New Florence. New Renaissance.

What CIOs do

McKinsey Quarterly (sub required) compiles a series of interviews (some are 2 years old) with executives of P&G, Volkswagen, Deutsche Post (which also owns DHL) and NetApp on technology direction, budgets and innovation.

What if Da Vinci were a CIO today?

I wrote an article for the thought leadership journal published by Cognizant (a sponsor for this blog)

"Most organizations feel intense, almost desperate, pressure to change and innovate. At times like this, it is useful to draw inspiration from the ultimate “Renaissance man” -- Leonardo  da Vinci. He symbolizes the rejuvenation that Western Europe experienced during the 14th through 16th centuries, after the Black Plague and subsequent Dark Ages."

Register here to get access to the article and others in the journal.

GE's CIO is very different

"Gary Reiner isn't like other CIOs. The average chief information officer's tenure is just over three years, but he has held the job at General Electric for the past dozen years - the period when the foundation of GE's business shifted from manufacturing to services to information. Most CIOs complain about their budgets' getting squeezed, but Reiner's is growing and, at $4 billion, is almost the size of a Fortune 500 company. Many CIOs report to the chief financial officer, but Reiner reports to the big boss, GE's CEO, Jeff Immelt. Most strikingly, other CIOs are rarely in charge of critically important non-infotech responsibilities, but Reiner has been running GE's massive Six Sigma initiative since 1996 and also oversees the company's $55 billion of annual sourcing."

Read the interview with Gary at Fortune

More Innovative CIOs

CIO Magazine has tips and traps from CIOs at Virgin America, Vail Resorts, Genentech and The Dannon Company on adoption of newer technology - and other innovation ideas.

Technology Innovation and New York Times

"But my favorite interview was getting to talk with Architect Derek Gottfrid, who told me about this thing called Time Machine which is an archive of old issues of the New York Times that you will be able to look through — he gave me a good demo of it in the video I filmed. He told me how they used Amazon’s EC2 service to convert all the TIFF images to PDFs for this project. Then he also told me that Times Machine would be released (today)"

Scoble on a tour he got of this and other technologies at the "gray lady"

Also, here is a fascinating description of the signage on its new headquarters

"How do you add a block-long, 15-foot-tall blackletter logo to the front of a minimalist building without obstructing the view of the Times staffers working inside? The answer was to break the sign up into smaller pieces, 959 of them to be exact. Each letter in the Times logo was rasterized, that is, divided into narrow horizontal strips, ranging in number from 26 (the i in “Times”) to 161 (the Y in “York”)."

Innovation at Public Utilities

PG&E, based in the Bay area, has always leveraged its proximity to Silicon Valley and tried out innovative technologies in IT and energy efficiency.

In this video, Pat Lawicki CIO of PG&E talks to ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber about tagging utility poles with RFID, smart meters that will quickly measure customer energy usage and intelligent grids that will allow for better maintenance and service.

While the regulated industry is considered stodgy, number of innovations I have written about before are transforming it.

Here are some other posts:

Localized Blackouts

Internet over Power Lines

Optimization of Grids

Innovation at Xcel Energy

Reacting to Outages in Disaters

More innovation at airports

Dan Farber interviews John Payne, CIO at San Francisco International Airport.

New York Times talks about growing number of blogs which focus on business travel.

My other airport/aviation related posts readers may find interesting:

Technology Innovation and Airport Security
Technology Innovation and Airport Runways
Satellite based Air Traffic Control
Woke up this morning feelin' fine
Building the A 380 in 7 minutes
Technology Innovation and Jetblue
Technology Innovation and Flight Tracking
Wi-Fly
Da Vinci is looking down in awe
The New Plane Smell

and the not so flattering posts on airports

Paris Charles De Gaulle
London Airports
3 or 3.4 oz at TSA?
On shoe forward. one backwards?
TSA's False Positives

"We try harder"

I have previously written about technology innovation at Hertz.

In this video, John Turato, Vice President of Technology for Avis-Budget Group talks to  Dan Farber about managing technology around for a rental fleet of more than 400,000 vehicles worldwide. He also talks about  the OpenTravel Alliance, a group of companies developing web 2.0 standards for the online travel industry.

Technology Innovation and San Francisco Giants

Dan Farber interviews Giants CIO Bill Schlough.

Befitting Silicon Valley is the $ 3 million high-def, giant screen; the WIFI throughout stadium (as he says you could play hooky and still stay connected), the scouting database, the interactive videos and a lot more.

As I have written before, baseball is generally behind American Football when it comes to technology adoption (and cricket in other parts of the world), but CIOs like Bill may help narrow that gap over the next few years.

Update: July 29, 2007  - Bill kindly gave us a nice tour of the stadium and all its technology and toys when I took my son and a cousin to the Bay Area. One of the highlights of the visit.

SAP "related" innovation

Thomas Otter of SAP points to some innovations its customers have developed using its tools.

This is so refreshing - because it is rare. No, not the innovation - but a vendor actually giving customers credit. As I wrote here CIOs/CTOs are unsung heroes. As I wrote in my MAGIC innovation framework "CIOs do not want to be "spoon fed" innovation - they want building blocks they can adapt to their own vision of innovation."

It is good to see SAP encourage "vive la difference" rather than push the message "I have all the best practices you need. Fit within me. Don't dare go outside my perimeter" Wow, may be SAP is innovating its marketing?