I left Seattle TechExecs CIO Panel Forum earlier today burning with unanswered questions.

The event was interesting and informative, but I couldn't help but feel that it didn't live up to its potential as not a lot of forum-like activity happened until the very end.

I was perhaps most interested to see, among a broad selection of IT executives, whether or not the conversations matched up with what the big analyst firms were talking about; IT/business alignment or the post-IT/business alignment world (depending on who you listen to), cloud computing and virtualization, social networking or the threat of social networking, the economy, and the effects of all these subjects on the relevance of the IT department and the CIO. To be sure, the forum was front-loaded in some respects to address some of these topics; two of the presentations were on virtualization and social networking, and the panel questions were weighted in those directions.

The three presentations (by 3sharp, Dell, and University of Phoenix) were all well-done and workmanlike in nature. The pitch by Dell was the most sales-like and the least interesting; I don't think anyone in the room wasn't already aware that virtualization saves money by consolidating servers. 3Sharp's John Peltonen gave a talk on Social Network, Web 2.0, and Sharepoint could have been double the time he was alloted and ended up conflating the internal and external aspects of the subject in ways that seemed to leave the audience confused. Stephen Allen's discussion of industry trends included some interesting facts, but relatively few far-reaching conclusions.

The panel, on the other hand, didn't seem to me to be particularly representative of today's average CIO; all three members were in regulated or semi-regulated industries, two of which are relatively recession-proof.

The discussion, however, was more what I had been hoping for after things warmed up. The executives in the audience piped in comments and questions which added to the discussion and presented a range of perspectives on current industry challenges.

The consensus seemed to be that virtualization, and some forms of social networking, are all but forgone conclusions. As panelist Bill Peterson, CTO of Routh, Crabtree, Olsen PS pointed out, new technologies are almost always banned at first, but adoption of the useful is inevitable. CIOs are working out how to implement these things now, although many admitted that currently they are blocking external access to social networking sites. There was little discussion of cloud computing, although I found a gratifyingly broad understanding that the concept is simply another level of virtualization (an understanding missing from much industry coverage of the respective subjects, and frequently from the respective silos of vendors); INX salesman Mike Calderon introduced an idea I liked, which may seem semantic but which a few of us found useful, which is to use "abstraction" to describe the over-arching concept instead of "virtualization" which seems to have taken on a life of its own.

No one brought up business/IT alignment or anything like it, though Peterson discussed the difficulty of working under an entrepreunarial, penny-pinching boss (my paraphrase, not his), and fellow panelist Washington Delta dental CIO John Polti advanced the notion that IT has a role to educate business users as to the potential uses and abuses of technology, while leaving many of the policy decisions up to the board or executive team.

The economy was oft alluded to but never discussed. The relevance of the CIO and the IT department as a whole was something I brought up in conversation with a couple of people but which seemed more generally to be off the radar for participants, although both Peltonen and TechExecs founder Anthony Huang both cited figures showing a tremendous reduction in IT and hard science degree enrollment among American college students. Perhaps this is simply seen as a problem that will take care of itself; as fewer jobs are available, there will also be fewer candidates vying for them.

On the whole it was well worth attending, and as it was the first such forum in the Puget Sound region put on by TechExecs, allowances may be made for opening night jitters. A day-long forum or perhaps something orchestrated to get the ice broken earlier in the event might have been better. The conversation was just starting to get most interesting as the forum was wrapping up. Or perhaps I was expecting too much from a sponsored event which required presentations in order to pay the bills.

I'll post tomorrow in more detail on the panel forum and the views of Enterprise 2.0 espoused by both panelists and audience.