Then, a comment by security expert Rachel Kleinfeld about an information innovation made me think about your job as CIOs. The co-founder and CEO of the Truman National Security Project, she was commenting for The New York Times on why it took so long to find Osama bin Laden. She writes:

I know, some people are saying the opposite: that torture helped us get the intelligence that ultimately led to the courier who worked for bin Laden. But the facts simply don’t support the claim. Torture produced a lead, but it took nearly five years between that lead and the end game, which simply shows that torture produces intelligence leads that can’t be trusted and must be verified through other means.

Instead, the intelligence breakthrough came when Gen. Stanley McChrystal took over at Joint Special Operations Command in 2004. In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, he and his intelligence chief, Gen. Michael Flynn, brought police experts to teach their special forces cutting-edge criminal forensic techniques. They then forced the special forces, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to work together.

This could not have been easy: I was a researcher in 2003 and 2004 on a Defense Science Board study looking at why intelligence agencies weren’t sharing information, and it is hard to overemphasize how much the deck was stacked against information-sharing. But McChrystal forced cooperation, and it paid off. It was the intelligence gained from this innovation that led to the breakthroughs of the last few days.

But McChrystal forced cooperation, and it paid off. It was the intelligence gained from this innovation that led to the breakthroughs of the last few days.

Readers of SearchCIO.com know that we are writing a lot about technology innovation this year: the role CIOs play in innovation, how they use technology to spur innovation, how they create a culture of innovation, how they measure the risks and benefits of innovation.

For many CIOs, breaking down information silos — and forcing cooperation — is the innovation that will lead to more innovation. Abha Kumar at The Vanguard Group is convinced that the social collaboration and communication tools her IT team is implementing and supporting will dramatically change corporate culture in concrete ways, such as compensation, as well as in ways we cannot even imagine.

The New York Public Housing Authority’s Atefeh Riazi is convinced that the business intelligence systems most likely to lead to the breakthroughs that will improve the lives of the authority’s low-income constituency are those that can cull and correlate data from inside and far beyond the parameters of her organization.

Breaking down information silos has become something of a cliché in CIO circles. It’s good to be reminded how monumental information-sharing is. Go forth and force cooperation.

[From left to right: Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, Gary Beach, Prof. Thomas Malone, Dr. Jeanne Ross]

The moderator for the panel, publisher emeritus of CIO magazine Gary Beach, didn’t waste any time, asking each academic what “the next big thing” in IT was. Professor Thomas Malone, Director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, noted immediately that the “elephant on the table is cloud computing.” In his opinion, “It may well be the next being thing in the hardware progression.” He chose, however, to focus on the power of collective intelligence.

His choice may not be surprising, given his research, but his coinage of the term crowd computing to describe distributed online collective intelligence turned to solving problems drew appreciative chuckles from the crowd. In Malone’s view, the answers of the many, or so-called “wisdom of the crowds,” is a powerful tool for organizations seeking answers to tough questions. Malone noted Twitter and Innocentive as two examples of the concept.

Dr. Jeanne Ross from MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) chose to focus on the digitization of organizational resources, stating that in her view, only “about 2% of global companies have nailed the concept of a digitized platform.” She said here are two things IT does well: standardizing and integrating business processes. Organizations of all types will gain the most from their IT investments by focusing in these areas.

Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, author of the forthcoming Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy, sees opportunity in the downturn. As he noted, “the lion’s share of Fortune 500 companies were founded in earlier economic disruptions.” Brynjolfsson calls today’s recession the “great restructuring.” In that trend, he sees three key elements: Experimentation, measurement and scale

Each of these elements is substantially enabled by innovations in information technology, like A/B testing, Web and data analytics and cloud computing or enterprise resource planning systems. Brynjolfsson provided a bottom-line example of how such methodologies can result in increased profitability, noting that “Yahoo only makes 16% as much per page served as Google with the same underlying technology. Why? Scale.”

Brynjolfsson suggested to the CIOs in the audience that they push for experiments, measure and validate them in order to rapidly adopt the innovation, replicate it and then scale it. “Experiments aren’t an excuse to validate preconceived notions,” Brynjolffsson was quick to note. “That’s the wrong mentality. Leaders must approach experimenting with a genuinely open mind to see what works and what doesn’t.” Brynjolffson offered a CVS case study that he and Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee wrote in 2005 as an example. CVS created a pharmacy service improvement at one test location. Once the new process proved effective, CVS embedded the process into all of its IT system, replicating it to thousands of other locations.

Take his research with McAfee as another example. McAfee hypothesized that companies would become more similar over time as each organization enjoyed the benefits of improvements in information technology. What he and Brynjolfsson found was striking. When you compare leaders with laggards, over the past decade there has been a substantial growth in the gap. From the 1960s through the late 1990s, technology advancements benefited the nation’s companies in roughly the same amount.  Starting in the late 90s, however, there was a discernible shift to higher profitability in the top 25% of the nation’s corporations, particularly in more IT-intensive areas of economy. Increasing performance heterogeneity was a result that appeared to be closely correlated with IT – if not IT itself.

In other words , the results implied that companies were using information technology in a new way after the dot-com bubble, with the top echelon leveraging investments in ways that dramatically accelerated their growth and profitability in the new millennium.

When asked what CIOs and CEOs could invest in now for returns on investment in recessionary times, Brynjolfsson focused on so-called “Enterprise 2.0” technologies. In his view, blogs, wikis and enterprise microblogging quickly allow innovations to be discovered and amplified across the companies.