Experts Talk Technology in the Future

A panel of Chief Information Officers from several of Atlanta’s top companies shed some light on technology at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce Chairman’s Club Breakfast on Monday.

Members of the panel were David Barnes, UPS worldwide; Becky Blalock, Southern Company; Ed Steinike, The Coca-Cola Company; Mark Ryan, Travelport GDS; and Joe Surber, AGL Resources. David Connell, president and CEO of the Cobb Chamber of Commerce, facilitated the panel.

“There’s probably no single issue in the business community that’s more important than where technology is today and where it’s going,” Connell said.

The panel discussed topics that reflected current events including issues like cyber security and social networking.

Blalock explained that cyber attacks are a real threat to businesses. Southern Company gets about 2.1 million attempted attacks on its firewall each day, she said. 

“I think today when companies like and Google, companies that are technology companies and defense companies; if it can happen to them it can happen to anybody,” she said.

Steinike explained that The Coca-Cola Company has had to re-think its cyber security strategies.

“We have shifted philosophically to what we call a ‘trust, but verify’ security profile versus the previous model, which was more of a castle model: build high walls and nobody gets in,” he said. “Unfortunately, there are airplanes and you can come over those walls. Moving to ‘trust, but verify’ means you need technology that allows you to know who’s in, where they are and what they’re doing. That’s the biggest change. Think about applying that across the entire world a mobile environment where information is moving around. That’s one of the biggest challenges.”

The panel also discussed social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and encouraged the business owners in the audience to integrate these sites into their businesses.

Blalock explained how Southern Company benefitted from Twitter in April when its customers lost power during the tornadoes that devastated the Southeast.

“We started using Twitter to communicate with customers to tell them where we were in restoring the outages and started sending pictures out,” she said. “We were told many of these were first-time people to sign up for Twitter. Our customers started communicating with us saying, ‘Well, here’s where power is out,’ and started sending us pictures. So we actually had a dialog for the first time in the middle of the storm other than them calling the call center and using this new technology. 

Barnes encouraged business owners not to rule out social networking sites as a young person’s medium.

“We shouldn’t think of it as narrowly as a young person’s area,” he said. “When you see it more broadly it really goes across to retirees to different groups in the economic strata, different age groups, it becomes a world of opportunity. 

About 150 members of the Chairman’s Club and their guests attended the event. Congressman Phil Gingrey, State Senator Lindsey Tippins and State representatives Ed Stetzler and David Wilkerson were also in attendance.

The next Cobb Chamber of Commerce Chairman’s Club event will be the First Monday Breakfast, Monday, July 11 at 7:30 a.m. at the Atlanta Marriott Northwest. Mike Kelly, president and CEO of The Weather Channel Companies, is the scheduled speaker.