Jarrett House North

Synchronicity: Sterling on architecture, MIT sues Gehry

It is surely a moment of synchonicity: I finally get around to reading the latest Technology Review containing Bruce Sterling’s short story about the death of architecture as a profession, and I read that MIT sues Frank Gehry for negligence over leaks in the Stata Center.

Heh.

I actually like the Stata Center, but I don’t have to work in it.

Is 5 (the MBA Edition)

Hard to believe I graduated from Sloan just five years ago (give or take a day). In ways it feels like an eternity; in others like it was just yesterday. Looking forward to seeing some old friends at the reunion tonight and this weekend.

Coming back to campus

I’ll be making an infrequent return to the MIT campus this afternoon on a career panel, talking about non-traditional recruiting paths. Sloan alums will remember my vocal skepticism of the value of traditional MBA recruiting, which at most schools seems designed to funnel MBAs into consulting or banking while giving other options short shrift. So I have a lot of things to say about the topic; hopefully I can say them in a constructive way this afternoon...

Congrats...

...to my Sloan friend Charlie, who just ran the New York Road Runners Manhattan Half-Marathon on Sunday in a respectable 2:07:32. Considering that it was in 20° weather (14° with wind chill), that’s a pretty darned good start to life in the marathon lane. Onward!

Sloan school dean stepping down

Breaking news this morning was that Dick Schmalensee, the dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, will be stepping down at the end of the year to return to research. What is interesting to me is that (a) two other school deans (the head of Engineering and Science) are stepping down at the same time and (b) Schmalensee is stepping down with a fixed timetable, rather than remaining on board until his successor is chosen.

It’s great that Dean Schmalensee, who was dean while I was at Sloan, gets to return to his research. The timing of the announcement is interesting, but reading the provost’s letter it looks like all three of these individuals wanted to leave earlier but held on while the school’s administration stabilized after the transition of the presidency from Charles Vest to Susan Hockfield.

Audio from the MIT CIO Symposium

ZDNet: Nine great podcasts from MIT’s CIO Symposium. While the timeliness is questionable (the symposium, of course, was in June), it’s still nice to have this on the record and to allow other people to listen in.

If I recall correctly, particularly interesting sessions were The Habits of Highly Effective IT Leaders, with our own Brian Whetten stepping in as a superb last minute moderator; Liberation Technologies (listen for the clash of opinions between the Media Lab’s Michael Schrage and Hyperion’s Howard Dresner about, well, everything); and of course the final session on the Future of IT and Sports, in which all present made it quite clear that any attempt to use data relating to major sports for any purpose, mash-ups or otherwise, will be met with the long hammer of a lawsuit. (Well, that was my takeaway, anyway.)

If you like these, you may want to subscribe to the Between the Lines podcast (and blog) from ZDnet, on which these items were featured—or just plan to attend next year.

From the CIO Symposium: eWeek with Dave Girouard

My feet and back are sore but my heart is light; the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium was a big success, with attendance up and all logistics smooth. I will write more about my experience later, but in the meantime there’s an audio interview by eWeek with Google’s Dave Girouard at the CIO Symposium.

Sox, Bruins, ESPN, and NASCAR talk IT

One of the more unusual panels this year at MIT Sloan’s CIO Symposium has some speakers who aren’t usually at IT conferences. We’ve pulled together the VP of Media Applications at ESPN, the Managing Director of IT for NASCAR, the VP of Technology and eBusiness for the Boston Bruins and TD Banknorth Garden, and the Director of IT for the Red Sox to talk about the Future of IT and Sports. Talk about mission critical: when the scoring system goes down, IT is facing mobs of angry fans along with their usual constituency. It should make for an interesting discussion.

As discussed previously, we also have a keynote from Google’s VP for Google Enterprise, so between discussions of consumer software in the enterprise and enterprise IT for sports it should be an interesting day. If you haven’t registered, there are still a few spaces available; though we’ve officially sold out, it’s still possible to register as a walk-in on the day of the event on a first-come, first-served basis. You can find us in Kresge Auditorium starting at 7:30 am on Wednesday, June 21. Hope you can make it!

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Googling your customer data

I’ve been working on the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium for the last few months, helping to pull together this annual conference that brings together CIOs from across corporate America with thought leadership and technologists from industry. This year’s topic is about maximizing the business value of IT, something that’s near and dear to my heart.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about some of the speakers and topics that we’ll cover at the conference. I welcome any input about the topics or questions for the speakers. Today’s post is about our keynote address.

One of the notes from the Gartner Symposium last week that I didn’t blog at the time was an analyst’s prediction that we’ll see increasing “consumerization” of corporate technology, as a generation that has gotten used to Google and Amazon looks at their own corporate IT and says, “why can’t you do that???” The speakers particularly pointed out that after Google’s search, looking for data across disparate systems is a frustrating experience. Our keynote speaker, Dave Girouard, who is the VP and General Manager of Google Enterprise, should be able to speak to that question—and if he doesn’t I’ll certainly ask him. Google Enterprise has rolled out some innovations in corporate search through their Google Search Appliance, including OneBox, which provides a unified search experience around both file server and intranet content and corporate information. The model that they’ve used for this is a partner plug-in model coupled with an API. The end result, in theory, is that you can type in a customer’s name in your internal search portal and get results from the file system together with sales data and forecasts, customer support issues, and other relevant data in a single, easy to read format.

The concept is great. What I’ll be interested to see is how well they avoid the pitfalls of corporate search: incompatible taxonomies, isolated data islands, customer information privacy barriers, and so on. At the very least it should be an interesting question and answer period.

Naturally, I’ll be shamelessly plugging the conference in each of these posts. You can register and get information about the speakers on the conference site. (Yes, I know it should have a blog and RSS. We’re working on it...)

Nice horse at SnapperBlue

Looks like George Chang is blogging again—and posting to Flickr. Some really killer underwater photos. He finds that keeping a separate blog for water (SCUBA, photography) and vacation related topics has helped jump-start his writing. I found the same thing when I was doing the Boycott Sony blog. I don’t really have time for doing two blogs at the moment, though—almost don’t have time to do one!

Follow up: Caltech students show little style

So Caltech rescued their cannon yesterday. It took 24 of them, they did it in broad daylight, and there was no indication of a return joke (though the MIT cheer at the end was a nice touch). Also not mentioned: what happened to the big Brass Rat? I’m looking forward to seeing what the CalTech kids pull off in return.

A long overdue hack: the CalTech cannon goes to MIT

Ever feel nostalgic for the good old days of MIT hacks, where devoted, slightly nutty students pulled off feats of engineering brilliance while evading the watchful eye of campus security? Well, mourn no more, Bunky, cause the MIT hackers are back with a vengeance. I think moving a Spanish-American War era cannon across the country through an inspired bit of social engineering qualifies as pretty impressive on its own, but adding the machined aluminum, gold plated Brass Rat (Brass Rat defined) to the cannon was absolutely inspired. Nice plaque too.

And as always the Slashdot commentary is helpful, for instance the note that the cannon belongs to a residential house at Caltech, not the university, and that “No one outside of Fleming House gives a rats ass about that cannon. (Actually, no one outside of Fleming House gives a rats ass about Fleming House),” is a masterpiece of humor, intracampus rivalry, and sour grapes all wrapped up in a brief comment.

And knowing that the cannon was previously stolen by CalTech neighbor Harvey Mudd, and that this theft occured on the 20th anniversary, and that the social engineering included a phony moving company called Howe & Ser (Howe Et Ser) Moving Company? Priceless.

How to pitch

Courtesy of Sloanblogger Cybersam, a little insight today into the MIT Enterprise Forum’s latest offering, discussions of how to make a great business pitch from a CEO perspective and a VC perspective. A lot of the advice from both sounds familiar from years gone by, but I didn’t (foolishly) blog it at the time. Very good stuff.

Sloan alum (re)gains the Mass CIO reins

The Massachusetts CIO controversy (short version: previous CIO shafted for trying to move Mass government away from Microsoft Office via a push for open document standards) appears to have resolved itself: Sloan (MBA 1990) grad Louis Gutierrez, currently chief technology strategist at the Commonwealth Medical division of the UMass med school, has been appointed the permanent CIO. The interesting thing is that he was the CIO of Massachusetts during the mid-90s, during the Weld and Celluci administrations, prior to stints at Harvard Pilgrim and other healthcare related organizations. In fact, he was the Commonwealth’s first CIO.

I predict that a lot of the noise around OpenDocument and the state will die down. With Gutierrez’s track record (the state, Harvard Pilgrim, the Federal Reserve, and UMass Medical School), I think he’ll be a little more seasoned in how he handles the issues.

Tech Trek hits the media

CNET News.com: MIT grads to size up Silicon Valley. Heh. Funny that this makes the news, with so little substance. There’s a lot to say about the Tech Trek (which is unnamed in this article), but this article doesn’t say it—just suggests that MIT finds the Valley interesting. Which it did back in January 2001, when I participated. But it’s good to see that the Sloan crew can still raise press attention.