In 2003, Torvalds rededicated himself to evolving the Linux kernel under
the auspices of the Open Systems
Development Foundation, which later
merged with the Free Standards Group
to become the Linux Foundation.
Charles Weaver, MSPAlliance
Charles Weaver is co-founder and president of the MSPAlliance, a professional
association of nearly 7,000 managed service providers worldwide. In addition to
running the operational activities of the
alliance, Weaver writes and speaks on
the managed services industry.
elaborates on his ideas. Recently, Carr
has tackled what he calls “Web 2.0
utopianism” and is reassessing the
value of social media such as Wikipedia.
Thomas Friedman,
The New York Times
A columnist for The New York Times,
Thomas Friedman is best known for
several seminal books on topics relating
to globalization and the implications of
borderless economy. His 2005 book, The
World Is Flat, made Friedman prominent
as an advocate of the inevitability of
free trade and outsourcing.
INFLUENCERS IN ACADEMIA,
THE MEDIA AND THE
LITERARY WORLD:
Peter Weill,
MIT Sloan School of Management
Since 2000, Peter Weill has been director
of the Center for Information Systems
Research and senior research scientist at
the MIT Sloan School of Management. He
urges CIOs “to spend more time working
with external customers, selling and
delivering the firm’s products and services, while helping to increase the firm’s
business process effectiveness.”
“In a study of more than 250 CIOs,”
Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock
While at World Online, Adrian Holovaty
collaborated with colleagues Simon
Willison, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and
Wilson Miner to create the Django Web
framework, a tool used for efficient
Web site building. In 2005, he created
Chicagocrime.org, a free database of
crime information. Holovaty also founded
EveryBlock, a network application for col-
lecting and disseminating local news.
Walter Lewin, MIT
Walter Lewin is a proponent of technology in science education. For many
years, he offered courses in physics on
MIT cable television. His courses on MIT’s
OpenCourse Ware Web site are widely
reposted on You Tube.
Irving
Wladawsky-Berger,
IBM Academy of
Technology
Peter Weill, MIT Sloan
School of Management
Andrew McAfee,
Harvard Business School
Andrew McAfee, associate professor at
Harvard Business School, is both a critic
and a proponent of the business use of
social networks, prediction markets and
other contemporary Web tools.
F. Warren McFarlan,
Harvard Business School
F. Warren McFarlan is T.J. Dermot Dunphy
Baker Foundation professor of business
administration and Albert H. Gordon
professor of business administration,
Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. The
author of Connecting the Dots: Aligning
Projects with Objectives in Unpredictable
Times, he is a highly regarded scholar on
the topic of innovation.
marketplace developments. As chairman
emeritus of the IBM Academy of
Technology, he is involved in a number
of IBM’s technical strategy and innovation initiatives. In 2008, he became a
strategic advisor to Citigroup.
When asked, “Where do you see IT
going in the next five years,” Wladawsky-Berger replied: “As the physical world integrates IT capabilities, and as IT applications
become more realistic, we will be increasingly living in a hybrid world, part physical
and part virtual, with close connections
between them. It’s important for CIOs to
understand the IT changes that will influence their organizations and to get on the
learning curve as early as possible, so their
organizations can become comfortable
with these changes and think how best
to integrate them into the business.”
Weill says, “we found that CIOs spend an
average of 44 percent of their time managing the provision of IT services and only
10 percent working with external customers. CEOs seeking growth want their
CIOs to double that time and are sometimes giving their CIOs revenue targets
and incentives. To free up time to focus
on these high-impact areas, CIOs need to
delegate more of the IT services work.”
Walter Mossberg,
The Wall Street Journal
Walt Mossberg is the principal tech-
nology columnist for The Wall Street
Journal. He has written the “Personal
Technology” column since 1991, and
he also runs allthingsd.com, part of the
WSJ Digital Network.
Tom Anderson, MySpace
Tom Anderson founded MySpace with
Chris De Wolfe, and now serves as president after the acquisition of MySpace by
News Corp. As the “first friend” of every
new MySpace user, Anderson now has
more than 240 million friends.
Nicholas Carr, Author
Nicholas Carr, formerly an executive
editor at Harvard Business Review,
is best known for his 2003 article for
that journal titled, “IT Doesn’t Matter,”
in which he argued that the strategic
importance of IT in business is vanishing. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?
INFLUENCERS IN THE
VENDOR COMMUNITY:
Marc Andreessen, Ning
Marc Andreessen was a co-author of the
original Mosaic browser and the founder
of Netscape. Following Netscape’s
acquisition by AOL in 1999, Andreessen
became AOL’s CTO, but soon left to found
Loudcloud, a high-availability hosting
service. Today, Andreessen runs Ning,
an engine that facilitates the creation of
social networks.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger,
IBM Academy of Technology
In his 37-year career with IBM, Irving
Wladawsky-Berger was responsible for
identifying emerging technologies and
J. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Entrepreneur, blogger and Internet influencer J. Michael Arrington founded his
first company, Achex, in the late 1990s.
