Ask a CIO
David Gee
Transformation & Digital CIO
David is a well known Transformation & Digital CIO, he consults as an CXO Advisor in Financial Services.
With 18 years as a CIO, David has deep experience in digital change. At CUA he successfully led a major transformation of all systems and technology, this culminated in him winning CIO of the Year in 2014 for Financial Services.
He is heavily embedded in the Fintech startup ecosystem as an Advisor to Sapien Ventures, Tyro Fintech Hub, Venturetec Accelerator and also advises a number of startups.
David is a popular writer for a number of IT publications including CIO, Computerworld and CSO.
Keeping up with tech and business news?
How do you keep your head above water in all the technology and business topics? What is your weekly reading sources list?
That’s an interesting question.
I have a number of public and private sources of reading. My normal wake-up time is around 5am and I’m a voracious reader. Generally speaking I check my email accounts and often there are various links on these, but it not likely that I will read them unless there is a hot topic that I’m actively researching.
If I’m not interested then I ruthlessly delete the message, otherwise leave it for reading later in the day. I like to browse my various news feeds from google news. This includes business and technology news – most of these tend to be with an international flavor.
Twitter and Linkedin will get next slice of attention and I will glance at retweets, shares and then what my contacts are sharing. Of course, I like to read what’s been reported on Computerworld, CSO and CIO magazine, but as that is already written then my focus here is to understand what’s not been discussed.
During the week, as I get travel and there is down time or evenings – then I will read Time, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Engadget and Medium. Yes, I am a creature of habit, but when I’m in search mode then I branch out to as many sources as necessary.
For private sources – I get some good material to review from various Slack channels. For me, this combination of news will provide inspiration that there is momentum building in a certain domain or that there is an insight that has not been highlighted that should be.
My view is that it is all about synthesizing what you have read and making it relevant to your work and what you are observing in the world around you. In that regard, I love it when I can join the dots between different stories that appear unrelated but there is another lense that can be used to view this.
- David Gee, Transformation & Digital CIO