Planning for disruption
Opening the fourth annual Harvard IT Summit Thursday at Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s chief information officer, Anne Margulies, put forth the goals of the all-day event: “We’re here to build our IT community, to connect more closely to the University mission, and to learn from each other. “As Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust reminded us during last week’s Commencement, ‘Discovery is at the heart of what universities do,’ and most important discoveries of late have been powered by technology. It would be hard to imagine a 21st-century discovery or challenge that won’t have technology as part of the solution,” Margulies said. The summit included presentations and seminars on an array of IT-related issues, from cloud-based computing to digital privacy to EdX. The morning keynote speaker was Clay Christensen, whose theory of disruption, set out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (1997), has helped researchers understand dramatic changes in personal computing, heavy industry, media, and more. Christensen,...