and work. In the mid-1990s it was the Internet and TCP-IP, and in 2000, it was the iPhone. Soon, it will be 4G wireless. Consider, for example, how it could make healthcare more pervasive. A doctor in Africa doesn't need to make a dangerous trip to treat patients at a remote village. With 4G wireless technology, he can treat these patients remotely.

Since the 1990s, 3G wireless has been in place, providing us with increasing amounts of bandwidth, speed, and the ability to download multi-media content in a more efficient way. Dr. Scott Snyder, author of the New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution, says that many people think of 4G wireless, which is the next logical step in the progression of the technology, as just more bandwidth. "Yes, 4G wireless will offer up to 100 megabits per second to mobile users and one gigabit per second to fixed users. You are talking about a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than what you get in your home broadband connection. This is only part of the story. 4G wireless will provide a new paradigm that will alter the network and the handset, by enabling users to have more control over what type of content they get, and what type of services they can get from any location they might be in around the globe."

Snyder adds that user-centric capabilities will be the defining feature of 4G wireless. "Extremely intelligent handsets will have the ability to make decisions on your behalf, just like a remote control for your life. Because it is based on the cloud concept rather than a fixed network, 4G wireless has the capability to follow you around. You will have access to many networks without going back through a network. That's a scary proposition for wireless carriers that make money from people going through their network. This feature enables a whole variety of digital swarms or group behavior. Users can self-organize in this cloud without going through the structure of traditional networks."

As CEO of a Decision Strategies, a technology consulting firm, Snyder came across many executives who lacked awareness of what 4G wireless technology could do, not only to their business, but to their industry as a disruptive force and an innovation platform. The need to educate these executives propelled Snyder to write The New World of Wireless. His book is not just about what's happening with the technology, but how this technology could have broader social and business interactions to create new business models, new industries, and transformational type events.

Meanwhile, new standards for 4G wireless and experimental handsets loom on the horizon. Even aspects of the iPhone sheds light on what new business models might look like. Snyder says that because these weak signals will explode very fast, CIOs need to prepare for 4G wireless right now. "They need to start building wireless into their organization as a competency to be explored both as a communication platform, but also an innovation platform. They need to put the infrastructure in place to support both platforms and to leverage both to build an ecosystem with their customers, partners, vendors, and even your industry. They have to also start fostering wireless content, connectivity and allowing the digital swarm to take place both in your organization and in your ecosystem."

In this podcast, CIOs will learn the following:

• The top three things they should be doing to prepare for 4G wireless
• Some of the ways they can innovate around 4G wireless to become more profitable and derive more marketplace,
• The new business models that 4G wireless will enable, and
• And the security issues that will confront this technology.

Bio

Dr. Scott Snyder is the president and CEO of Decision Strategies International, a strategy firm focused on increasing the strategic aptitude of organization. He has held executive positions with several Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin. He has also started business ventures in software including OmniChoice, a CRM/Analytics software applications provider. He was selected as a candidate for Entrepreneur of the Year for the Philadelphia Region. He has worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients on business and technology strategy including General Electric, NCR, Verizon, as well as government organizations such as the Federal Aviation Administration, National Security Administration, and the US Navy.

He has also contributed as a co-author to the recently released Future of BioSciences 2020 Report from DSI and the Wharton School and is the author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution.

Dr. Snyder is a senior fellow in the management department at the Wharton School, an adjunct faculty member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured at MIT and RIT on decision-making, business and IT strategy, telecommunications, product design and development, and business intelligence. He holds a patent for on-line decision aids and has been quoted as a thought leader in numerous publications. Dr. Snyder earned his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania and has an executive degree from USC in Telecommunications Management.

Resources
Profile of Decision Strategies International, INC magazine

http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2008/company-profile.html?id=200819430

How Failure Breeds Success, BusinessWeek

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_28/b3992001.htm?campaign_id=nws_insdr_jul1&link_position=link1

Put on Hold: Why Telecoms Can't Get Consumers to Bond More with Their Cell Phones, Knowledge Emory

http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1138

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Carvallo goes into detail about building the enterprise architecture for the Smart Grid based on service-oriented architecture and cloud computing.

He also talks about his involvement in driving the IT Leadership and CTO Best Practices Collection, a 700-page document that describes essential IT processes, such as how to manage a data center to how to run a project management office. He also provides some takeaways for CIOs who might be interested in moving to Smart Grid technology. Despite the economy, Austin, Texas, has seen a spike in major businesses, such as google.com and Hewlett-Packard, moving into the area, as well as more people relocating there to find jobs. Meanwhile, Austin Energy, the nation’s ninth largest community-owned electric utility, is making sure it can meet the power demands of its one million residential customers and 41,000 businesses, and continues to return more than $1.5 billion in profits back to the community.

If all goes as planned, Austin Energy could become the country’s first electrical utility to deliver Smart Grid technology. A Smart Grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost, and increase reliability and transparency.  
 
Perhaps, the credit for putting Austin Energy on its Smart Grid journey belongs to Andres Carvallo, the organization’s CIO. In fact, this year Computerworld Honors Program’s recognized the outstanding significance of Carvallo’s Smart Grid work in the energy field. Carvallo just could become the first CIO to deliver the country’s first Smart Grid for a public utility.
 
The genesis for the Smart Grid began in 2003 when Carvallo was working on automation and efficiency and optimization of the business. In 2004, after reading the Electric Power Research Institute’s white paper on the Intelligrid, Carvallo thought it would be possible to use similar technology for Austin Energy. In fact, not wanting to infringe on the Intelligrid trademark, he coined the term Smart Grid.   In 2007, he gave his first speech about the Smart Grid. With the support of executive management, Carvallo’s team began working on Austin Energy’s Smart Grid, which seamlessly integrates four disciplines: energy, communications, software, and hardware.
 
He says, “Together these four disciplines help to redefine how we generate, distribute, and consume electricity. The project goes beyond how we collect data and move it, and how safely we do it. The decisions will be able to make about that data will affect production, distribution, and consumption of energy, from turning on and off devices, to managing plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in the house. “
 
Of course, as a public utility Austin Energy must abide by the North American Electrical Reliability Council’s standards and regulations for infrastructure protection and cyber security. Carvallo says, “We will become compliant this year.” Meanwhile, he has been one of eight people working on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cyber security standards for Smart Grids. He says, “We are awaiting the publication of the interim Smart Grid standards.”

Bio
Andres Carvallo is the chief information officer at Austin Energy.  In addition to his CIO responsibilities as CIO, Carvallo sits on an eight-person executive team, as well as on the Innovation and Opportunity Development executive board. Outside of Austin Energy, he is vice chairman for the Large Public Power Companies’ CIO Task Force. Carvallo is a frequent speaker at both IT and energy industry venues, such as CleanTech.

His outstanding work in IT has earned him many awards, including IT Executive of the Year by the Association of Information Technology Professionals in 2005, Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld in 2006, Best in Class of Premier 100 by Computerworld in 2006, CIO 100 Award by CIO Magazine in 2006, InformationWeek 500 by InformationWeek Magazine in 2007, and Computerworld’s Top 12 Green IT Companies in 2008 (First Ever).

Before joining Austin Energy, Carvallo held key positions at four start-ups and large companies, such as Philips Electronics, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Microsoft. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas, and has completed executive management programs at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Resources
Austin Energy Delivers Opportunity - Smart Grid News
Exec Calls for Smart Grid Policies - EE Times
Top 10 Smart Grids - GreenTech Media

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Evans also talks about the relationship between social media and CRM, and the impact social media will have on wireless technology, known as the digital swarm.

Whether you are a chief information officer or a chief marketing officer, you need to know how to leverage technology, especially social media, to understand how customers perceive your brand both positively and negatively, and what changes you need to make to your products to get more positive responses. You have the challenge of influencing 1,000s of daily online conversations you can’t control. After all, these aren’t your conversations. Dave Evans, a social media strategist and author of Social Media Marketing – an Hour a Day, says that you need to create an external social media experience that your customers will talk about in a way that invokes others to buy your products. He adds, “This is a big change from asking your advertising agency to change the message because customers’ aren’t getting it."

Evans’s social media strategy firm, Digital Voodoo, has helped many well-known companies come to grips with the impact of social media, and to recommend changes to their brand, product, or service to position it for success using external social media. Take the work Evan’s firm did for Meredith Publishing, which produces well-known magazines such as Parents, Better Homes and Gardens, and More. His firm created a strong engagement between Meredith’s individual print and online subject subscribers via the content discussions which they engaged. He says, “We gauged success in terms of page views –the base line indicator for publishers– and the size of the community as it grew over time.”

Evan’s following as a social media marketing strategist caught the eye of John Wiley & Sons. He was asked to write a book to fit into Wiley’s An Hour a Day series. Unlike other social media marketing books, Evans’  book provides a daily plan for how you can approach social media both strategically and tactically. For example, in one exercise, he tells you to go to IBM’s blog and read about the policies for selecting bloggers. He says, “If you don’t have the right social media strategy, you’ll wander all over the place. On the other hand, having the strategy right doesn’t mean you can turn the job over to the operational side of your business and say, ‘Now go to do this.’ The book allows you to select the things you want to work on.”

Bio
As a strategy director for integrated communications for GSD&M, Dave Evans gained extensively advertising experience working with clients, such as Southwest Airlines, AARP, Wal-Mart, PGA TOUR, Dial, and Chili's. Before GSD&M, Evan worked with Progressive Insurance Company as a product manager, and a systems analyst for the Voyager deep space exploration program with Jet Propulsion Laboratories/NASA.

In 1994, he cofounded Digital Voodoo to provide strategic marketing services for clients wanting to tap the power of the social Web. In 2005, he cofounded HearThis.com, a podcasting service firm focused on social media and marketing.

He holds a BS in physics and mathematics from the State University of New York/College at Brockport. He has served on the Advisory Board with ad:tech and the Measurement and Metrics Council with WOMMA. He is a columnist for ClickZ, an e-zine about social media.

Resources
Social Media Marketing An Hour A Day: Dave Evans - Online Marketing Blog
socStardom2: Social Media Marketing with Dave Evans - SlideShare
Getting Started With Social Media - ClickZ

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Swaminathan goes into detail about the following:

• how four technology trends drive the elastic business model;
• what challenge businesses will face deploying the elastic business model among a wide spectrum of different generations in the workforce;
• how communication will change from a need-to-know model to a good-to-know model;
• and why the workplace of the future will resemble the open source community.

Every year, Accenture, the global technology service and outsourcing firm with $23.9 billion in revenue for 2008, does a thorough analysis to identify the major technology trends that will change the underlying business models and capabilities. In 2009, research conducted by Dr. Kishore Swaminathan, Accenture's chief scientist, identified four major trends that will define the technology landscape over the next five years: Internet computing, data management, mobility, and convergence of unified communications, collaboration, community, and content distribution. He says, "These technology trends will give businesses a new capability that we call elasticity. They will allow every aspect of a business -- from IT to businesses process to how a company innovates -- to be more flexible, and to expand, contract and change, depending on current market conditions."

To derive more revenue and business value from this elasticity, businesses must get all of these four technologies just right. Take Internet computing, For example. Swaminathan says that transformational technology trends often pose a dilemma for CIOs who now face a possible change to their applications, the enterprise architecture, or the business models. "You have several choices: You can commit to a major change that will take much time and money, and you won't see much business value right away. On the other hand, you can ignore the trend or put it aside, and then you can wait until you have no choice but to spend a lot of money and embrace the new trend. Many CIOs need to go experiment and get comfortable with things, such as how to source storage, or software as a service (SaaS). They have to understand the pros and cons."
 
Swaminathan says that many CIOs he has spoken with have a visceral reaction to SaaS, especially with security and data privacy issues. He adds that the visceral reaction is fine. "Ultimately, CIOs have to make a business decision based on solid empirical data. They have to get Internet computing right in the long run, but for the short term they need to experiment, gather as much data as possible, and learn about the model. Unless they are comfortable with a new technology, they shouldn't put in it on a critical path."
 
Accenture definitely practices what it preaches about technology trends. In fact, Accenture acquires as much first-experience with a technology before deploying it. Swaminathan says, "We try to determine if we have a successful model or not." Accenture's approach to collaboration mirrors this practice. The company has created a version of LinkedIn, called PeoplePages, where more than 100,000 Accenture employees have already posted their professional profiles. Swaminathan says the site enables employees to find communities or individuals with certain expertise. Meanwhile, the company has begun a project to put its collective knowledge into the Accenture Encyclopedia, modeled after Wikipedia. He says, "We're encouraged by the progress we have made to date." Accenture also has developed its own version of YouTube, where employees can use video to convey difficult concepts and then distribute those videos to colleagues.

Bio
Dr. Kishore Swaminathan is chief scientist at Accenture where he defines the company's technology vision and helps to set the company's research and development agenda. He also heads Accenture's Systems Integration research located in the United States, France, and India. Swaminathan joined Accenture in 1990, taking a position in Accenture's Center for Strategic Technology Research. He has a bachelor's degree in technology and aeronautical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology of Madras and holds a master's and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was a Smithsonian Fellow. Media outlets ranging from ABC Evening New to The Wall Street Journal have featured his work.

Resources
The Grill: To Kishore Swaminathan, CIO means 'chief intelligence officer' - Computerworld
Enterprise 2.0: turning consumer-driven Web 2.0 technologies into business value - Kishore Swaminathan, Accenture
Accenture: Time is ripe to test cloud computing - ZDNet

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software