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March 15, 2004 (Computerworld) -- Passion can produce amazing results." That's Shelley McIntyre of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America speaking last week at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in Palm Desert, Calif. She was one of more than 700 IT and business executives attending the event. (See QuickLink a4100 for the full conference coverage.)
Although McIntyre, a VP of business technology services at the New York-based insurer, was referring specifically to Guardian's award-winning project involving an online annuity system, her comment could just as easily sum up the impact of two powerful days of peer connection and conversation.
I don't use the word powerful lightly here. The collective will of IT leaders can -- and should -- directly influence technology products and the vendors that sell them.
The most striking endorsement of that idea came in a talk by Alan Paller, executive director of research at the SANS Institute [Quick Link 45335]. After demonstrating how easily hackers can break into ostensibly secure corporate networks, Paller urged IT leaders to use their collective power to force vendors to deliver safer software by requiring certain security settings. He noted how Oracle has already complied with such a demand by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Will Paller's call to action have a result? It certainly should. At least 75% of the audience members -- surveyed after his talk -- declared their intent to start requiring minimum security settings in all future systems purchases, as well as in the external systems connecting to their networks.
In other audience survey questions at the conference [available in a registered part of our Web site at QuickLink 45115], we asked the assembled executives to identify their most pressing IT leadership issues and most critical projects. Topping the leadership issue list were implementing business process re-engineering, streamlining operations and planning the future of the IT infrastructure. Singled out as the most important IT projects were those involving business intelligence/data management, enterprise integration and Web services.
Collecting useful, actionable ideas about all of those topics and having the time to talk them over with peers are the greatest benefits of a conference like the Premier 100. We also staged the first-ever debate between Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter," and Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor and now venture capitalist. That exchange stirred up its share of passions, as well [see QuickLink 45332 for a transcript of the debate].
Our theme this year was "Mapping the Future of IT," which may sound rather grandiose but is, in fact, what IT executives do whenever they get together to talk strategy and compare best practices. No matter what industry segment they call home, CIOs and senior IT managers have many core issues in common. Vendor issues. User issues. Budget issues. Even regulatory compliance issues.
You can see that commonality even within the diversity of the 12 projects we singled out of the Premier 100 to honor as the "Best in Class" winners (see the special supplement). They include massive undertakings like J.P. Morgan's grid computing project, Northrop Grumman's integration of its multibillion-dollar acquisitions and the U.S. Air Force's far-flung server consolidation project. They also include an innovative Web services project at Lincoln Financial, an industry-leading centralized call accounting project at Wyndham International hotels and the creation of the state of Ohio's user-friendly, self-service tax-filing portal.
Yet for all their surface differences, each of the winning projects embodies what so many of our Premier 100 conference attendees have: That underlying passion that can and will produce amazing results.
Maryfran Johnson is editor in chief of Computerworld. You can contact her at maryfran_johnson@computerworld.com.
See more editorials by Maryfran Johnson.
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