The new show started last week, is called CIO Top of Mind Live and is hosted by me, David Terrar.  We’ll provide a regular, often weekly, forum for a group of 3 or 4 CIOs and CTOs invited from our joint networks to discuss their latest concerns.  We’ll cover topics from the changing nature of the CIO role itself, to successes and failures in digital transformation, the challenges of app modernisation, which technologies you should be investing more time in, as well as the problem of finding and keeping the right talent.  Whatever issues that are at the forefront of our guests and their businesses that week and on their planning horizon.

 
Episode 1 – 13:00 UK time, 22 July 2019 – Strategy and Operations

The first CIO Top Of Mind Live programme was streamed last week on Disruptive.Live, is available on demand right now (click on the graphic below), and will become part of the continuous programming on CIO Transformation TV.  

The theme was Strategy and Operations.  Our guests were Harvey Durrant – Head of ICT at Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service, Lia Edwards – Former CIO at Aucerna, Finbarr Joy – Group CTO at Superbet, and Mark Butcher – the Founder of Cloud Consultancy company, Posetiv.  We tackled many of the issues around reengineering IT, the chronic skills shortage that we are facing and the fact that we aren’t being supported well enough by either our education or the recruitment sector. We finished with a roundup of the additional topics that are worrying our guests the most.  

Episode 2 – 13:00 UK time, today, 30 July 2019 – Technology and Futures

Today’s theme will be on Technology and Futures, when we’ll cover the issues around getting rid of legacy, handling a multicloud world, machine learning and automation, and what technologies our CIOs and CTOs are looking at next.  

We are joined by Nour Shaker Fayed – Product Development & Cloud Architect – Public Cloud Services at a large telecoms company, Tim Connolly – Chief Executive for Bloor, Jas Bassi – It Solutions Delivery Manager at Gateley and Phillipe Chone – a provider of advisory services to CIOs, COOs and MDs in the Financial industry.  It should be noted that our guests are giving us their personal views rather than the views of their respective employers.  After going out live, it will also be available on demand, and will become part of the programming on CIO Transformation TV.

Episode 3 – 13:00 UK time, next week, 6 August 2019 – Diversity and Inclusion

We have 3 great guests lined up for next week who will tackle the problem of Diversity and Inclusion in the tech space.  We’ll publicise the show link nearer the time, or go to the Disruptive.Live home page on the day.

As a byproduct of the shows we’ll interview each of our guests individually, and get their input for the agenda of CIO Transformation Live and their suggestions on how we can make the event better and more relevant.  All of the video content we produce gets added to the rolling programming on CIO Transformation TV. The next CIO Transformation Live event is at Whittlebury Hall near Silverstone on Wednesday 30th October.  If you are interested in coming along, please check out the website, and follow this link to register for a place.

Can I give a big thank you to all of our friends at Disruptive.Live for doing such a great job for us. Follow #CIOTL for our regular event content and #CIOTOML for conversations around the new panel show.  If you’ve got suggestions of what we should cover, or you’d like to be a guest on the show, then please contact us.  

Like my earlier mobile post there is a must watch video at the core.  This one has NYU Professor Scott Galloway speaking at DLD16 in Munich a few weeks back on Monday 18th January talking about the Gang of Four – that’s Apple, Amazon, Facebook & Google.  The video went up on YouTube on the 25th January – at this second, 10 days later it has been viewed 520,618 times.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth 16 minutes of your time to help you better understand today’s landscape and to learn some lessons from the steps the current titans are making.

Scott Galloway preceded his pitch with a brilliantly self deprecating health warning showing that some of his predictions will be wrong, but hoping that more will be right. Here are some of the things he said about the “four horseman of the apocalypse” Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google:

• In 2015 their combined market capitalisation rose from the GDP of Spain to the GDP of Canada
• Each of the 4’s 2015 value is so large he compares each with a basket of well known brands in their sector to highlight their position
• Amazon is the number 1 e-commerce player both sides of the atlantic, dwarfing the next 10 players in each market
• Apple added $51Bn in revenues last year – that one year growth is more than the total 2014 revenues of luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Coach, Hermes, Michael Kors, Kering, Richmond and Prada combined
  Facebook and Google are growing at 40.3% and 12% compared to traditional media companies where they range from IAC’s 4.5% to Viacom’s -3.7%
• “The advertising industrial complex is about to come to an end!” – last year 90% of CPG brands lost market share and 68% lost revenue “because advertising sucks!”
• If you’re wealthy you can opt out of advertising with downloads, Netflix, iTunes, Tivo or Sky+
  He has quotes from fashion brand leaders highlighting how the fastest growing brands aren’t advertising in the traditional way
• More venture capital going in to the ecosystem but fewer exits
• The mobile ad market is a duopoly with Google and Facebook controlling 50% of the global market
• Amazon has redefined the way we think about building businesses – it can be profitable any time it want but has made a conscious decision to run at break even because “profits are heroin to investors”, they get addicted to them and if you take them away, they respond negatively – he highlights Walmart’s recent capital investments to compete as the right thing to do, but the markets didn’t like the drop in profits and so the share price has gone down dramatically, where as Amazon is the master of consistency
• Over 90% of the profit from the global smartphone market goes to Apple, then Samsun gets a bit, then the rest fight over the losses (the numbers on the slides don’t add up here, but the message is still clear)
  Apple’s revenue from PC’s is going up, everyone else’s is going down
• If you believe the press, Apple’s Watch is a failure – Apple took away Samsung’s smart watch market share away as soon as they entered the market – ask Richemont and Swatch if they think Apple watch is a failure – he suggests Apple Watch will do $5-10Bn sales this year, but the entire Swiss Watch industry is $25Bn
• He highlights the amazing rate of growth of Facebook, but then goes on to explain how they’ve only really monetised of its assets, and the potential they have with Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger
• Facebook are spending more per dollar on R&D than any other tech company in history – as well as being incredibly nimble with the number of products and releases they are doing, they’ve gone from 0% to 76% revenue in mobile in only 3 years – that’s a lesson in how to disrupt yourself and pivot
• Scott explains how one of these four will become a Trillion Dollar company in the very near future
  He suggests Amazon should be acquiring bricks and mortar retail chains and become the true mini-channel retailer
• Google needs a bigger business – he postulates they could go after the college education market
  Facebook, Google and Amazon are easy to understand, but what is Apple’s mission? He suggests they “pay an absence of vision tax”
• Globalisation, free flow of capital, and the frictionless environment mean that i’s never been easier to be a billionaire, but never been harder to be a millionaire – it’s the middle classes that are getting squeezed
  With share options and stock being used as a regular motivator for senior people in companies, but look at the markets and the way companies are being valued – he says “there is nothing equitable about equity in a digital age”

Please watch the video to get all of this in his own words and the full story.  I’ll even forgive him the Adele segment:

He finishes excited by the technology opportunities, pleased by the meaningful things we are doing, but wondering whether we are doing anything profound. What all of this highlights for me is that there are key lessons to be learned from the way Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are innovating, expanding and addressing their markets that should be adopted by your business and my business, but that the equity markets don’t respond well to some of those moves required. I’m sure that’s why the likes of Dell have gone back in to private ownership, and why “going public” as an exit route is less important in the future plans of any of today’s startups.