CIO has to hold the CEO's hand

[Editor's note: I tried live blogging this panel from the MIT CIO Symposium yesterday - and failed. Internet access was sporadic and one needs facts to live blog as opposed to stream-of-consciousness opining (live tweeting worked much better, tho @ecioforum @thedodgeretort). But there's some good thoughts in here on everything from Gen Y employment jumping to tech wish lists. I have now converted this to a nearly coherent Q&A. I edited some to the quotes so they make sense  - JD.]  

Panel name: View from the Top: Opportunities and Strategies in the Digital Business World

Moderator: Gregory Huang, national IT editor, Xconomy

David Castellani, senior managing director & CEO, New York Life Retirement Plan Services

Brian Halligan, CEO & co-founder, Hubspot

Tiawen Liu, CEO, chairman and founder, iSoftStone

Eric Openshaw, vice chairman, Global and U.S Technology Leader, Deloitte LLP 

Huang: What are the critical skills employees will need to be successful from five years from now?

Halligan: Turnover in Gen Yers is 10 months. When I started out, I was just thrilled someone would hire me. Gen Y has a very different attitude toward work. There are no offices. They work at home and  expect work apps to be just as cool as Facebook. [Gen Yers] blow away the old paradigms about the way the corporation is run.

Openshaw: The reason they move and change is because they need to be on a constant learning trajectory. How do we create ecosystems that cause passionate knowledge workers? if we don't recognize that, we'll die in the process.

Halligan: World has over-valued IQ over EQ resulting in a lot of smart people who can't work together. Relation between the employee and the corporation is changing. I think the organization of the future will look a lot different than the organization of today.

Huang: What is on your technology wish list?

Openshaw: Social media is top of mnd. There's a massive education problem because we handle too much confidential data.

Lui: Social networking (unfortunately, his English was hard to understand).

Halligan: We do much business on Saleforce. First, I want it to be cheaper. And I'd like some mid-market intelligence tools that mere mortals can run.

Castellani: Technology has to be disruptive and destructive. We want to destroy the desktop and drive cost down 60-70 percent. That's destructive. [What] do we do with all this data so (everyone) is smarter?

Huang: Are we deriving business value from Big Data?

Openshaw: This is the future. Intelligence available is extraordinary. I've heard of using analytics on Twitter to gauge the mood of the country and how it effects investors. It's huge.

Not sure who said this (Halligan, most likely): We have to make CEO look smart and the way to do that is to get him reports quickly. We have to unlock that data and create accurate reports on the fly.

Castellani: It's connecting the world together with social media. What are best practices in realtime that can get distributed out to clients? Clients post up questions and get answers from other clients.

Huang: Question about sentiment analysis

Openshaw: I don't know how to distinguish between my professional and personal life. It's virtually impossible.

Halligan: Wall between corporation and the marketplace need to broken down. There should a porous wall. CEO needs to be much more transparent and the CIO can hold his hand on that. It used to be ok to have this big wall around a vendor. Break that wall down. CIOs will help CEO break down those walls.

Huang: How much of your infrastructure can be outsourced?

Castellani: Cloud computing just is a term that exists to say how much can be done internally and externally. All it (the term) does is create headaches.

Openshaw: If $1 in capital is for IT with a venture capitalist, you are shown the front door.

General Q&A:  What about security (with social media)?

Openshaw: This is a debate that could take three days.Aspects of privacy have to maintained.

What is your attitude on the cloud? Where does IT add value?

Castellani: People have to manage the infrastructure. IT folks have been order takers. Don't screw it up. We don't like it. Go back do it again. That model does not work anymore. CIOs have to think like a CEO and behave that way.

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