At CIO Dinner Talk, it’s tough to be a mobile vendor in a tech-savvy town

OP-ED: The Greater Austin area, stretching from Round Rock to San Marcos, is a small market when it comes to big companies headquartered here. You can count the number of Fortune 500 members with two hands – and that’s using just your hands, not your fingers, because there are only two: Dell and Whole Foods Markets.
In fact, the number of publicly traded companies of any size headquartered in the greater Austin area has ranged between two and three dozen total for quite some time, hovering around 30 presently. Yet, that’s not to say there aren’t sizable installations here, with major employers including big chip makers and their equipment suppliers (AMD, Samsung, Freescale), the University of Texas, State of Texas government agencies, and a bevy of bluechip techs (HP, Apple, Cisco).
And then, there is the overflowing, effervescent set of venture-backed or boot-strapped entrepreneurial start-ups that have anywhere from two to 200 employees and contractors that help make Austin the exciting place that it is to work and live.
So, naturally, when you convene a group of chief information and technology officers (CIOs and CTOs) along with their peers from the directors and VPs of IT, applications, and information services, then you’re going to have a broad mix of companies of varying sizes. One thing is for sure, though: the members of the group are likely to be more mobile-savvy than your average CIO/CTO peer group.
This is exactly the case with one of Austin’s longest-running CIO/CTO groups, the peer group managed by the Austin Technology Council. I’ve been attending this group’s meetings, which are held about four to six times or so per year, since 2005. It’s a terrific group of men and women from precisely the mix of Austin firms I’ve described characterize the region.
What’s interesting about the Austin group is how members are as comfortable with the technology as they are with the management issues. When I’ve joined CIO groups in Houston or Dallas, invariably the topics are big process-related themes like change management, procurement best practices, orcultivating talent. The Austin group covers these subjects as well, but they will just as equally dive deep into hard-core mobile tech topics IPv6 implications or Mobile Device Management (MDM) shortcomings.
I believe this to be for a couple of reasons: in a start-up town like Austin, it’s likely that any number of the CIO/CTOs have been pitched directly by a start-up. Who better for the start-up to approach for feedback on their cutting (bleeding?) edge mobile product, than prospective customers in their own hometown?
Also, it wouldn’t be unusual for members of an Austin-area CIO/CTO peer group to themselves have worked for a start-up in recent years; possibly even working with a start-up presently as a cofounder or early executive on the team.
The group has a wonderful, short set of ground rules, starting with: What we discuss in the Peer group stays in the Peer group. (A variation of the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” commercial.)
Vendors are welcome to have dinner and present to the group. And, in selective cases, they may participate in the post-dinner discussion, in situations where the individual is both a vendor and an IT director in their company – but otherwise, it’s only the IT insiders.
Not so surprising about the post-dinner discussion is that the dominant theme has recently been mobile-related topics. The most recent one, just a week ago, featured speakers from Google, Microsoft, and Apple to discuss their respective firms’ visions of mobile. (The Apple rep was, in fact, a certified Apple consultant, but not an Apple employee, as is typical of their style.) It was an intriguing exchange that evening.
Based upon it and my prior history with the CIO/CTO peer group, here are a few words of advice I’d give any presenter coming to speak about mobile topics:
–     Be briefed on your own company’s announcements – the company of one of the presenters at the peer group dinner on mobile was holding a major annual conference that same week, but the representative failed to mention a couple of significant announcements that were made by his company that would likely have been of great interest to the CIO/CTO members. It was a missed opportunity.
–     It’s about the person, not the company – far too often, I’ve seen a good bus dev or sales person from a vendor unintentionally brush off a member of a CIO/CTO peer group because they judged that member’scompany to be too small, too early, too off-target from their customer personas. But, while that’s a risky approach with any group of people who are close to each other and compare notes, it can be especially bad form in Austin, where as I said before the people and companies can be very fluid – i.e., today’s CTO of a 5-person tech start-up could be tomorrow’s CIO of a network solutions company worth half a billion dollars, or vice versa.
–     Be transparent, be open – acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your company’s mobile products and solutions; chances are, the members of a group like Austin’s already are well aware of them and, in fact, may have really good suggestions about how they have overcome those issues or can tell you how they have managed to leverage the strengths.
As a final note, with those simple words of advice in mind, I urge any and all to seek out attending one the CIO/CTO peer group meetings. For IT or any technology enthusiast professional, it’s a welcoming group, eager to learn and share. For tech vendors, there’s no better place to sharpen your mobile message and win a valuable group of influencers whose jobs are to solve big problems and make possible the strategic initiatives of their firms.
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Steve Guengerich is a co-founder of Appconomy and executive producer of its research and education initiatives (The.Appconomy.com).