How social networking can transform the CIO into a superhero

By Alan S. Cohen, vice president enterprise, Cisco

Workers unite! Cohen says social networks can empower employees. Photo: Cisco

I recently spent a few days with 100 of Cisco’s (CSCO)  top customers, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), representing a range of industries – private and public and geographies. These folks are often the unsung heroes of  their organizations, enabling employees to perform great technological feats while helping management wring huge cost savings from their budgets.

During our time together, the conversations focused on how work has changed: from local to global, from centralized to decentralized, and increasingly, from live to asynchronous or even virtual.

In the past 20 to 30 years, our customers’ organizations have invested tens of billions of dollars in transaction systems – from ERP to email – to reduce latency and inefficiency in value chains. This considerable investment underpins the heart of the “Six Sigma,” process-driven revolution that became the ultimate strategy for operational excellence. However, today we’ve reached the zenith of transactional gains.

So, from where is the next wave of innovation and productivity emerging? Allow me to posit a simple answer: from people. More

The trouble with being number one in any industry is that you have nowhere to move but down. Few companies know this better than Nokia (NOK), the Finnish telecommunications giant that has dominated cell phones for so long that in some parts of the globe the brand itself has become synonymous with the device. More

Corporations need to stop looking for the silver bullet –and to start listening to outsiders.

Hagel: U.S. executives may need to shift their mindsets. Photo: Deloitte

New research by the Deloitte Center for the Edge, part of tax and consulting firm Deloitte, paints an ominous picture: The return on assets for U.S. firms has fallen to almost a quarter of 1965 levels despite continued improvements in labor productivity. 

And according to John Hagel III,  co-chair of the center and one of the study's authors, the declines are taking place in all sectors of business — not just in maturing corporations. "The bottom line," he tells Fortune, "is that in every industry there has been erosion of return on assets."

Hagel and his fellow researchers are in the process of writing a follow-up study that will offer some detailed prescriptions for reversing the trend, but he shared some early insights with us. Two of his observations in particular stood out: 1) He says corporations need to move away from the idea of breakthrough innovation and 2) companies need to find a way to harness new kinds of information flows. More

At Dreamworks Animation, CTO Ed Leonard has to play well with others.

Globe (left) and CTO Leonard play for the same team. Photo: Dan Monick

Top technology executives are no longer sitting at the corporate equivalent of the kids’ table. The information technology leaders who gathered at Fortune’s Infotech 40 forum at Brainstorm Tech have moved from supporting roles to star billing when it comes to helping their companies cut costs and execute strategy.

Ed Leonard, chief technology officer of DreamWorks Animation, (DWA) gets involved in everything from buying servers to promoting movies. When Anne Globe, the studio’s head of worldwide marketing and consumer products, wanted to run an advertisement for the film Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D during the 2009 Super Bowl, she called Leonard. More

From Pattie Sellers' Postcards column: Our 10 favorites from the mouths of media moguls, tech titans, Tweeters and more.

The departure of outsized NBC chief Ben Silverman is the third time that the producer will team up with IAC’s Diller.

By Richard Siklos, Editor at large

Silverman, shown at Fortune Brainstorm Tech, days before leaving NBC. Photo: Robin Twomey

Ben Silverman’s  departure from NBC this morning comes as no huge surprise: he was an out-of-the-box choice to head programming at major broadcast network and his two-year-plus tenure was marked by lots of attention on Silverman’s outsized persona but little yet in terms of new prime time hits for the long-struggling Peacock Network. (For more on Silverman see our story, The Player.)

It also makes perfect sense that Silverman’s exit  involves the creation of a new and as yet unnamed production company in partnership with IAC Interactive Corp., (IACI) the Internet company led by mogul Barry Diller. This will actually be the third time that Silverman and Diller have teamed up to produce ventures aimed at melding conventional TV advertising, programming and Web—and both other times yielded the men handsome returns.

“Barry stirs the pot and he sees the future,” Silverman said in an interview today.  More

For Ashton Kutcher, winning the race to 1 million followers on Twitter before CNN was not about being victorious in a popularity contest.

Instead, it illustrated that “one individual could have as much influence on a social network as a media conglomerate,” he said at Fortune’s Brainstorm: Tech conference.

He also noted that it signifies a shift in turning media back over to consumers, who are now also content creators and editors. This dynamic “has and will forever change media,” Kutcher said.

Now more than three months after hitting the 1 million mark, followers of his Twitter handle “aplusk” come in at 2.9 million. He said he Tweets to stay close to his fans, to raise awareness about causes that interest him, and simply because it’s fun. More

by Patricia Sellers

On Tuesday night, during a dinner conversation about the growth of Facebook and the potential of Twitter, I tossed out a phrase that I can”t get out of my head these past three days at FortuneBrainstorm Tech in California. The conversation was with a dozen or so Silicon Valley execs, from companies like Google (GOOG) and eBay (EBAY) and Palm (PALM), and they were noting that Twitter hasn’t invested much in talent — given its global prominence as a communications platform and its need to become a sustainable profit-making company.

So what, it doesn’t matter, said one smart executive at the dinner, contending that “virality” will propel Twitter’s success, at least for a while. “Virality is virility,” I replied. More in Pattie Sellers’ Postcards blog.