What CIOs Think About Web 2.0

We put on a seminar yesterday at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco entitled, The CIO Survival Guide for Web 2.0. The CIO panel included Jim Sutter, former CIO of Xerox, Lila Tretikov, CIO of SugarCRM, Max Rayner, CIO of TravelZoo, Steve Douty, President of BSG Applications and former CIO of Hotmail, Larry Singer, former CIO of the state of Georgia and Andrew Aitken, CEO of the Olliance Group.

The big take-away from the event was that Web 2.0 tools will help companies innovate more at the edge of their business while managing their IT infrastructure from the core.
I summarized the following points from the public comments and followup discussions with the CIOs:

• Need more rowers: when you're CIO, sometimes you feel like you have 49 guys bailing, 49 guys patching the boat and only 2 people rowing. What we hope for from Web 2.0 is tools that enable us to get more IT folks rowing. - Steve Douty


• I like to watch: Web 1.0 gave us better tools to observe our business, Web 2.0 will give us better tools to interact with and manage our business. - Jim Sutter


• Balance edge/core priorities: Web 2.0 will enable innovation at the edge of the corporation. The CIO's job is to provide core infrastructure that enables innovation at the edge and prevents unintended damage. - Larry Singer


• Web 2.0 is Consumer-driven: Web 2.0 in the enterprise is being driven by end-users who do things at home on consumer web sites and then come to work and expect their business applications to give them the same kinds of capabilities. - Lila Tretikov


• Revenge of the non-nerds: Web 2.0 will allow non-IT experts to contribute their creativity to the process of building business applications - Max Raynor


• Lower the cost of failure: The web is a massive Petri dish. Web 2.0 makes it possible to have lots of small application experiments running in the enterprise. - Steve Douty


• Encourage accidental collaboration: The internet is a platform that enables accidental collaboration. - Larry Singer

We also used this event to launch our new company name, WaveMaker Software. I wrote about our rationale for the name change and perspective on the enterprise Web 2.0 market under Ready to Make Waves.

CIOs see the value of new web technologies for driving positive change in their business. As Web 2.0 toolkits improve (I wrote about our role in helping commercialize Ajax and Dojo here), we will start to see these forward-looking CIO's predictions come true.

Update: Matt Asay had a great post on this same seminar on his CNet Open Road blog under the title, Any CIO Not Using Open Source Should Be Fired.