Creating IoT-powered smart city platforms; hiring a CDO

The following is a roundup of last week’s SearchCIO and SearchCompliance content.

Creating IoT-powered smart city platforms is no easy task, according to Rob Lloyd, CIO for San Jose, Calif. “Can we do more than the cute projects and make smart cities a platform that allows us to connect and to control the entire environment in ways we’ve never done before?” he asks. Senior News Writer Nicole Laskowski talks to city officials to find out the merits of such smart city platforms.

Associate Site Editor Brian Holak was at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit last week. In Searchlight, Holak recaps what Gartner analysts had to say about organizations hiring chief data officers in a world deluged with data.

Laskowski was at the recent MIT Tech Conference where technologists and academics debated the merits of automation. “We, as roboticists, need to do a better job of communicating to the larger community the impact of these technologies and the fact that this is coming,” Brown University’s Stefanie Tellex said. Laskowski writes about the panel’s view on automation’s impact on jobs. Panelists also talked about the challenges associated with programming robots to navigate the real world.

In this tip, Whitewater Projects’ Joseph Flahiff writes about the four-letter words that can unlock employee potential, transform organizations and spur innovation.

Over on TotalCIO, Sparapani talks with Shutterstock CIO David Giambruno to know about indiscriminate computing — getting IT infrastructure “out of the way so the developers and the product teams can turn around and face forward.”

Facebook is on a mission to connect the world. Laskowski writes about Facebook’s Wi-Fi based Terragraph system and how that is helping erase the digital-divide in the city of San Jose.

Please follow @SearchCIO, @SearchCIOSMB and @ITCompliance to get updates on new stories throughout the week.