You can listen to the podcast below.

Points I make in the podcast on the role of CIO and technology leadership include:

* Any technology leader must understand how the industry in which they work is and may be evolving

* They need to build roadmaps on how technology might change the shape of their industry, including enabling new competitors and opening up new, broader opportunities for incumbents

* It is critical to have a long-term timeframe on this, at least 5 years out, in order to build and implement effective strategies today

* We need to explore how technologies can make cities and communities more effective, efficient, and liveable

* There is a need for visionaries to envisage and communicate the potential of technologies to drive value – who better than technology leaders?

The audio of the podcast can be found on the ThinkFWD website.

In the podcast Mark asked me to delve into the details of my Future of the CIO framework, shown below.

I discuss the driving forces shaping the environment, the shifts in the IT function, and the emerging new role for CIOs.

As I point out in the podcast, I believe that there is a growing divide in the roles of CIOs.

Some CIOs and IT functions are being marginalized as the business leaders come to believe that technology is a commodity and that technology functions should be performed increasingly efficiently, starving them of resources.

Other CIOs are leading their boards and executive teams in understanding the critical role of technology in their organizations’ future success, and playing a key role in shaping not just their strategies, but also the very nature and shape of the organization in a connected world.

The Chief Information Officer used to be a functional support role. Today and moving forward it is and must be a key leadership role in driving the future of their organizations.

However organizations are regularly re-organized, requiring a new org chart to be created. In fact, organizations are completely dynamic, changing in ways small and large every single day.

A fantastic video (below) depicts the continuous and frequently dramatic changes in the org chart of Autodesk over a 4 year period, in what the creators describe as an OrgOrgChart (Organic Organizational Chart). It’s well worth watching.

While Autodesk was probably a particularly fast-changing organization in this period, the video gives a powerful indication of the extent to which organizations restructure.

Organizations are living entities, highly dynamic organisms that cannot be captured in a formal organizational chart.

I have worked with many clients to apply Organizational Network Analysis to understand the informal (as opposed to formal) structure of their organizations.

Network perspectives are essential to truly understand how organizations function (or dysfunction). Network visualizations can certainly assist the development of effective strategies for organizational development.

Rich time-series visualizations such as the one above can help to understand the deeper nature of change, how organizations function, and how to increase performance.

APIDays was founded by Mehdi Medjaoui in Paris in 2013, has since been run in Barcelona, Berlin, San Francisco and now Sydney, with the event in Paris last year attracting 800 delegates.

Below are the slides for my keynote on The Flow of Innovation. As always, note that my slides are designed to support my presentation and not to stand alone, but still may be of interest to people who did not attend my keynote.

In my keynote I noted that in a world in which we are moving towards a truly fluid economy, driven partly by powerful twin technological and social trends towards openness, networks are at the heart of everything.

Business innovation can be applied across five domains: product or service, marketing, process, organization, and business model.

APIs can dramatically enable innovation in each of those five domains, and I gave a number of examples of each. However the most important impact is at the organizational and business model levels.

In my book Living Networks I wrote:

In today’s world of blurring boundaries and increasing ambiguity, organizations are nothing more than vehicles for creating and appropriating value. In a capitalist world, shareholders own the legal entity called the company. The managers of the company apply its financial and other resources — in combination with other organizations — to create value that end-customers are prepared to pay for. They also must negotiate terms of engagement with other companies so that they can extract a fair share of the value created by the firms working together. The key difference in thinking from previous conceptions of the organization is that value is created by the network, not by the organization. The art of management is now about positioning the firm to extract value from its participation in a broad economic network.

APIs are a means to open out the organization. They are a fundamental tool to enable value creation across organizational boundaries.

One of the reasons I loved being part of the APIDays conference is that everyone involved in APIs has an implicit understanding of the importance of transcending boundaries. These are not people who are perpetuating existing systems, they are enabling new structures for value creation and organizations.

Innovation has become a flow, and must be a flow.

There are critical strategic implications of APIs and of adopting more open and flexible configurations of organizations, that must be on the agenda of the board of directors. Governance must be undertaken an enabler of innovation and value creation as well as of risk control.

The potential is to drive innovation, growth, competitive advantage, and massive success.

The original blog was on the book website, but a couple of years later I moved it to this domain, rossdawsonblog.com. At the time I put quite a lot of consideration into whether that was a good name, given that ‘blog’ was a neologism that might fade or be replaced.

The concept of a blog is now firmly mainstream, with not just tens of millions of people and many companies blogging, but a significant chunk of mainstream media having shifted to blog-like formats.

I still spot many articles about how to get attention to your new blog, and many people still seem to be setting up blogs (though of course many are also abandoning them after having tried for a while).

So what are some of the things I have learned from 12 years of blogging?

It is massively worthwhile (for me).
There is no question that my blog has been central to my visibility and in turn the success of my work over the years. Many client engagements come from people who read or discover my blog, and a significant proportion of the people who know of my work know of it through my blog.

Blogging refines knowledge and expertise.
The process of putting into words your views about industry developments, technology, the future, or anything else requires you to structure your thoughts. If you are going to share your ideasin public, you want to make sure you have your facts right, forcing you to research and find the relevant references and examples. Good blogging is often about engaging in online discussions with well-informed people who can hone your perspectives. If you have an opinions about something, write a blog post about it, and you will definitely know more and have better structured thoughts about it after you’ve written it.

Blogging is best complemented by other channels.
My first tweet, on June 21, 2008, read: “ok I know I’m the last one on the planet to dive in, but I’m now in twitterland – hi all!” As it turned I wasn’t the last person on the planet to join Twitter, but in my blog post about my arrival on Twitter I reported how I thought Twitter would take away from the limited time I was able to carve out for bloggging, which was my top priority. I have long spent more time on Twitter than I do blogging, however they are marvellous complements. Twitter information exposure leads to blog posts, and blog posts can be shared on Twitter. However the development of what I call “mini-blogging” – formats such as Tumblr and Google+ that are between blogs and micro-blogs – are also a vital part of the mix of discovering what is interesting, and contributing to the global brain.

Blogging is a commitment.
The real value of blogging comes from (reasonably) consistent effort over an extended period. If you stop for a while you lose momentum and it is harder to pick up again. However it is very hard to find time to blog; there is always something more urgent and important to do, and over the last couple of years in particular I have had extremely intense work periods when I have had to concentrate on client priorities. Yet I am committed to blogging, because the value far exceeds the effort. It is part of my life. While the word ‘blog’ may eventually be superseded, I expect to blog in some form or another for the rest of my life.

This is my 1,689th blog post (compared to 19,365 tweets so far). Here’s to many more.

However the situation is now dramatically different than it was before, as we become richly connected and the world we live in becomes increasingly complex and interdependent.

A new paper reviewed by Stanford Graduate School of Business examines the relative success of firms through the recent global “Great Recession”, depending on their degree of centralization.

The authors, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Philippe Aghion of Harvard University, Raffaella Sadun from Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen from London School of Economics, reportedly found that:

“Firms that decentralized their decision making had lower falls in their sales and faster increases in their productivity than those with a centralized structure.

…

When a recession arrives, the interests of the plant manager and top management quickly align. “Their feet are up against the fire, and everyone starts pulling in the same direction” with the common goal of staying afloat, says Bloom. Once the plant manager agrees with the CEO on common goals, he or she can have a drastic impact on company performance if the firm is decentralized, giving the manager the autonomy to act. That impact is more pronounced than in firms where the CEO is onsite and is on the same page as the plant manager from the start.”

In summary:

“When conditions get tough,” Bloom says, “it’s a good time to push power down to the people on the ground who really know what’s going down.”

Centralized control is predicated not only having sufficient information to make decisions across a distributed organization, but also being able to make and enact effective decisions. The conditions for this are increasingly less likely to prevail.

As we shift to more volatile and challenging industry conditions, organizations that have well-structured and designed distributed decision-making will win.

The Australian newspaper yesterday featured an article titled Mobile exposes need for design skills, programming languages: Ross Dawson based on an interview with myself and Alan Patterson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society, which is organizing the conference.

The article begins:

The rise of mobile is absolutely shifting the nature of technology work as it becomes an important – and often primary – interface to digital worlds. Indeed, mobile technologies are changing the nature of virtually every kind of work.

Interface and user experience design has moved to the center of technology, partly due to the smaller screen sizes on mobile devices, as well as our soaring expectations of beauty. Design is the core skill and capability that makes technology useful today. This is just part of what makes technology a fundamentally creative field.

The full article is well worth a read, it goes on to cover some of my broader perspectives on the jobs of the future as well as Alan Patterson’s insights on mobile and the future of ICT work.

Over the past year I have used the framework extensively as a starting point for executive briefings and strategy workshops on the strategic implications of the rapidly changing world of work.

However the static visual can be hard to interpret on its own, so we have now created a short video that delves into and narrates the framework.

I hope you find the video useful, please feel free to share it or use it in your internal meetings. We will continue to evolve the framework over time.

Transformation isn’t so much a process as a modus operandi for successful businesses in the digital age, according to Australian futurist and digital strategist Ross Dawson.

Dawson said that successful, ongoing transformation comes from a fundamental change in business culture–away from secrecy, hierarchy, and fear, and toward greater openness in which failure is embraced as a learning tool.

“There needs to be a real shift in the culture of the business–not just at the top levels of the organization–and this requires greater risk taking, as well as greater transparency,” Dawson said. “This transparency and visibility around what is being done in the transformation, and the successes as well as failures, are vital to any business transformation.”

The article then discusses in some detail the transformation initiatives of telecommunications firms such as Singtel and Telstra, then concludes:

Dawson said he believes the most profound shift for industries, such as telecommunications, is in understanding change as a continuous process, rather than a series of discrete projects.

“In terms of transformation, if the parameters imposed by management are too restrictive, the organization cannot transform itself,” Dawson said. “Organizations must adopt an open business model if they are to succeed.”

This goes completely to the point of “governance for transformation” which I apply with many boards and executive teams.

The shift to open business is highly challenging, and governance is essential given both the real and perceived risks. Yet governance must be an enabler, not a blocker, of organizational transformation, otherwise it destroys value.

Almost all organizations must shift to greater openness, internally and externally, in order to be successful in the future. However that must be deeply considered and carefully executed, creating an ongoing and, realistically, unending process of organization change.

Click on the image below to see a video of the interview.

A few of the things we covered in the interview:

* Two key developments are transforming work and offices: increased connectivity and automation of jobs.

* We can now gather immense amounts of data about people and human interactions that help us design workplaces that are highly productive.

* There is no reason to go to an office if simply sit down and do individual work, so from now offices will be primarily focused on facilitating interaction.

* Companies such as Google are creating offices that are fun and people want to go to, with slides and other novelties to engage us.

* Products such as Double Robotics are allowing us to virtually visit and wander around distant offices and interact as if we were there.

* The next phase of remote work will transcend videoconferencing to potentially allow us to interact with holographic representations of our colleagues.

* Offices will focus on humanizing work, connecting people, and making our work relevant and valuable.