I’ve spent yesterday and all of today at the CIO100 Symposium — an event sponsored by CIO Magazine. CIO stands for Chief Information Officer who is usually the person at the head of all the information technology and systems within a company. CIO goes along with the CEO (Chief Executive Officer), COO (Chief Operating Officer), CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and CTO (Chief Technology Officer). The several hundred attendees are all senior information technology people from across the company. Right now, I’m sitting at a table with the senior IT person from the CIA for instance. The symposium has been pretty interesting. I’m here sponsored by RedHat and am able to take the time because the symposium is in Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor, a 5-star hotel and resort on the southwest part of the city. The symposium has several objectives, including honoring the top 100 CIO’s as selected by the CIO Magazine, providing a forum for best practices to be discussed and presented by these honored CIO’s and by experts, and a forum for selected vendors who (at a significant price), have good access for hawking their wares to the senior IT executives in attendance.

I’ve found the symposium to be quite interesting. The speakers have been good and the topics quite pertinent. Even more interesting has been the opportunity to meet other people who are wrestling with the same kinds of problems I’m working with. There has been a lot of opportunity to meet the other attendees and visit with them. I’ve been thinking about trying to get something like this going in Colorado Springs with some kind of a monthly meeting of senior IT executives in the city. I think that’ll be part of my activity during the next couple of months.

I talked today at lunch with the group putting on this event: CXO Media. The ‘x’ in their name is kind of like the algebraic X — the variable in the name. They publish two magazines, CIO Magazine and CSO Magazine (Chief Security Office). Perhaps other X’s will become part of their publishing stable in the future. He said that while the Broadmoor is a wonderful facility, there are some serious issues. For instance:

• There aren’t many places from which someone can fly directly into Colorado Springs. So, the attendees have to make at least one plane change to get here and the last leg is usually on a little airplane and some folks aren’t all that happy about that.
• The hotel isn’t very well wired. High-speed access to the internet is limited and expensive to deploy for the conference. It’s impossible to provide wireless access for attendees. The hotel is right on the edge of Sprint’s digital network. People staying in the southwest half of the hotel are on a roaming cellular network.
• The hotel isn’t very close to anything else in Colorado Springs, easy public transportation from the hotel to other places of interest is difficult. So, spouses and significant others attending the symposium complain about what is available for them to do during the day while the conference is proceeding.

Sounds to me that the city and the hotel need to get this feedback as well, so I’m intending to pass it along. Meanwhile, we’ve just finished a session on the new Sarbannes-Oxley Act and our compliance responsibilities.