Topics at CIOmove 2021

Quantum Computing, Sustainability and a Cookieless Future

CIOs, IT providers and students from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) prepared 45 topics for this year’s CIOmove. 30 of them were selected by the participants. Many topics have been discussed in working groups of previous years already.

One topic was absolutely new at this year´s CIOmove that started at Daimler in Stuttgart on July 8 and ended with Audi and Siemens in Heilbronn on July 11. “IT as Sustainability Booster” is the remarkable topic by Ralf Blessmann, who advises automotive companies for Capgemini. It is remarkable because CIOs alway believed it’s a topic that involves a lot of talk and little action. Since 2014, they have voted against every topic proposal that had “sustainable” in the title. Now, for the first time in the history of CIOmove, “sustainability” made it onto the agenda. Now, for all times, at our first CIOmove to the German car manufacturers.

Blessmann´s topic made it into the agenda probably because Jan Brecht, CIO of Daimler, announced in his opening speech that sustainability is one of his most important topics. “IT as Sustainability Booster” got an average rating of 2.95. As a reminder: All participants at CIOmove rate the proposed topics on a scale from 1 (uninteresting, I don’t want to discuss further) to 5 (interesting, I want to discuss in depth).

2.95 on a scale of one to five – that sounds pretty mediocre. However, it should be borne in mind, that more and more CIOmovers are voting tactically. That is, they rarely award the five and often the one. In this way, they increase the probability of being sorted into the preferred working group by the algorithm. Even the most sought-after topics therefore rarely make it above 3.0.

At this point it is already clear that this year, too, topics with generic titles are more likely to slip into the top places of the top-rated topics. Who would say with “Bring Your Own Brain” that the topic doesn’t interest them at all? Of course, the peers reward their colleague Christian Neugebauer, CIO of AVL, with at least a 3 for the nice title.

Special topics never create great average scores, but still find their fans. As a rule, three fives are enough for our algorithm to accept a topic as set. That’s the beauty of this method: topics don’t have to become broad and generic to make it onto the agenda.

Examples of specific topics (which are much better discussed in the short time available) can be found at the end of the topic ranking:

On places 31-45 there are still plenty of good, special topics that deserve to be discussed. One example is “From Farm-2-Fork” by Sebastian Schleicher from TUM. The necessary CIOs would certainly have been found for the IoT applications in the food industry – if this CIOmove had not been limited to only 50 participants. We hope that the next CIOmove in Moscow will be at least as large as the previous ones.

Finally: A list with all topics from GAIA-X to “Scan+Pay” to “Robo-Shuttles” and “Chiefmartech” is available for the CIOmove participants. However, we have decided not to make it publicly available, as it shows which CIO is interested in which topics. This knowledge should be reserved for the eight partners of the event. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Accenture, Adobe, HPE, Salesforce, Gapgemini, Servicenow, Sitecore and Google once again for their courageous support of this year’s CIOmove. We almost had to cancel the event because of a positive Corona case.