The critical voice of the customer
Michael Skok participated in a CXO Talk panel last week hosted by CXO Magazine titled, “CIO Perspectives”. He was joined by Brook Colangelo, CIO of Houghton Mifflin, and the panel was moderated by Michael Krigsman of CXO Magazine and Vala Afshar of Extreme Networks.
Brook Colangelo’s experience and voice as a CIO is invaluable as a reality check for entrepreneurs to hear. (See video below). He covers many great areas such as adoption, learning, and agility. In one example Brook talks about his internship development program that created 40 apps in 8 weeks!
Overall it was an interactive conversation with the panelists and they invited Michael to talk about what he looks for in his investments and why. Michael covered his original investment thesis from 2002 “EaaS: Everything As A Service” and reviews his thoughts around many future groundbreaking areas including the Internet of Things (IoT) and the opportunities arising from that as billions of devices swarm our lives. Themes included:
- Outservicing – How companies are efficiently outsourcing or “outservicing” non core business processes, as well as real world inhibitors to the cloud.
- Trust — How companies are, or need to be, enabling a balance between trust and utilization of data to give consumers a level of comfort, and personalization
- Innovation — while combining and re-using several thousand Cloud Services APIs
Michael challenges the audience to discuss what would NOT be possible before some of these great new technologies. For example: Uber through Crowdsourcing Product Design with co-creation between customers and vendors.
There are a lot of exciting changes underway in the ecosystem, but the panelists discuss how it’s only adoptable if it’s consumable. Companies need to keep up and can do so by following customer usage for faster, built-in adoption. We invite you to watch the video here:
In the discussion, Vala refers to Michael’s slides on the Future of Cloud Computing, copied below: