This past week I had the opportunity to attend a CIO Summit with 90 CIOs from major corporations across the globe.  CIOs from companies like Microsoft, Oracle, the NBA, Nissan, and Mobil Oil attended.  We have much in common with these private companies.  Like us, they are complex, they have central and distributed IT services, and there is continuous talk about culture and governance.

 I came away with five questions these CIOs said affect all of our services:

1. What is core to the success of our enterprise?
2. How do we go about understanding the entire “IT spend” for our enterprise?
3. What do we create incentives and disincentives for?
4. Is there unnecessary duplication in our enterprise that is resulting in higher costs with no appreciable increase in value?
5. Do we really understand what IT services add value to our enterprise’s ability to deliver?

 Over the next couple weeks, I would like to explore each of these as they relate to UW-Madison and our ongoing strategic planning work.