John J. Roese
Founder of ICT Advisory Group
Former-CTO of Nortel, Broadcom, Enterasys & Cabletron
John is an industry recognized Chief Technology Officer with a history of running and improving both focused and extremely large R&D organizations. He is also recognized as providing industry thought leadership and vision and evangelizing that future-view to both customers and the wider industry. Having served as CTO for four large corporations (Nortel, Broadcom, Enterasys and Cabletron) in the telecom and IT sector over the past two decades, John has developed a broad understanding of the total Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ecosystem and its diverse global customer base. In addition to his roles as CTO, John has been a Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Information Officer in publicly traded companies. This expertise has allowed John to become one of the most well rounded senior executives in the industry and an expert in both establishing the long-term strategy of a company and the near term tactical execution to reach those goals.
At Nortel, John was the senior R&D executive globally for the corporation and had functional responsibility for the 12,000 R&D staff of the company and its $1.7B annual budget. Prior to Nortel, John was CTO for networking technologies at Broadcom Corporation in Irvine California. Broadcom is an industry leader in the development and creation of silicon ICs for the broader communications market. John’s responsibility was for switching, security, microprocessor, fabric and other communications IC technologies. Prior to Broadcom, John was CTO, CMO and CIO of Enterasys Networks based in Andover MA where he led a wide range of teams ranging from technology to global IT and Marketing. Enterasys went from a company seriously affected by the dot-com bust to becoming the recognized leader in the secure networking segment of the enterprise IT market. That turn-around culminated with the company going private in 2006 at a 50% premium over market valuation. John started his career at Cabletron Systems in Rochester NH where he grew within the company ultimately becoming the global CTO.
John is a published author, holds 18 pending and granted patents in areas such as policy based networking, location based services and security, is a well recognized public speaker and has sat on numerous boards including ATIS, OLPC, Blade Networks, Smart Share Systems, Pingtel and the globespan advisory board. Additionally, John has had an active involvement in various standards development organizations and was a co-author of the original IEEE 802.1X standards work and IETF RFC 3580. In recent years, John has been honored by the Ottawa high-tech community by being named High Tech executive of the year and one of the 40 under 40 executives in the capital region. John was also one of the first senior executives in Canada to publish his thoughts on an external blog where over 10,000 unique users per month followed his thoughts and commentary. John grew up living in the UK, Iran, Colorado, Washington and New England and has continued to travel the world extensively in his professional life. In 2004, John completed a personal goal of setting foot on all seven continents with an expedition to Antarctica. John is dual national (UK and USA) and lives in Ottawa, CA and the seacoast area of New Hampshire in the United States.
Sessions:
Corporate Blogging: From an Executive Perspective
Blogging is a key Web 2.0 experience and most organizations are keen to participate. The issue is that unlike Independent bloggers, an insider of a real company is bound by dramatically different rules and barriers to having a strong, engaged and valuable weblog presence.
In this session John will share his experience in launching his personal blog at Nortel in the 2006-2008 timeframe. John was the first “section 16” officer in a public Canadian company to launch and personally deliver a public blog. In doing this, he had to overcome the challenges of providing a valuable forum to attract interest and drive his views with the need to operate within the legal, marketing and industry “norms” of a corporate presence.
Even though John had to operate within the corporate structure and message, his blog attracted well in excess of 10,000 unique visitors per post and received industry awards and recognition.
This session will share his techniques and learning along with some of the more bizarre experiences he encountered by being the public web 2.0 face of the company in a complex time. This session will be of great value if you are considering, actively delivering or supporting an external blog from within a company. Even if you are not, the experiences and learning will give everyone insight on the unpredictable nature of the Web 2.0 experience within the corporate culture.
Creating a True R&D Innovation Culture
Any company beyond the start up phase is constantly challenged with the balance of innovation versus their mainstream products. In almost all companies there is a fundamental NIH (not invented here) syndrome that actively resists disruptive ideas and products. This concept was best presented by Clayton Christensen in the “innovators dilemma”, but how do you actually recognize this problem in your environment, and more critically, how do you put in place the structure and discipline to make sure that you are not suffering from this fatal flaw that plagues many companies?
In this session, John will share his approach to balancing innovation, mainstream and sustaining R&D to assure that a company is balanced for the long term. His approach has been used and proven in several large to very-large organizations. We will discuss concepts including R&D allocation, portfolio management discipline, establishing innovation and incubation programs internally as well as creating organizational structures to make innovation core to the company. In addition, John will discuss his experience in overcoming the most common “immune responses” from the corporate culture and institutions that attempt to stifle and kill disruptive innovation.
Finding the ways to bring innovation into an established organization is a critical but difficult process regardless of whether you are developing a product for market, introducing new IT technology (Web 2.0, social media, location service, mobile broadband, etc.) or are simply trying to operate in a new model. The alternative, giving up on innovation, is a long term catastrophe. The goal of this session is to better arm you to take on this critical task.
