New thoughts invited: ACT-IAC's CXO dinner gets ideas flowing

I’ve been struggling with what to call this contribution since “Insider” has been so well used. There are at least three in our market.

John Monroe suggested Anagrams, which I considered. But hope I am not that hard to decipher. Decided to call the blog Alinea.

The foodies in the market will recognize that as the name of a restaurant in Chicago owned by chef Grant Achatz. But more to this point, alinea is the Latin term for the paragraph sign, sometimes called a pilcrow.

In Latin it means “off the line,” but a paragraph signals a new thought. It also echoes the idea of liner notes, which is in many ways what blogs do — commenting on the work being done by others. Anyway, insert new graph here.

ACT-IAC CXO dinner

Very interesting experiment in getting government and industry working together to bring new ideas to the table. Lots of folks have tried versions of this, including the early workshop days at the Executive Leadership Conference (ELC).

The task at hand was to look at the five pillars of transparent government being proposed by CTO Aneesh Chopra and CIO Vivek Kundra. Each table took one of the pillars and was asked to come up with a succinct definition, describe what success would look like, identify barriers to success and come up with three to five actions to accomplish the purpose.

It’s a lot harder than it sounds. In the limited time, scribes wrote down dozens of ideas. It will now be a harder task to pull that together into a coherent document. At least, there is still a need for editors in some endeavors.

Kim Taylor Thompson, CEO of Duke Corporate Education, facilitated the work. Teresa Carlson of Microsoft worked with Martha Dorris, out-going president of ACT to get this pulled together. There are several more planned.

Once the wisdom has been distilled, it will be passed on to Chopra and Kundra.

There are lots of ideas about how to improve on the first effort, but hats off to those involved for getting it off the ground.