Subscribe by RSS
The Evolving CIO: From Financial Compliance Origins to Data Singularity
Note: I have started a blog series to share my reflections and create a dialogue on how the role of the CIO must adapt to meet the information management challenges that face us as we move deeper into the 2nd decade of the millennium. If you are reading this blog on CIO.gov, I invite you to visit the cross-posting on HUD’s Blog: The HUDdle and share your thoughts.
Thank you to those who took a moment to comment on my recent blog introducing my new series on the evolving CIO. Several of you agreed that we need to redefine the purpose of the CIO based on the trajectory of our society. In this spirit, an article comes to mind that I was reading in Time magazine while at the airport several weeks ago. The article is about Robert Kurzweil, a computer scientist and futurist who believes humankind is progressing rapidly toward something he (and others) call the Singularity. The Singularity is the point of convergence at which human and artificial intelligence merge. One of the results of this merger is human immortality, but there are many other fascinating results as well. The Singularity will be reached, according to Kurzweil, in 2045.
I have no way of knowing, of course, if any part of Kurzweil’s science-fiction-sounding hypothesis will come to be or whether it will always remain out on the edge of the imagination. What I do know, however, is that in my professional life, I have been witness to a rapidly increasing interface between technology and human activity. And for me, this interaction defines the role of the modern CIO.
Information technology (IT) shops in the public and private sectors grew out of financial management shops. The financial organizations were basically the stewards of corporate data. They kept the books and the computers helped them with the numbers. The early computers were good with the numbers. Maybe because of this back-office connection, the CIO started as a compliance-orientated position. Then the technology boom of the mid-to-late 90s came and the CIO morphed into a new technology maven.
But more recently, one idea has struck me over and over, and the discussion of the machine-human interaction in that Time article made me reflect on it again. Computers are gluttons for data. They suck in information in whatever form it exists and store it for instant access. In the process, technology has become the storehouse for all the data that we create on a daily basis—a store that is growing geometrically every day. Now we need to figure out how we get our arms around this data in order to use it to inform the process of “good government” and to inform decisions.
I recently attended the Interagency Resources Management Conference and the Department of Energy’s Information Management Conference. Both events offered a venue to explore and share the importance of properly managing data necessary to fully transform the way organizations conduct business. In the context of HUD, transformation is in part about updating our technologies, but to be clear it is also about creating venues that will allow us to more effectively and efficiently share and use data to inform decision-making. Gleaning useful, productive intelligence from our mounds of data is central to the modern CIO’s role. When I say “productive” intelligence, I mean data that has been formed into knowledge that helps us make more informed decisions and take more informed actions. It is this productive intelligence that I, as CIO, need to provide to my customers, wherever they are in the organization, whenever they need it, and in the form that they can best use it. I need to be an enabler of their decisions and actions, not just a compliance guy or a technology ambassador.
