Using a 3D simulator to visualize a computing environment is a long way from traditional IT security, but the drama of video gaming actually enables analysts to watch over their networks more effectively. An article New Scientist titled: The real Ton: IT security as a shoot ‘em up   describes some research under development at the Lincoln Laboratory, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the simulation, network administrators can patrol their environments as if they were playing a first-person shooter - much like in the cult film Tron.

This was presented at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference in September 2012. Both the paper and the presentation are available for download.

Although not really gamification in the purist definition, it definitely is an example of serious gaming moving into the IT field.

Business analytics is about using the data available to manage performance and make decisions. It is about asking questions to get answers. As we have more powerful tools, analytics should allow us to ask questions we’ve never thought of asking before. We can hypothesize about issues and results.

Even the type of questions we ask may change. Which is more important knowing the buying behavior of our customers or knowing more about the behavior of those who are not current customers? Is it better to know about why people make decisions to buy our product or about understanding why people were entering a decision making situation?

These kinds of questions are not exactly new, but there is now more data and powerful tools to attack them then have ever existed before. With social techniques we also have new perspectives to add to the analysis.

Most of the analytics work in the past was focused on hindsight, performing analysis on historical data. Much of the real-time analytics push discussed currently is about providing insight into decisions that need to be made now. The real opportunity is in the area of foresight, with modeling and simulation techniques to predict and shape the future we want to have. These are all analytic areas that are rapidly changing.

I’ve mentioned in the past that in a world of abundant data having more data is not all that exciting -- on the other hand having the attention of personnel with the right questions will always be scarce and powerful.

Now is the time for organizations to make a choice to develop greater depth and breadth of analytic capabilities, figuring out what works and blazing a trail toward a more agile future.

In the past innovators were a chosen few—predominately middle-aged, middle-class Western men. Tomorrow’s innovators will come from all corners of the globe, all races, religions, and classes. Not only can everyone be an innovator – it is an expectation going forward as more “normal” tasks are automated.

When I say I am only human, I’m saying that I’m innovative. I like to do things differently. The optimist view is that all humans are innovative. The environment of the future will be designed to support this level of personalization and creativity. It may even reach the point where what we think we’re talking with may not be human at all.

The pessimist may believe that as low as only one percent of any general population has the high motivation, intelligence, and creativity to be truly innovative.

For Canada, with a population of 32 million inhabitants, we can reason that 320,000 are innovators. In the United States, that number increases to three million innovators.

One percent of China’s and India’s combined population would be 26 million innovators. They’ll have nearly as many innovators as Canada has residents. Our global approach is opening up those innovations to the world, further accelerating change and adoption.

Yesterday I described the numerous hats today’s CIOs are required to wear -- but what about the roles to avoid? Here are a few of the hats the CIO probably shouldn’t wear:

Chief inertia officer

Inertia is defined as “a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force.” Inertia is what makes companies continue in a direction long after the signs of change have passed. It’s represented by fixed-cost decisions, where the enterprise is sometimes incapable of overcoming bad decisions simply because they were made recently and must be defended despite better reason.

When I was going through my MBA program, one of the things we had a great deal of discussion about was the fact that sunk costs are in the past, and they can’t be a constraint to your future.

Increasingly, the future isn’t a straight line from the past, and decisions made on that basis won’t serve the enterprise well. The CIO must be a force in overcoming organizational inertia and be a strong voice in understanding not only the points at which systems fail but also the point at which optimal performance is lacking.

Chief impediment officer

IT must be a business enabler, not a business impediment. Increasingly, applications are moving closer to business end users. The expectations are for greater flexibility for devices, systems and collaboration. CIO’s must understand and embrace (at least to the point of making an active decision instead of a passive one) topics like BYOD.

The CIO is responsible for smoothing the transition from a legacy IT environment to a business-flexible SOA, where IT will move as rapidly, and with as much agility, as the enterprise demands.

Chief inefficiency officer

The efficiency of the enterprise is often tied to the efficiency of the IT capabilities underlying and supporting it. Maintaining the efficiency of the IT infrastructure is becoming a more demanding chore.

Six-nines (99.9999 percent) availability requirements mean redundant, standby infrastructure, much of which remains unused until there’s a point of failure. Architecting computing infrastructure that can be highly efficient during low traffic but can quickly and economically scale to tens of thousands of business events are becoming practical. New processes, tools, and techniques will be necessary for most organizations and the CIO is on point to plan for this.

CIOs must not only work at the strategy level, but also understand and relate to the details needed to make it happen. They must understand and preserve that which is optimally efficient, yet also muster the courage to find what could work better -- to evangelize change. They must be part lawyer, technician, mediator, and change agent. The CIO must be as much at home in the business environment as they are in the technical world. No other position in the modern enterprise requires the executive to excel in so many capacities. Even if someone masters the many dimensions, it’s safe to say that the future CIO should prepare to take on further additional, unexpected responsibilities. It’s the nature of the job.

Are you wearing in hats that you might need to take off? Do you have any other “don’ts” to add to my list?

 To read more about my thoughts on the roles of the CIO, visit these HP The Next Big Thing blog posts:

• Misplaced concerns about the death of the CIO
• 5 Points CIOs must take action on now
• A video of 5 things CIOs must take action on now

The winds of change for CIOs (and IT) are blowing harder than ever before. Normally, one would say “hold on to your hat!” but in this case, it should be time to “get ready to lose it,” since the CIO needs to wear more hats than ever before.

In this age of exponential growth, powered by Moore’s law and other exponential changes, we’ve only started to see the changes that will be taking place.

Every worker today needs to have access to broad as well as deep knowledge. They need to be constantly learning. Those who are great at one thing will have a job only as long as that one thing is in demand and accessible. The workers who can move from role to role (be willing to let go), even within one job, who can project their expertise into the market (even if it is only within the ecosystem we call an enterprise today) will thrive. The CIO position of the future is a perfect example of this, both as an example and as an enabler of others.

Tomorrow’s CIO will enable the flow of a rapidly evolving new business model. The CIO’s hats will undergo significant change, and the concept of the chief information officer role we are familiar with will likely be lost to history.

In case anyone doubts these multiple roles, here are just a few of the many dimensions required for today and tomorrow:

Chief integration officer

The untethered, aggregated, ecosystem we call an enterprise today will demand integration like we’ve never seen before. Systems of record will still exist, but they will have many consumers, possibly even outside the enterprise borders. The days of standalone solutions, organizations… are over.

Chief innovation officer

We know that innovation is coming from all directions and sources—and in an environment of increasing change, it must be understood, cultivated, and managed. The CIO has a role to both educate and accelerate innovation. Diversity of perspective is a key way to hasten innovation and the collaborative tools are in the CIOs area.

Chief irritation officer

This goes along with the saying “if it ain’t broke – break it.” The CIO needs to have a vision of where things need to be. They need to be able to share that with others, evangelize and rise up against the latency and inertia that inhibit change adoption. This skill is critical for the CIO being a leader.

Chief identity officer

Identity management is a critical capability -- optimizing the flow of information to partners, customers, and employees. Knowing who the right person is and providing that individual with the right information in the right form in the right place at the right time to drive the right outcome (Right6) is an expectation for the future. The security implications are immense, so…

Chief inoculation officer

Security is a make-or-break proposition in today’s enterprise. The news is full of stories about hackers, worms, and phishing expeditions. Security incidents can give an organization a black eye, or even take them down.

Security breaches reduce confidence in every aspect of the business and can cost the executives their jobs. The security techniques for business in the future need to be about creating and maintaining multilayered, context-aware, business function-based security. If the 90s taught us anything, it is that perimeter based security approaches are bound to fail. Security must be baked in, not bolted on. It requires strong collaboration between technology and business processes and the CIO’s leadership role is central to this effort.

Security must be transformed from being viewed as a cost component to an empowering one. One of the foundations of the big data movement is that visibility and transparency are central to decision making. Depending on the industry, significant amounts of meta-data can be derived from security information showing the relationship between people, systems and events.

Chief international officer

While the primary responsibility for international relations might fall to the COO, the technical infrastructures that facilitate these efforts are within the domain of the CIO.

This is no trivial undertaking. Each country has its own laws, risks and implications. Managing an international infrastructure requires the CIO to be part lawyer, part technician, part politician, and all business.

Chief investigative officer

New constructs around cloud computing, pattern recognition, simulation, predictive technologies, complex-event processing, and event-stream processing technologies emerge daily. The CIO must understand these new technology capabilities—and, when economically appropriate—apply them to create business value.

Each new service must be considered as to whether it’s a new competitor or, perhaps, a compliment to amplify the value of an existing service. Many of the new services will be delivered through the Internet and won’t be geographically bound like their predecessors. The CIO will be at least partially responsible for providing the conduit to this new business-intelligence content, even if the analysis responsibilities fall to other parts of the business. The CIO needs to understand the business needs and flesh out these possibilities, bringing them into discussions with the business. To accomplish this, the CIO must be aware of new opportunities, new threats and new conduits for finding them, as well as how they’ve been used elsewhere, and the commensurate risks—a process requiring strong investigative and analytic disciplines.

Chief information officer

Finally what we think of as information and sources of information are under constant change. The sifting of structure from unstructured data is opening up vast sets of information that just a short time ago were beyond our reach. For example deriving the context of speak, video… are becoming possible.

But what’s unique about much of this new information for most companies is that it’s designed to improve decision making—it’s not data for more data processing. In a world where data is abundant, having more data is just not helpful. Referred to as “context content,” the new information flow consists of meta-information, or information about the information; collateral information, or what else was occurring; and environmental information, or the state of environments. When properly processed, this information will provide clues as to the “why” of an event rather than just the “what” and move the basis for corporate action from sense-and-respond, or reactive, to cause-and-effect, or proactive.

Next time, I’ll talk about a few of the hats today’s CIOs probably shouldn’t wear, but in the meantime, do you have any CIO hats to add to my list?

To read more about my thoughts on the roles of the CIO, visit these HP The Next Big Thing blog posts:

• Misplaced concerns about the death of the CIO
• 5 Points CIOs must take action on now
• A video of 5 things CIOs must take action on now

This post was based off an earlier article Jeff Wacker wrote while at EDS.

I was looking at the IEEE site TryEngineering.org. This site is focused on helping students select an engineering profession as well as help teachers to expand their curriculum. One of the pages on the site is dedicated to Playing Games, that demonstrate some of the concepts and issues that engineers encounter.

By performing tasks like designing a parachute for the Mars lander or engineering a Bionic Arm (among many others), students get a feel for the kind of issues engineers need to think about.

These are useful tools for an individual to make a decision about their lives, but games have moved on from the one person playing in isolation to much more of a social, fluid foundation for multiplayer interaction and development. It does make me wonder how more serious gaming in a multiplayer environment can influence the way businesses train and shift behavior. There are more conferences every year that try to expand educational gaming into the business world, but other than in the government space, I can’t think of any examples being used.

Yet as we move into this information explosion enabled world where we need to use simulation and modeling to generate an advantage, the use of gaming techniques will have to increase. Are there any good examples out there?