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Another "CDO" Fad
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A couple of years ago, one of the Cutter Consortium's consultants wrote about a new proposed enterprise role, the "Chief Data Officer" or CDO. The CIO of a large financial organization was rumored to have responded, "I'm the Chief Information Officer, I thought I was in charge of the @#$%^&* data!" I then wrote a brief note in which I basically said that if the CIO isn't taking care of the enterprise's data assets, then she or he should be fired; and if the CIO hasn't been given the trust and power to take care of the data, then it's the CEO or the Board that doesn't get it, and the new "CDO" will probably not be able to do any better than the CIO.
Well, bad pennies do keep turning up. Now, according to this article relating a CIO Forum organized in London by The Economist, people are talking about a "Chief Digital Officer." This is in line with all the hype about "digital transformation," something that we have been doing since Alan Turing cracked the Enigma codes by computer, or perhaps when the first computer-generated payroll was produced in the 1960s.
Kudos to Carolyn Brown, CIO at Durham University, for standing up to this new age fad when she said: "Being a CDO is what a good CIO should always have been doing. [...] A good CIO has always put together business and technology and expressed [the opportunities] in a way that can help the business take a leap forward and transform [its position in] the marketplace."
Jeanne Ross, Director of the MIT Sloan School's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), and author of "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy" among other well-regarded publications, wrote this: "Hiring a chief digital officer (CDO) is not the answer. [...] A CDO can't make an existing business a digital success. This is because dealing with digital disruption is a broader issue that requires all parts of a business [...] to now work together." |
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User Identification Across Social Media
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Most of us don't have a unique Internet identity. We have multiple e-mail addresses, and notwithstanding Google' success at giving people long-lasting Gmail addresses, other addresses disappear when we change Internet Service Providers, leave a professional society, or when your old school changes the address syntax for its alumni.
While some people may like leading multiple lives on the Internet, the proliferation of identifiers is usually a problem. Each ID is associated with a profile -- which one is correct? How do I browse a directory of my contacts without getting obsolete or conflicting information, and without duplicates? The "link contacts" feature on our cell phones is only a partial workaround -- and who takes the time to use it?
This paper by Reza Zafarani et al., published in the October 2015 issue of the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD) explores this issue.
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Urban Computing: Concepts, Methodologies and Applications
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This paper, published in the September 2014 issue of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) takes a somewhat broader view of what many people include under the term "smart cities." It is a good review of the approaches -- including, but not limited to Internet of Things (IoT) technology -- to make cities more efficient and perhaps even more livable.
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How Standards Work
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Richard Robinson, who has the impressive title of "Industry Relations and Open Symbology Strategy Executive" at Bloomberg, posted on LinkedIn an interesting piece comparing how different types of standards organizations work, and what the benefits and drawbacks of the various models are. Last year, Bloomberg succeeded in making the Object Management Group adopt and expand what was a proprietary scheme for the unambiguous designation of financial instruments, now known as the Financial Instruments Global Identifiers (FIGI).
This particular post is subtitled "Part 3: the Organizations Behind It All." Parts 1, 2 and 4 complement it and can be accessed from the sidebar at the above link.
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Seen Recently... |
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"One does not simply cut a waterfall into sprints to be agile."
-- Dustin Potts, Chief Development Officer at JPMorgan Chase,
speaking at the "Path to Agile Conference" on May 25
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