My most excellent friend Thornton May coined the phrase, “By CIOs, for CIOs” in the early 2000s. It is an apt describer of why I was involved in chief information officer (CIO) conferences. Part of my professional success was understanding opportunities in higher education from other industry sectors and decisively implementing those opportunities in higher education. The service component was leading events like these as a chair, governing body member, speaker, or facilitator. I have served at these events for nearly 30 years trying to build or strengthen the technology ecosystems in the communities I have lived in.
I am occasionally asked why these technology events and ecosystems are so important. The answer is threefold:
- Leader and organizational reputation is CRITICAL in the hotly contested technology recruitment process. The most important war is the talent war as people are the most precious part of any organization. Winning awards and presenting at these events has a significant effect on recruiting the absolute best talent in the field.
- Culture beats strategy every day of the week. Meaningful recognition shapes organizational culture and especially so at a state or national level. If you want an innovative team, walk the walk and win awards at the highest possible level.
- The many innovations that I have led in higher education I stole from another industry presented at a technology conference. In healthcare and higher education, often laggards in innovation, the best tested ideas can come from other industries. The absolute best place to pick up these great ideas is at technology conference.
The Early Years
I really don’t know how it started but somehow I built a reputation for speaking at conferences while still a faculty member at West Point. I believe it was a SIM New York event or SIM Hartford event where the famed Hunter Muller approached me and offered to co-author a book about me of all people. I declined and suspect Hunter shared his high opinion of me with others. I started getting invited to intimate dinner gatherings of CIOs around the nation. The plethora of today’s CIO events did not exist back then and these intimate dinners where we would fly in, have dinner together while one or two members discussed an issue they were dealing with, and immediately fly back out overnight so as to be back at work the next morning. For example, the Girl Scouts CIO would discuss how to provide the young ladies from predators within a volunteer organization and that would be our dinner conversation and collaboration. It was very enlightening.
Evanta
While I didn’t attend events like this while I was in Korea or graduate school, I was invited in 2002 to speak at an Evanta conference in Houston. It would be the first technology conference focused on Chief Information Officers from this new private company Evanta. Evanta’s CEO Bob Defthels. I was not a keynote speaker but I was in a side room. As luck would have it, Bob came in and listened to my presentation. That would start a multidecade collaboration.
I would speak at Evanta events around the nation between 2002 and 2008. Perhaps the most notable engagement was a speaking engagement in Philadelphia followed by a train ride to West Point with the Philadelphia Evanta conference team. While on the train ride, we called into the Praise and Progress event that Evanta surprising the entire company. Once we got to West Point, the team got to tour the campus, attend a formal event (and meet GEN John Abizaid) and attend a West Point football game.
In 2008, having returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, I spoke at the Atlanta conference of the use of technology in war zones. Little did I know that I would become a co-chair of the Evanta Atlanta conference in two years. As of 2024, I am the longest serving co-chair of the Atlanta conference and very much enjoying working with amazing Evanta community managers like Eileen Wade and Heather Bolick to build the Atlanta technology ecosystem. Evanta would recognize my contributions to the technology community in 2009 as the National CIO of the Year and in 2012 as a Global Breakaway Leader. I would make a number of personal friends at these events including the legendary CIOs Jay Ferro (my brother from another mother), John Trainor (our last meeting was hugging in the middle of the Atlanta Airport), Tom Murphy, and Lee Crump.
inspireCIO
The inspireCIO group started recognizing chief information officers in 1998 and has become one of two premiere recognition programs in the nation (the other being the CIO100). I became familiar with the inspireCIO group in 2010 and immediately noted the difference. First, invitation to inspireCIO required CIO leadership of organizations with $100 million in revenue and about half are responsible for $1 billion or more in revenue. This leads to different conversations among technology leaders with significant responsibilities. Second, inspireCIO does an exceptional job of involving the spouses in events so that
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