Smith's Sixth Annual CIO Forum Brings Experts and Industry Together

Today's IT professionals face a range of challenges that are constantly changing as technology evolves. How do you manage the huge amounts of data generated by today's virtual networks? And what do you do when you've invested millions in a key piece of hardware, only to see it made obsolete by new technology?

Robert H. Spicer, II, keynote speaker at the Smith School's Sixth Annual CIO Forum, addressed these and other issues at the November 18, 2005 event. Spicer is executive vice president and chief information officer of Chevy Chase Bank, a $14 billion enterprise with 250 branches and over 1 million accounts in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. Chevy Chase Bank is an important partner of the Smith School as a provider of scholarships and fellowships and a lead investor in the New Markets Growth Fund.

Spicer traced the development of business IT, from the advent of single-tier architecture run on a mainframe with dumb terminals to today's highly virtualized information technology universe with its many vertically-integrated data systems.

Spicer emphasized the need for IT to have a clear business alignment. In the past, says Spicer, "There was technical precision, but information technology wasn't strategic for business - so people saved money on their IT systems, but they weren't necessarily doing what was best for the organization."

The challenges posed by continuing technological transformations are particularly crucial for the banking industry - after all, they're working with people's money. Paper checks have been a case in point. The 9/11 terrorist attacks made the banking industry realize that moving paper checks by airplane was not a truly safe option. New government regulations require banks to digitize all paper checks and archive them for a period of seven years. This has led to an ever-increasing amount of data, presenting storage and accessibility issues for the industry.

Information security is also a challenge, particularly for those working with financial information. Banks must counter fraud, provide anti-terrorist safeguards, provide reliable, foolproof methods of authentification, protect customer privacy, and ensure the security of customers' financial data, all while complying with increasingly complex federal regulations.

Spicer also pointed out some of the unexpected ways in which technology is changing the banking world. Today more and more people use their bank debit cards as an alternative to cash, a phenomenon Spicer calls "the digitization of money." This practice is slowly negating the primary function of the thousands of ATM machines across the nation - providing twenties for busy consumers. But if ATMs lose their main role as cash machines, how can the banking industry maximize the investment that has already been made in this technology?

Spicer acknowledged that this is a pressing question for today's banking executives. "Please, somebody, write your master's thesis on that, and send it to me," he joked. Spicer discussed several possibilities, including providing more personalized functions, like no-envelope deposits for both cash and checks, or using the ATMs for direct marketing purposes.

Other sessions at the CIO Forum featured presentations and panel discussions on information technology and the automobile manufacturing industry and healthcare industry.

Highlights

Barry Shufeld

Sanjay Gosain, assistant professor of information systems, Mario W. Cardullo, counselor of technology and entrepreneurism, U.S. Department of Commerce, and moderator Joe Bailey, research associate professor in the decision and information technologies department and director of the Center for Electronic Markets and Enterprises, participated in the panel discussion "How Infomediaries Have Transformed Auto Retailing."

Mark Ferrel, CEO of Universata, spoke on "Information Exchange with Medical Records."		Dr. Ross Martin, director of business technology for Pfizer, spoke on "The Quest for Interoperability in Healthcare."

Ritu Agarwal, director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems, moderated the panel "Revolutionizing Healthcare with IT." Panelists included Dr. Ross Martin, director of business technology for Pfizer Pharmaceutical (PGP), Dr. Victor Plavner, chairman of MD/DC Collaborative, Aidan Farrell, senior manager, emerging business technology, AstraZeneca, and Dr. John Cuddeback, chief medical information officer, MedStar.

About the CIO Forum

Established in 1999, the CIO Forum is a yearly meeting of top chief information officers, technology strategists, and academic researchers, in Mid-Atlantic states. Events are highly interactive and focus on the most important issues confronting technology strategists in the emerging digital economy, including e-commerce, the IT talent shortage, Internet strategy, multi-sourcing, next generation architectures, and other topics.

Participants come from high-tech firms, financial services companies, consulting companies, manufacturing, service industries, non-profit organizations, and federal, state, and local government agencies. The CIO Forum is sponsored by the Center for Electronic Markets and Enterprises (CEME) and the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.