October 20, 2009

October Meeting Notes

Thanks to Kendra Andrews for taking notes at the CEO/CTO Emerging Technologoes roundtable.  Our panelists were:

Kristopher Tyra, CTO of QTags

David Sink, Program Director, Emerging Technologies for Solutions and
      Strategy Division, IBM Software Group

John Charnovich, Founding Partner of TecExecs

Gary Hoke, Director of Enterprise Applications at INC Research

Jack Spain, Consulting Director for Fuentek

Jack Spain:  primarily deals within government organizations, such a NASA.  Specific to his field he sees sensor technology and materials science as important areas for the future.  Nano technology is also there, but not to the level that the media has us think.

Gary Hoke:  with the prevalence of mergers and acquisitions, definitely a need for the integration of solutions for M&A.  ERP, green technologies and virtualization will also continue to grow.

John Charnovich:  Due to the commoditization of software, Software as a Service and Product as a Service are key areas.  Social networking will continue to grow, with totally new hosted networking platforms.  Don’t know how that will take shape yet, but social networking is here to stay.  Seeing a shift away from controlled IT environments.  More important to be responsive.  There’s a move to more transparency within IT.  No more is IT the group in the corner that has all the say.  Storage and BI needs will continue to grow.  As globalization, virtualization, SaaS expand, need frameworks to improve quality (ITIL, etc.).  There is going to be less and less role specialization.  3^rd party companies will handle the nuts and bolts, so people will need to expand their skill sets.  The people who are programming in other countries are just as good as the programmers in the US so need to find a way to show value in other ways.

David Sink:  Business has much more influence over IT.  Some say IT is going to become a utility due to cloud computing.  IBM just released an international CIO study (results on IBM web site) that shows their key points.  High on the list were price and BI.  Lots of IT is going to be based on price.  Being a coder isn’t good enough anymore.  Need experience with multiple languages, domain skills.  Web will continue to grow, as will open source / open standards, and mobile computing.  Rise of big data and being able to get valuable information out of it.  We are no longer looking at gigabytes, now into petabytes.  Real-time organizations will be key.  Has a client right now with data that normally takes 90 hours to process, want it to be shrunk down to 1 hour.  This will be the norm.  Will still need system administrators, just less of them.

Kristopher Tyra:  Must be able to communicate.  Guys who sit in the corner can be replaced.  Everything is about productivity.  Cloud computing isn’t going away.  Must understand distributed systems.  Gone is the day where a PHP programmer who does a static Web site is of value.  If don’t know distributed systems, you won’t be of value and your job can be sent somewhere else cheaper.  User interfaces must be simplistic.  Data analytics is important.  Interviews are heading toward problem solving instead of what you have done in the past language-wise.  Must be multi-dimensional.

From audience questions:

While some areas of government can be behind the times, federal government is where innovation comes from.  Lots of programs were started in and funded by the federal government, and then start-ups ran with the concept once word got out.

Mainframe isn’t going away, and the need will probably grow stronger since a mainframe is the best way to crunch huge amounts of data.

Best way to prep candidates for today’s interview is to give them situational questions.  Ones that don’t necessarily have an answer.  For example:  You are a project manager and you’ve been given a deadline of X.  The development and testing teams say they can’t physically get their work done by X.  What do you do?  Things that show how they think and problem solve.

Thanks again to everyone who participated.