About The Feld Group Institute

Perspective

During the last 40 years the evolution of technology has been from “wired board” in the 50’s, mainframes in the 60’s, mini computers in the 70’s, personal computers and local area networks in the 80’s, to the internet in the 90’s. Who could have conceived of our current 21st century model of commerce and communications, of Google, buying electronic books on Amazon or songs on iTunes, or checking onto a flight or monitoring traffic delays from your iPhone. The journey of innovation and sophistication has been nothing short of breathtaking.

What has not been so spectacular has been the evolution and maturing of a management framework that would enable the efficient application of these rich technologies within large enterprises. Every decade these enterprises have become more dependent on IT but the potential still far exceeds the ability of most organizations, industries and governments to harvest IT.

Over the years, to improve their odds for success, organizations often reached to the Feld Group as their general contractor to help manage their strategy and implementation.  The Feld Group was acquired by EDS in 2004, which was subsequently purchased by Hewlett-Packard in 2008. In September 2008, Charlie Feld retired as a senior executive vice president and member of EDS’ Executive Committee.

In 2009, Charlie launched The Feld Group Institute, a leadership development firm that is using all of the learnings from his decades of running IT organizations.  This new institute model is initially being applied at FedEx, Southwest Airlines and Bank of Montreal.  All extremely healthy enterprises, working on developing their IT leadership teams and continuing to remain on top of their industries.  The foundation of the knowledge base and training framework has been captured in his new book called Blind Spot: A Leaders Guide to IT Enabled Business Transformation.

It is Charlie’s passion to extract the learning from the first 50 years of IT from many IT leaders so that future generations of business and IT leadership can continue to build the body of knowledge for this new profession.  Up until now, each organization has had to learn from their own mistakes.  This is not meant to compete with the many fine universities, consulting firms and institutions that continue to refine the frameworks and mechanics for building and operating IT systems.  This institute will be focused on collarobation between IT leaders, past, present and future, that have operating experience.

These leader-to-leader forums will be both physical and electronic leadership development programs, briefings, coaching, articles, blogs, etc. contributed not just by Charlie Feld but also by other CIOs and CTOs.