innovation

UMD CIO Forum highlights the role of IT innovation, Web 2.0 potential

Last week at the University of Maryland’s 10th Annual CIO Forum, a succession of CIOs from the government, health care and publishing industries described how they are harnessing IT innovation with limited resources during the recession. The featured speakers also discussed what they see as the future of Web 2.0 in the business.

Bipin Patel, CIO of ProQuest, spoke to the audience about the ways that Web 2.0 is changing business and usage patterns at his company. As he observed, “the inflection point [for Web 2.0] has been met and passed. The old model of publishing is gone.” So, what has replaced it? “The users themselves – the researchers – are creating information and reacting with each other,” he said. “They are the publishers now.” They’re working collaboratively with their community to identify and feature useful information. As part of his company’s Web 2.0 efforts, Patel’s team has created an online community for graduate students, where they can publish their dissertations for public view. The online community, called GradShare, has been rolled out in about 30 schools.

Premal Shah, formerly of PayPal and now the president of Kiva, offered another example of how to leverage Web 2.0. He described how the “eBay for microfinance,” as he put it, has leveraged Web 2.0 to both sustain innovation and build out features that Kiva’s resources could not provide. Kiva has grown rapidly since its founding and now has made more than $100 million in loans from more than 600,000 people, with 103 microfinance partners globally. Shah said the microcredit model is working, citing a 98% repayment rate for Kiva loans, and that transparency in results is crucial to success. “Imperfect credit is OK, but imperfect data is not OK,” he said. “The donors of the world want transparency.”

”Radical transparency,” in fact, was one of three Web 2.0 principles that Shah listed, along with providing an addictive user experience and crowdsourcing against constraints. Since engineering resources were scarce for IT innovation, Kiva opened up its API to crowdsource development. As a result, Kivadata.org is online. Shah said that Kiva now also has about 500 volunteers that work as “virtual translators,” helping to translate profiles so that their projects can get funded.

Shah also offered advice on growing Web 2.0 communities: identity the influencers and power users. “Cater to your addicts,” said Shah. “Keep short feedback loops.”

Douglas Abel, CIO of Anne Arundel Health System, focused his remarks on how to manage growing demand for health care at a new health care campus in downtown Annapolis. He’s seen success using targeted IT innovation, like bar-coding medicine at the bedside to “check to see if it’s the right patient, right dose.” Now, as electronic healthcare records (EHRs) enter the system, he says the effectiveness of sharing data depends on standards, identifying bad data and avoiding duplicate records. Should his efforts succeed, Bell said that Anne Arundel Health System will be in the top 10% of automated hospitals. “It’s about building an infrastructure that’s patient-centric,” he said, “not venue-centric.”

Web platforms for health care information exchange are growing outside of major hospital systems. David Horrocks, former CIO and president of CRISP, discussed the ways that he’s building out Maryland’s statewide health information exchange and maintaining privacy. CRISP is Maryland’s statewide health information exchange, which moves clinical information electronically among disparate health information systems.

New models for IT innovation in telemedicine also are also emerging. Dr. Sean Khozin presented on Hello Health, a pilot practice in New York that uses a Web-based platform for primary health care. Hello Health requires an in-person initial checkup, after which virtual follow-ups use telemedicine, unified communications and EHRs.

Massachusetts launches MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced a new initiative today to attract and develop tech entrepreneurs to the Commonwealth, the MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition.

“There’s no reason for us to be intimidated at all by what is happening in California,” Patrick said in a speech to business and technology leaders gathered at the Microsoft offices in Cambridge, Mass.

Patrick said that up to $1 million could be made available to a startup that agrees to base operations in the Commonwealth, create a minimum of five jobs in the first year — and that had appropriate work permits in the U.S. Each startup must also gain matching funds from an outside investor.

The MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition (MVFC) is modeled upon the annual business plan competition held Cambridge’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and offers a similar amount of seed capital: $50,000 in cash for the launch of the business. The competition will be financed through a combination of public and private funds. Microsoft, Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande (co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, Inc.), the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and The John Adams Institute serve as initial founding sponsors of new $1 million startup competion.

Should a funded company become successful, fund officials hope a portion of the profits could be used to make the competition self-sustaining. Initially, the competition wants to fund between 25 and 30 companies each year, using a collaborative, innovative website built in consultation with the founders of Monster.com, LinkedIn and Facebook.

According to the initiative website, there will be six different tracks that can receive funding:

• Health care, and life sciences
• IT, software, and gaming
• Clean technology and energy
• Social development and nonprofit
• Open category, seed stage
• Open category, expansion stage

MassHighTech reported on the launch of MassChallenge. You can also read through the active online conversation that accompanied the announcement at #innovateMAtech on Twitter.

This initiative is a marked departure from the creation of direct employment opportunities created by the federal stimulus act. Offering seed funding from a public-private partnership of venture capitalists, foundation and the state itself for startups that are founded, built and headquartered here is innovative. The number one concern, however, expressed by Massachusetts IT executives in a study presented by researchers from the Massachusetts Donahue Institute, was the cost of doing business in the Commonwealth, with respect to taxes, unemployment insurance and compensation. Public and private partnerships came in far below improvements to IT infrastructure or the science and technology pipelines.

Even so, the hundreds of technologists and business leaders were left buzzing following the announcement here in Cambridge; clearly, there are high hopes for the innovation that may be sparked by MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition. That said, Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner tweeted the following: “Key detail about $25 million MassChallenge “fund”: it hasn’t been raised yet, and winners will need matching $ from VCs.”

An archive of the livestreamed video of the announcement is embedded below. The Governor’s speech begins 20 minutes in.

(We apologize for the relatively low quality of the audio and video.)

Academics at MIT CIO Symposium advise on innovation, future of IT

CIOs look to the MIT CIO Symposium for information on management, technology and innovation. Those in attendance at the academic panel held in Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, Mass., enjoyed a healthy helping of all three, as distinguished researchers from MIT’s business centers offered ample insight into how successful organizations leverage technology to increase innovation and profit. Over the course of the hour, the audience heard about the power of collective thinking, the impact of Web 2.0 tools behind the firewall and the methodologies for innovation that have served to differentiate IT giants like Google from their competitors.

[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.