Symposium Theme Summary

In an increasingly connected world, in the office, on the road, at home, companies have unprecedented access to information and ideas from their employees, partners, and customers. Business leaders are looking for ways to leap ahead of their competitors by leveraging these social networks for competitive advantage and become the product and customer service leaders of the future.

Here is our schedule, with links to panel summaries below

Panel Summaries

Leveraging Collective Insights to Enhance Value

The Internet allows businesses to learn more about their customers than ever before.

Key questions we are looking to discuss include:
Can we use IT to adapt the customer experience on an individual level to improve conversion and retention?
How do we leverage the collective insights of our customers to predict and create the products and services they really want to buy?
We are good at knowing customer buying cycles, but how can we use IT to manage the customer experience through the ownership cycle?

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Building Capabilities in a Digital Enterprise

To thrive in a globally-connected economy, enterprises must be able to bridge boundaries to deliver seamlessly integrated services with increased agility, lower cost and managed risk. Our panelists take a variety of perspectives on how organizations build IT capability and manage risk in a digital business process environment.

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Social Networks and Productivity

Social networks have gained prominence recently as sources of entertainment. However, businesses can also use and analyze the use of social networks in their organizations to learn more about the communication patterns of high performing employees.

Key questions we are looking to discuss include:
How do we use networks of people for competitive advantage?
Can social networks improve productivity?
Do high performing employees require access to more information or less?
Can social networks be a source of innovation?
Can we replicate the communications patterns of highly productive workers?

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Is IT Becoming “Componentware?”

Organizations have more IT options than ever. Software can be purchased as an ASP service, data center operations can be outsourced, IT operations can be remotely monitored and managed, development initiatives are distributed across the globe, and service oriented architectures enable greater interoperability. Will IT ever become “plug and play”?

Key questions we are looking to discuss include:
Is the vision of IT evolving into standard, easily connected building blocks becoming a reality?
What are the risks and rewards of using 3rd party services?
What are the implications for today’s CIO?

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IT and Marketing in a Consumer Networked World

Word of Mouth has always been important in marketing, but the Internet has enabled new and enhanced forms of customer networking.  General communities (e.g. FaceBook, MySpace), virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life), specifically purposed communities (e.g in health – the Wellness Community; in customer ratings of products - Epinions; in networking - e.g. VisiblePath), and cellular messaging are but a few examples of the newly enabled customer networks. 

In light of this new phenomenon, the key questions this panel will address are: 
1. How significant are these new customer social networks as tools for marketing? 
2.  What are likely directions for these networks in the future? 
3. How will they affect Marketing Strategy? and,
4 . What are the implications for IT?

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Trends in enterprise IT infrastructure: Enabling the agile enterprise

Utility, Grid, Adaptive and On-Demand are compelling visions promoted by the major IT vendors. They paint a picture of a world where IT enables the agile enterprise, business strategies can be adapted in real time, IT can be offered as a service, service levels are guaranteed, and resources can be provisioned just-in-time. This session will separate fact from fiction, identify what works and what doesn’t, and highlight what IT organizations should do now.

Key questions we are looking to discuss include:
How real is “on-demand”?
What impact is ITIL having on infrastructure management?
What technologies are ready for adoption?
Where is the greatest ROI?
Should I deploy server and storage virtualization?
What new “cross-domain” management tools are required?

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The Global “Knowledgeforce”: Collaborate for Excellence

Now more than ever, people and computers are connected to one another in ways they have never been before. This is enabling new organizational structures that may render our traditional notions of firms and hierarchies less effective.

Key questions we are looking to discuss include:
Can large groups of people make business predictions that are more accurate than those of “experts”?
Can widely-dispersed independent workers form teams to complete specific projects for an organization, for efficiently and effectively than could a formal organization?
Can large groups of people help computers to do things better that computers do badly?

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Emerging Technologies

Today's CIOs are challenged to lay groundwork for the future while implementing today's state of the art. What are the emerging developments in hardware, networking, communications, information strategy and presentation? What impacts will these technologies have on the way we live and interact? How will our organizations need to change to keep up? This panel will take you on a quick trip to the future, guided by insights from MIT's researchers and experts who will create it and bring it to the business world.

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For more information about this event or sponsorship opportunities, please contact our Sponsorship chair . For Speaker Information or Submission please contact .

This event is part of the CXO series produced by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Boston. Please refer your finance colleagues to the MIT Sloan CFO Summit (www.mitcfo.com).