This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 3

The City of Birmingham's (UK) disaster, what Salesforce and NVIDIA's earning say about CIO budget priorities, and lessons on innovation from Apple on this week's episode.

👋 Hi and welcome to The DX Report — the research hub of The DX Institute all about Digital Transformation, the Digital Experience, and the Digital Enterprise. I’m industry analyst, author, and speaker Charles Araujo, and I’m all about providing insights and analysis for enterprise IT leaders as you make the big bets about your organization’s future!

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I’m really enjoying hosting our new weekly podcast with Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights. He and I agreed that doing it keeps us both sharp — and hopefully provides you with some meaningful and useful insights.

This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 3

This week, we dig into 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.

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 (https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Age-Charles-Araujo/dp/1849283753). 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

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