When asked about the upcoming priorities this year at the Georgia Aquarium, Beach Clark was quick on the draw. “The Dolphin exhibit expansion is going to be big for us. It will be the biggest project for our facility this year and it will drive a lot of opportunities for us. This project will increase our IT network by 30-50 people and it will be the object of new online social media marketing campaigns.”

 Georgia Aquarium has been an excellent role model for those who have interest in how to employ social media marketing to add value to their businesses. Their active use of Facebook and Twitter have drawn a lot of attention from their target audiences, and they have reported having over 30,000 followers online. Now that’s a feat that many organizations would love to accomplish.

 “Coming up for us this year will be a new Human Resource system. We have begun the shopping process and we are looking at several SaaS options. We are going to do a significant expansion with Sales force and we are also going to implement a virtualization project. We are working with Intel for participation with the servers.  And if all that was not enough to keep us busy, we are going to ride herd on the many changes coming up in the online payment card industry (PCI). There are lots of new requirements in that space. It is important that we support and stay tuned up with all of them,” observed Clark.

We wrapped up the discussion with views about the implications of the large scale movement towards SaaS, virtualization, Cloud computing and other trendy labels of today. While many of these concepts are cycling back around from similar models in the past, the reality of significant change is most obvious.

 We discussed how these trends will impact the CIO role and what these new environments will mean for the next generation of IT professionals who might be entering the work force now. How will the role of CIO be different when they move up to the hot seats of management?

By Mike Adkinson

March 2010