IT elite pool ideas online

By Chris Barton

Chief information officers (CIOs) of large New Zealand businesses and organisations weighed down by the stresses of their jobs may find solace in the Cambridge Information Network (CIN).

This select virtual community enables top IT executives to meet online and talk about their working lives.

Formed in late 1996 and run by Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm Cambridge Technology Partners, CIN has 3500 members in 52 countries, including 12 from New Zealand. CIN was promoted to top CIOs over here early this month.

Membership is free - as long as you are a CIO or senior IT exec-utive with some responsibility for your organisation's IT strategy and budget. Companies or organisations such as government departments with annual revenues of less than about $100 million need not apply.

The biggest draw of the network is the online discussion groups where the IT elite talk about, and ask advice on, their IT dilemmas. Director of online products Ellen Schreiber says, unlike typical Internet news group discussions, CIN postings are not about grousing or letting rip with whatever is on members' minds. Members quickly learn the closed community is a safe place where they can exchange positive views and get answers to IT conundrums.

The site - www.cin.ctp.com - gets 400 visits a week, with members staying on the site for an average of 15 minutes a time and viewing about 300 different pages. The no-selling ethic means members do not push products online.

What is on CIOs' minds these days? Customer relationship management is hot. So is Y2K - with most discussion lately about what everyone is doing after the millennium dawn. There is also the usual talk on new products, plus the eternal problem of finding and retaining skilled staff. Members happily talk about their careers, too. Strangely, they're also happy to share the wealth of experience they have - even if that might prove a benefit to one of their competitors.

CIN also conducts think tank research three times a year, mainly by online surveys among members. The hot topic now is knowledge management, which 85 per cent of respondents describe as a strategy for creating competitive advantage. But only 8 per cent have implemented it across their organisation.

"Yes there is a paradox. They all believe it, but the word 'knowledge' doesn't have a lot of credibility with boards of directors," says Ellen Schreiber.

But the research has detected a huge shift to knowledge management tools such as search engines, data warehouses, conferencing software, groupware, event notification alerts and even neural networks in the next two years.

The problem of getting more senior managers and directors to adopt new technology ideas comes through in a recent CIN question-of-the-week. Asked "Would your chief executive spend time in an e-commerce strategy meeting for your company?" CIN members said that 40 per cent of their bosses would say no, 44 per cent would spend half a day, 11 per cent up to three days and 5 per cent more than three days.