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Editor's Blog: A 30,000ft view of the CIO
Berlin bound...

By Tony Hallett

Published: Tuesday 30 January 2007

I'm on an Airberlin flight to Deutsche Telekom's International Press Kolloquium. After an horrifically early start to the day I've had a chance to reflect on silicon.com's latest Editorial Board dinner, which took place last night (though thankfully without an horrifically late finish).

Getting together our board members is an invaluable process, one that allows us to stay in touch with what our key readers want. And they are needs that are constantly shifting.

Last night we discussed what form this year's silicon.com CIO Forum might take. It won't be until the autumn but right now I'm wondering whether we should be stricter about the whole term CIO and therefore stricter about who gets in the door.

It's a tough choice. So many of our good contributors aren't CIOs. Many of them used to be. Does that qualify them? I can think of would-be commercial sponsors of the event who would say no.

And are CIOs really the only ones that matter in terms of tech? On an almost weekly basis silicon.com says 'no'. Almost exactly half of our readers aren't inside or astride the IT department. They are in any number of roles but all, in common, need to keep abreast of what's going on in IT and communications.

I'm constantly asking how we engage with their needs as well as those who want to occasionally take the lid off and look inside, so to speak.

Fortunately, as some of our board members pointed out, those who want the latter - from a publication such as this or from one of the regular IT events - are becoming increasingly rare.

Talk last night meandered from contracts, to board-level decision-making, to India, to China, to the law... and kept on meandering.

Apart from a few raised eyebrows as half the room explained to the other half what a Slingbox is (answer: one of the most exciting pieces of tech of the past 12 months - and pure consumer tech at that), nobody mentioned products, bar perhaps one disappointing Siebel rollout once upon a time.

I have travelled a whole lot less than usual over the past year - expecting a first child and then seeing her arrive. However, I was in Berlin as recently as the summer, during the World Cup. This time the visit will be all about work. A few years ago I was at the same IPK event to witness the birth (from existing units and IT departments) of T-Systems.

As well as hearing from the new DT CEO this time - Rene Obermann was always interesting as head of T-Mobile and has just pushed out a profits warning at the weekend - I will be catching up with T-Systems, a services unit keen to be better known outside of Germany.

Tomorrow I should be getting out of the IPK gathering and going to see their work on a road-charging project. It's a subject I know always interests our readers, from our past exclusive look behind the scenes at London's Congestion Charge nerve centre to speculation on how the government might try to run some kind of national pay-as-you-drive road tax scheme.

I'll let you know how it goes.