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In a Digital-Transforming World: Journalists Reflect On What They Learned At The 2021 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

From CIOs Becoming a Larger Part of Overall Organization to Rapid Change Being Possible and More

Hundreds of the world’s leading CIOs and digital technology officers gather each Spring for the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium - the premier global CIO event. This year, due to the pandemic, they gathered virtually for the event to learn, engage, and discuss how to shift their enterprises into high gear within our ever-changing, digitally-transforming world. 
  
Panel topics included Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines, Will Artificial Intelligence get us through Uncertain Times?, Protecting Your Digital Innovations from Cyber-attack, Future of Work, Accelerated Digital Transformation, Innovations that will Transform the User Experience and more.

  
Unlike any other senior level technology conference, the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium brings together a unique community of MIT academic leaders, CIOs, digital technology executives, and industry experts, enabling them to be more effective leaders. The event offers an environment for engaging discussions where the best in-the-trenches business practices, technology innovations, actionable insights, and new ideas can be shared and debated. 
  
In addition, the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium attracts roughly 40 top journalists who cover technology and the business of IT. We asked them about their big takeaways from the conference and here’s a summary of what we heard: 
  
Gabriella Frick, Site Editor, SearchCIO stated that, “My primary takeaway from the Symposium this year was how big a role the CIO has played over the last year -- that they are now a larger part of the overall business strategy and organizations must rely on them more than ever before.”
  
Clint Boulton, Sr. Writer for CIO.com said, “It was interesting to hear about business resiliency amid the pandemic, as well as the future of work and hybrid work models.”
  
Madrid, Spain based Manuel Navarro Ruiz of Byte TI said, “What I liked the most was learning more about trends and about what CIOs need. I was also looking to see if the needs of Spanish CIOs were different from those in other parts of the world, but I have already seen that they are the same. I also liked the education part because I think it's a fundamental section; people can adapt to the new work reality that a large part of society will face.”
  
Gordon Haff, Technology Writer for The Enterprisers Project says takeaways included, “The tension between rapidly adapting (from the pandemic) and doing it safely, remote work challenges and possibilities, and that rapid change is possible when you have to.”
  
Finally, CIO Dive’s Roberto Torres said, “For me the lasting message this year was this: Whatever technologies executives responsively enacted during the height of the pandemic, they must now seamlessly combine and meld into a single company-wide strategy. Mixing and matching worked to solve key pain points. The companies who gain upside from this whole wild ride will learn to holistically address their technology issues and help the business become increasingly nimble.”
  
We look forward to seeing these discussions and topics evolve (and even compare to what the takeaways were back in 2019) as the global environment and technology changes. While we are already looking forward to next year’s event, you can stay tuned for updates by following @MITCIO on Twitter and LinkedIn.