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Articles by Tom Soderstrom
Technology and Business Trends for Executives | Amazon Web Services
Everything is changing everywhere all at once. Executives must track technology and business trends that (a) create opportunities for innovation and growth and (b) may disrupt and reshape entire industries. The blog post “How Executives Can Avoid Being Disrupted by Emerging Technologies” discusses how to determine which trends will matter and how to experiment with them. Here are the most important emerging trends to watch going into 2025.
How Executives Can Avoid Being Disrupted by Emerging Technologies | Amazon Web Services
Executives must anticipate rapid technology shifts, which increasingly disrupt businesses, and find new markets and partnering opportunities. Accenture’s global disruption index, which quantifies economic, social, geopolitical, climate, consumer and technology changes, indicates disruption occurs at a rate 50 times greater than just five years ago. How can executives stay ahead of the curve?
Accelerating the Space Economy With Cloud
Having a purpose that is larger than ourselves is universal — we all want to achieve something to be remembered for. Protecting the planet and our species fills this need rather well. We must and should do better for our planet and the next generations, and historically, when challenges arise, humans are great at innovating to solve them.
The Rise of Intelligent Digital Assistants
Before we can have a rational discussion about artificial intelligence (AI), we should probably cut through the hysteria surrounding it. Contrary to popular opinion, we’re not talking about machines that are going to rise up, steal our jobs, and render humans obsolete. We already rely on AI in countless daily tasks.
The Next Tech Tsunami Is Here: How to Ride the Wave
Our lives are very different today than they were even 15 years ago. We walk around with computers in our pockets and do things like share our locations with loved ones via satellite technology. Still, the changes we’ve experienced so far are nothing compared to the tech tidal wave that’s approaching. A convergence of computing advancements ranging from supercomputers to machine learning will transform our daily lives.
The Most Important Technology Trends: Part 2
This is the second article in a series about the most important technology trends. The first article postulated that the key trend is the evolution of how we work. It discussed working like a startup and utilizing new methods of working including: agile development, open source, consumerization, continuous development/continuous integration, iterating with minimum viable products, DevOps, crowdsourcing, maker communities, and reducing wait states.
The Most Important Trend: Evolving How We Work
As we look at the exciting technology trends of the Next IT Decade (the next three years), one mega trend stands out: We will work very differently. Why? Because we will need to work faster and more effectively with fewer wait-states (aka “bureaucracy”). Consumer technologies are evolving very quickly and have made us highly productive at home.
Enterprisers Project 3-year anniversary: A look back at top articles and what's changed for CIOs
This week, The Enterprisers Project celebrates its third anniversary. We've had a front-row seat to the changing priorities of the CIO over the last few years. Early on, we heard a lot about what CIOs should be doing about shadow IT and why they needed to begin building strategic relationships with their peers in the C-Suite and the rest of the business.
9 IT conferences CIOs should attend this spring
2016 is shaping up to be the year that digital transformation will move from buzzword realm to reality for CIOs. We've identified nine events taking place this spring that have something to offer all IT leaders as they put their digital strategies into action. Mark your calendars, and prepare to find the answers and insights you need to succeed in the digital future.
The best jobs in America are often in IT
Glassdoor, the popular website where employees and former employees review companies and their management anonymously, recently released its list of “25 Best Jobs in America for 2016.” How do they determine what’s “best?” By weighing earning potential, career opportunities, and the number of current job openings. Given the extremely tight IT job market today, it’s no surprise that 40 percent of the best 25 jobs are in IT.
Should you consider a chaotic architecture?
Recently the Jet Propulsion Lab’s technology leadership began a collaborative conversation about chaotic architecture as a cornerstone of the next IT decade (that is, 2015-18). As CIO, Jim Rinaldi, and IT Chief Technology Officer, Tom Soderstrom, define it, chaotic architecture at its core means building technology tools based on changeable modules with a short half-life and securing data while viewing applications as temporary.
How Jet Propulsion Laboratory helped developers and operations see eye-to-eye on containers
In the continuing IT balancing act between development and operations teams, new technologies are constantly emerging and proceeding through a gauntlet that runs between the two groups. The sides generally line up like this: Developers This is new. I’m excited. Can I use this by myself? How can I develop a prototype? Can I automate this? Can I do self-service, including patches? Operations This is new to me. Will I get the blame if it doesn’t work? How does this technology work – and is it proven?
How would you turn off IT's always-on culture?
The press is full of stories about Americans being overstretched and overworked. The U.S. Travel Association reported in August that 40 percent of us will leave paid vacation days unused this year. I know that work-life balance is a challenge because I, along with my colleagues in IT, live it every week.
3 new trends pressuring CIOs
This is the second of a two-part interview with Mobiquity CTO Ty Rollin. In part one, Rollin highlighted three trends making CIOs' jobs more complex. What trends are likely to post the biggest problems for IT during the next couple of years? Ty Rollin, CTO of the mobile technology company Mobiquity, takes a look at some of the issues CIOs and CTOs will be facing going forward. 1. Change Management: "Change management is becoming a block to agile business," Rollin warns.
3 ways CIOs can embrace disruptive technologies without ignoring legacy IT
Disruptive technologies are here to stay. We have the cloud and we have open source software. Because you can implement things in a safer environment that doesn’t disrupt your entire ecosystem or your entire data center, you can experiment faster. New technologies therefore will get a foothold faster and the pace of disruption will increase. The problem is when you look at legacy environments and technologies. We’re an enterprise, so we have built legacy environments and applications.
The new ROI for CIOs - Return on Attention
Tom Soderstrom serves as the IT Chief Technology Officer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where his mission is to identify and infuse new IT technologies into JPL's environment. Infusing new technologies means creating ways both IT and the business can work together to innovate for the business. As an experienced leader, Soderstrom shares his recipe. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Six ways to avoid cloud missteps
As some companies enter into their first cloud engagements, other organizations already are looking back at 'legacy cloud' experiences and defining best practices based on what they might have missed or overlooked the first time around. At JPL, we made the decision early on to create a cloud computing commodity board. Why? We already could see that we would need to align all our business functions as people started getting excited about cloud computing.
Five principles to guide your big data analytics projects
Big data plays a critical role in our work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Understanding, analyzing, and visualizing data is core to the problems we solve. When embarking on a big data project, I’ve found it helpful to have a set of principles that everyone agrees to ahead of time to help save time on planning. Here are five guidelines that I believe make it easier to plan for big data projects. 1) Think data first. When we take on new projects, it’s always all about the data.
Six scary tales from IT leaders
Any organization managing change and growing rapidly will encounter unexpected turns in the road – even roads that lead straight off the cliff into the unknown. So, Enterprisers Project asked six top IT executives what some of the scariest moments have been in their careers, especially when there is no roadmap to follow. Here’s what they shared: Facing the fear “I like going to work scared. I like going to work nervous about what’s around the corner.
CIOs: Turn your analytics expert into a venture capitalist
It’s actually a lot cheaper and simpler than you may think to do what I call venture capital probing inside your own company. Your secret weapon is your analytics expert. We tend to think of analytics as only outward-facing. But when you look inside your organization, you’re apt to find a lot of gold waiting to be discovered.
5 IT executives share real strategies for moving the business forward
What’s so special about organizations that are embracing technology to move their businesses forward? What are they doing that’s so different than everyone else? And what can you learn from them? It turns out that companies pursuing IT-enabled business innovation tend to have six things in common, ranging from having CEOs who are committed to technology-driven initiatives to investing in and rewarding innovation.
5 ways CIOs can save time and dig deeper on big data projects
Getting started with big data can be overwhelming, especially when you have a lot of diverse information available. We recently tackled a big data project at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help our departments solve some of their big problems. This internal big data project was successful, in part, because of the way we approached it. Here are some takeaways that could help you tackle your next big data project. 1. Identify the low-hanging fruit.
Dark data and other big data surprises
The image above shows how JPL employees used the popular tool GitHub to share open source code across the organization. One day JPL hopes to use big data visualizations like this one to incentivize specific code-sharing behaviors based on positive outcomes. By Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology Officer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA have been producers and users of big data for a long time. You could say it’s part of our DNA.
Consider creating a startup within your company to tackle big data
If you want to see quick results from big data, consider ripping out some cubicles and creating a startup within your company. We decided to do just that at Jet Propulsion Laboratory last summer, and we’re thrilled with the results. Here’s how we did it: After identifying several end-user problems that we wanted to solve internally with big data, we had a choice: Put the projects in the operations pipeline or tackle them on the side with a startup.
Are the Next CIO Megatrends SMACK?
How to Adopt Technology for The Next IT Decade by Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology Officer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory With the pace of technology change being what it is, I like to say an IT decade is now three years long, and it’s shrinking. Whether you buy this proposition or not, the important thing is to get a handle on what technologies are coming soon to your enterprise and how to incorporate them into your next generation of applications and services.
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