That was the money quote last night at the Churchill Club's 5th Annual CIO Agenda, and it was uttered by  Doug Schwinn, CIO of Hasbro. (How cool would a job be where you could rationalize characterize playing experimenting with Transformers as "getting close to the customer experience"?)

His answer was in response to moderator Dave Margulius' question about why none of the panelists were talking about the daily nuts and bolts of IT like identity management, uptime, application rollout, etc., but were instead focusing on fostering global collaboration, shortening supply chains, enabling new business offerings -- all business benefits, not IT benefits. Schwinn said, and the other panelists nodded in agreement, that keeping the infrastructure and the fundamental apps up and running is only enough to come to the game -- but nowhere near enough to win.

Each of the panelists: Schwinn from Hasbro, Douglas Merrill from Google, David Bergen from Levi Strauss, and Randall Spratt from McKesson, runs a large, multinational organization in a company that faces rapid business evolution and therefore requires inspired IT capability.

Levi Strauss is embarking on strong self-owned retail sales, a step away from the traditional channel-focused strategy of the company.

Spratt noted that there is a revolution brewing in electronic patient information that will require much more application integration and connectivity for all players in the medical supply chain -- from vendor to provider to the ultimate end user, the patient.

Schwinn's company is not so much a manufacturer as an IP company that creates or licenses content to create entertainment.

And, of course, Merrill's company is revolutionizing information management and accompanying that with "interesting" internal IT challenges (e.g., they create development organizations in countries throughout the world and insist that the office infrastructure support any person working on any system; in other words, every Google app must -- at least theoretically -- have developers around the world simultaneously able to begin contributing code to any project in the company).

I'm sure all of them face pressing challenges, but there are some advantages available to them: this group of rapidly evolving companies is going to increase IT spend this year -- no "IT doesn't matter, run it as a utility" attitude here. All of them agreed they're trying to reduce spend on everyday functionality -- but with a goal of redirecting the savings to

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