InfoWorld changes begin with welcoming new CTO Chad Dickerson

by Michael Vizard

April 25, 2001 —

With the coming of spring, the energy level behind new initiatives usually picks up quite a bit, and we here at InfoWorld are no different than most organizations. There are a number of things in the immediate future that we're excited to share with you, starting with the appointment of a new CTO at InfoWorld. As some of you may remember, InfoWorld began a search to fill this newly created position at the beginning of the year. It gives me great pleasure to announce that Chad Dickerson, the former CTO of Salon.com, has agreed to take on this job.

In addition to running our IT and Web operations, you also can look forward to Chad writing his own column beginning next month. This will give him about 30 days to immerse himself in some of InfoWorld's more immediate requirements before he begins to share his unique perspective on the expanded role IT plays in today's business environments.

Chad's arrival is timely, as InfoWorld is about to launch the second annual CTO Forum conference, which will be held June 19 to 21 in San Francisco at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. Keynote speakers for this event include Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft; Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks; and Bill Raduchel, CTO of AOL Time Warner.

Titled "The Ultimate Peer-to-Peer Network," the conference is the only event of its kind, allowing CTOs to interact with their peers while comparing notes about ways in which technology is being used to transform nearly every business process under the sun. Among the other speakers at this conference you'll find Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic and author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum; Eric Drexler, chairman of The Foresight Institute; and comedian David Brenner.

The CTO Forum is an invitation-only conference. But if you are interested in being considered for an invitation, I would encourage you to visit InfoWorld.com to find out how you can be invited.

Of course, no CTO Forum event would be complete without the naming of the CTO of the Year, so stay tuned for the June issue of CTO magazine to find out who made the biggest impact in the past year.

As you can tell, we've been working pretty hard on our CTO initiatives during the past few months. In fact, next month we will launch a new editorial feature called the CTO Network. More than 100 CTOs have agreed to answer monthly survey questions about various technology and business trends. We'll use that data to publish an executive summary that will provide readers with the collective insights of some of the most influential IT customers in the industry.

For InfoWorld, the CTO Network is only the latest endeavor in a long tradition of staying connected to the reader. As part of that effort, we've resurrected the InfoWorld Readers' Choice Awards. I invite you to visit InfoWorld.com to vote, which requires you to punch in your subscription number from the front cover of InfoWorld to make sure you're eligible to vote. (After watching the mess that characterized this year's presidential elections, we decided to substantially revamp the voting process to eliminate chads, dimples, and people who feel the need to vote more than once.) Not only is this your chance to reward a vendor for doing a good job, but it's also an opportunity to tell our editors what products and technologies are most important to you. In turn, editors can take those responses and factor them into InfoWorld's daily coverage of the industry as a whole.

Good, bad, or indifferent, we always look forward to hearing from everybody who reads InfoWorld. At the end of the dayy, we exist to serve the interests of our readers. In pursuing this goal, it is our hope to expand the InfoWorld community beyond the printed page by creating a series of events based on reader job functions and interests. The first part of that process is a simple e-mail. So if you would like us to do something new, better, or differently, please drop me a line at michael_vizard@infoworld.com. I think you'll find that 2001 will be a year of great change for InfoWorld and I look forward to sharing those changes with all of you.

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