This Week in Enterprise Tech, brought to you by the DX Report’s Charles Araujo and Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park, explores six big topics for CIOs across innovation, the value of data, strategic budget management, succession planning, and enterprise AI.
1) We start with the City of Birmingham, which is struggling with its SAP to Oracle migration. We discuss how this IT project has shifted from the promise of digital transformation to the reality of being in survival mode and the cautions of mistaking core services for innovation.
Article link: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/02/28/birmingham_city_council_to_spend/
2) We then take a look at Salesforce’s earnings, where the Data Cloud is the Powerhouse of the earnings and CIOs are proving the value of data with their pocketbooks and the power of the purse. We break down the following earnings chart.
3) We saw NVIDIA’s success in AI as a sign that CIO budgets are changing. Find out about the new trend of CIO-led budgets that are independent of the traditional IT budget, as well as Charles’ framework of separating the efficiency bucket from the innovation bucket from his first book, The Quantum Age of IT.
Article link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-ai-investment-is-surging-to-nvidias-benefit-5611ffc5?mod=djemCIO
4) One of the hottest companies in enterprise software sees a big leadership change, as Frank Slootman steps down from Snowflake and Sridhar Ramaswamy from the Neeva acquisition takes over. We discuss why this is a good move to avoid stagnation and discuss how to deal with bets in innovation.
Article link: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/28/new-snowflake-ceo-says-ai-will-keep-him-busy-for-many-years-to-come.html
5) Continuing the trend of innovation management, we talk about what Apple’s exit of the electric car business means in terms of managing innovative moonshots and what CIO’s often miss in terms of setting metrics around leadership and innovation culture.
Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/business/dealbook/apple-car-project-to-drive-wider-innovation.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share
6) And finally, we talk about the much-covered Google Gemini AI mistakes. We think the errors themselves fall within the range of issues that we’ve seen from other large language models, but we caution why the phrase “Eliminate Bias” should be a massive red flag for AI projects.
Article link: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/28/24085445/google-ceo-gemini-ai-diversity-scandal-employee-memo
This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:
Charles Araujo of The DX Reportand
Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights