OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 12-13-07

1993-2008
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
December 13, 2007 meeting

Present: Howard Eaton, Bob Nishi, Jeff Hecht, Rich Hoffman, Esther Delurgio, Jim Sutter, Sean Brown, Dave Phillips

The minutes of this and prior breakfasts are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to the host’s presentation material, when available. Please provide us with the “url” of your presentation materials.

We welcomed Howard Eaton and Bob Nishi, R360G, to the OC CIO Round Table, and thanked them for making the journey down from Santa Barbara. It was unfortunate that several members who had indicated their intentions to attend the meeting were unable to do so at the last moment. They missed a very interactive session.

We also thanked Sean Brown, RJTCompuquest, who at short notice made their conference room available to the group. Sean has joined the group as a permanent member.

Topic – CIO effectiveness / 360 measures

Before introducing Howard to the group, we talked about the evolving role of CIO and how he/she has to be effective in relating to the executive group, in dealing with his senior management peers in the organization (the VPs of Operations, Sales, Marketing, Distribution, etc.), as well as managing a service organization providing reliable and effective IS. Now as the product or service content involves more and more technology, the CIO also has to interface with clients and their organizations.

Howard 1st slide dealt directly with the evolving role of the CIO from a tactical provider of services to one of providing more and more strategic leadership. In fact, in his view, the CIO is in one of the best positions to provide strategic leadership to the organization, and warned against being smothered by the service role. The CIO will be assessed for both roles – meeting user expectations in the provision of services (lagging indicators), and providing leadership in the strategic role for a better future organization (tapping into the wisdom of the organization). Bob mentioned a book worth reading called “The Wisdom of Crowds”, by James Surowiecki. Jim and Rich were not sure that being the agent of change is necessarily a long-term employment strategy for the CIO. Esther argued that it is important for the CIO to provide ideas for change to the CEO/COO, and related some of her history. The group noted that even though the CIO may be heavily involved with identifying opportunities and the project management, the leadership/sponsorship of change must come from the top. Howard went on to talk about various 360 assessments – ones that measured leadership, and other key competences; ones that focused on team building; others on emotional IQ and EQ (executive quotient). He mentioned one that Zehnder International had developed and used to evaluate 25,000 CXOs. He then focused on how the CIO can effectively leverage his/her position for the greater betterment of the organization. He believed that a CIO has both the opportunity and responsibility to do so. One way to do so is to promote the use of an organizational 360 assessment of all units that comprise the enterprise, which provides reports that detail the gap between the strategic and tactical systems. Follow this up with working sessions that identify and prioritize the issues for C-level revue and approval, and manage the implementation. Again the group warned against IT/CIO becoming the sponsor of such an effort – that has to come from the executive branch of the enterprise – but the CIO could become a catalyst and the energy behind the scenes. Howard’s last slide showed the result of such a assessment for one of his clients that showed the differences, in 9 dimensions, between how the CIO/IT group saw themselves versus other C-level departments in the enterprise.

This was a topic that the group could relate to with passion and we ran out of time to hear individual experiences with using 360 type assessments in their organizations. In assessing a CIO’s effectiveness we have to define what success means to the individual – longevity in position? Change agent? Promotion to CEO/COO? The group felt that if profit/expenses were the primary issues, the CFO is promoted to CEO. When the primary issue is sales, the SVP of Sales or Marketing is promoted. When the issue is legal, the SVP of Legal tends to get promoted.

Several other books were recommended as worth reading:
“The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson (why the future of business is selling less of more);
“Blue Ocean Strategy”, which promotes the importance of using ‘fair’ processes for change.

Good session – thank you, Howard and Bob.

See you on January 10, 2008 – 7:00 a.m. in the RJTCompuquest conference room at:

940 South Coast Dr., Suite 260, Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
It’s opposite the Carl Strauss Brewery on South Coast Dr. If you are driving N on the 405, take the SOUTH COAST DR EXIT, and turn RIGHT on South Coast Dr. If you are driving S on the 405, take the FAIRVIEW EXIT, make a LEFT over the freeway and turn RIGHT on South Coast Dr. Turn LEFT on Greenbrook, and immediately right into the parking lot of 940. Proceed to the 2nd floor to Suite 260. Attachment A
December 13, 2007
1993 - 2008
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
Notes

Purpose: To provide a forum in an informal setting for senior IS executives to ex­change ideas with their peers on key issues of interest to the group.

Goal: To get to know each other and to feel comfortable discussing issues and solutions.

Format: Select one topic per meeting; have one member be responsible for a 30-minute introduction, and have each participant come prepared to pre­sent not more than 5 minutes on how they are approaching the issues in their environment.

Time: 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

Place: The RJTCompuquest conference room at:
940 South Coast Dr., Suite 260, Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
It’s opposite the Carl Strauss Brewery on South Coast Dr. If you are driving N on the 405, take the SOUTH COAST DR EXIT, and turn RIGHT on South Coast Dr. If you are driving S on the 405, take the FAIRVIEW EXIT, make a LEFT over the freeway and turn RIGHT on South Coast Dr. Turn LEFT on Greenbrook, and immediately right into the parking lot of 940. Proceed to the 2nd floor to Suite 260.

Date: 2nd THURSDAY of each month

Schedule for the meetings through August 2008:

DATE INTRODUCTION TOPIC

1/10/08
Chris Andreozzi, Knowledge Centrix
VoIP
2/14/08
Jim Sutter, Peer Consulting Group
Web 2.0
3/13/08
John Buccola, OnCure Medical
favorite gadgets/"favorite websites"
4/10/08
John Pringle, RCM Technologies
Attracting / Retaining IT talent
5/8/08
Rich Hoffman, HISNA
Productivity - does where you work from matter?
6/12/08
Larry Godec, 1st American
Business Continuity Planning
7/10/08
Omar El Sawy, USC
Future of IT
8/14/08
Tim McClain, The Irvine Company
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

(See voting spreadsheet for other topics to consider)

OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 11-8-07

To: OC CIO Participants

From: Dave Phillips and Jim Sutter, Peer Consulting Group

Date: November 15, 2007

Subject: Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

Copy: CIO Participants


Attached are the November 8, 2007 meeting minutes. Minutes are also at http://www.peergroup.net/, the Peer Consulting Group website.

The next CIO Breakfast Round Table will be on Thursday, December 13, at 7:00 a.m. at HISNA, 111 Peters Canyon Road, Irvine, CA . The topic for this meeting will CIO Effectiveness / 360 Measures and Howard Eaton, R360G, will introduce the topic. E-mail tdavidphillips@cox.net, by December 12th, 2007 to confirm your attendance.

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1993-2007
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
November 8, 2007 meeting

Present: David Mann, Jeff Reid, John Pringle, Jennifer Curlee, Subbu Murthy, Esther Delurgio, Rich Hoffman, Randy Miller, Randy Farner, Jim Sutter, Michael Thorton, Scott Campbell, Bob Case

The minutes of this and prior breakfasts are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, with links to the host’s presentation material, when available. Please provide us with the “url” of your presentation materials.

We welcomed Randy Miller, Vice President, and CIO, Toshiba to his first OC CIO peer group Roundtable.

Topic – SOA ( Service Oriented Architecture)

Randy Farner, Mercury, described the effort undertaken at AAA to integrate many legacy systems (VB, Pl/1, CICS,COBOL, MsDos) on to a .net framework using an SOA approach. He described their experience as a very successful way to make a rich set of applications available to a wide range of users, in an up-to-date, web environment. He pointed out that SOA means several things: Business services, Architectural style, and a Programming model. It fosters reuse of services that improve time to delivery and lower cost. It also enforces standards such as XML. The effort was a large undertaking, beginning in 2004 and employed 30 – 50 outside contractor/consultants.
Agents at AAA now consult one large display containing all the information regarding a customer instead of having to log onto multiple systems. Productivity and systems performance are difficult to measure, but the tools to do so are improving. Randy’s and his team took a selective approach to wrapping the legacy applications, which he emphasized was an important success factor. Most critical was governance and the senior level sponsorship they received. He stated that “success is proportional to how high in the organization the sponsorship is.”
Clientsoft exposed the services and the team built and automated test scripts. In Randy’s view, done properly, SOA delivers on the promise of EAI and componentization. An IBM handout outlined best practices in undertaking an SOA.

Jennifer Curley pointed out that her environment at Surefire includes the Epicor ERP suite and provides a Service Connect feature that is used largely to support internal users. It is not a comprehensive framework, and Jennifer would be concerned about her own staff’s degree of knowledge to tackle a complete SOA architecture at this time.

Esther Delurgio implemented several pilots intended to foster reuse. She asked about training. Randy said that it began with the consultants – who trained trainers. Contractors also provided ongoing training. The learning curve is not as steep if you have people who have an object-oriented background.

Subbu Murthy, UsourceIT, built an IT Diligence Model that was able to expose perceived ROI. He pointed out that while a calculated ROI may not be achieved, there is still value in pursuing SOA because it fosters change and innovation.

Scott Campbell, First American, stated that they were a Microsoft shop and were interested in the real benefits of an SOA initiative. He asked for measures of both savings and performance. American does not have an SOA framework and worries about system performance in a large, heavy transaction oriented environment.

David Mann, Word & Brown, has brought in SOA consultants. The partnership is just beginning with Neudesic, who specialize in M/S (.net) environments and the SOA framework. W & B will use up to 30 consultants in the effort.

Randy Miller, Toshiba, asked for the best way to identify opportunities. He worried that his team might not be able to identify or define the right services. He pointed out that in recent years, he has replaced the old legacy environment with a new Oracle suite of software and that most systems at Toshiba are very contemporary. He is pursuing areas to connect the Oracle applications to the web.

We thanked Randy Farner and his team for a very comprehensive review of SOA.



See you on December 13, 2007 – 7:00 a.m. in the HISNA conference room at:

111 Peters Canyon Road, Irvine, CA 92606.
It’s the KIA Motors building at the end of Peters Canyon Road next to the 5 Freeway. Peters Canyon Road is off Walnut between Jamboree and Culver, near the 5 Freeway. Park in the Visitors parking lot, near the 3 flags, and walk to the glass lobby.

minutes - October 2007

1993-2007
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
October 11, 2007 meeting

Present: Omar El Sawy, John Pringle, Joel Manfredo, Esther Delurgio, John Buccola, Bob Houghton, Larry Godec, William Zauner, Randy Farner, Rich Hoffman, Dave Phillips

The minutes of this and prior breakfasts are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, “www.peergroup.net”, with links to the host’s presentation material, when available. Please provide us with the “url” of your presentation materials.

We reviewed the results of the voting for topics for 2008, and several members volunteered to prepare introductions. Check Attachment A to confirm the date and the topic that you volunteered for – let me know ASAP if this date will not work for you.

We thanked Professor Omar El Sawy, USC, for stepping in at the last moment to introduce this topic, and Rich Hoffman, HISNA, for hosting the event at this very nice new KIA Motors facility.

Topic: How consumer electronics innovations are ahead of the Enterprise: implications for CIOs

Omar El Sawy started by listing innovations such as blade servers, virtualization, ERP, CRM, BI, SaaS, Laptops, SOA, Office 2007 that the IT department has introduced in recent times. User centric innovations started with end-user computing and PCs in the 80’s; Internet browsers, online purchasing, travel reservations, etc. followed in the 90’s. The role of IT started to change from providing the infrastructure for connection, to providing an IT environment, to becoming part of the enterprise fabric. Consumer centric innovations since 2004 include VoIP (?), mobile phones, SMS, instant messaging for the Millennial Generation (those born since 1982, to whom email is so 5 min ago!!), social networking sites, and virtual environments, wikis & blogs, easy videoconferencing, open APIs and mashups, Google flight checks, HD TV, iPods, iPhones, high end multimedia handhelds… Nowhere is this seen more that in the home, with advanced home entertainment, wireless, implicit SLA for usability and functionality, and integration of functions. What are the implications for CIOs? What should they do: resist; embrace; experiment incrementally; enable the home/road as the hub for employees; outsource. There are many issues for discussion. Let’s start with privacy and security, SaaS a la Google, compliance, and demands for support. The discussion soon focused on the effect that these digital natives – children of technology – who will drive the usage of technology whether it is disruptive, like IM, or not. The business, the IT department and tech support are all in react mode. Products are driven by technology - the newest automobiles are full of electronics. The virtual world, virtual space and Second Life avatars will become commonplace. The average age of game players is 30, not under 20, as might be imagined. The discussion was wide-ranging and interactive!

To close, I asked members to share with us his or her biggest concern, or challenge, that they face with integrating these new technologies into their infrastructure.

Bob Houghton, DDI, is most concerned about the health of his employees – 7X24 availability, and the demands of being on call all the time even at home, and the effect of that on family life.

Joel Manfredo is concerned about the cost of second life adoption, avatars and the hardware infrastructure needed to support this.

John Pringle, RCM Technologies, said he was worried about security, the potential to exploit the vulnerabilities, and availability.

Randy Farner is worried about management of the information generated by all these devices, hardware usage and control.

Rich Hoffman, HISNA, thanked Omar for a great presentation. He was also worried about security, the 7X24 support expectation, the effect on employee health, the availability of multipurpose PDAs, and the challenge of knowing what employees were working on in the office. He has had to terminate a few people for working other company assignments while on the job at HISNA.

William Zauner, JAMS, is worried about productivity, and the difficulty in knowing what his employees are working on. They have banned the availability of uTube in the work place. He remarked that the most explosive growth in the legal business comes from e-discovery, as most IT departments save everything – all emails, etc. It’s important to have an email retention policy.

We had a very interactive meeting, and enjoyed Omar’s presentation and his ability to lead the discussion.

See you on November 8, 2007 – 7:00 a.m. in the HISNA conference room at:

111 Peters Canyon Road, Irvine, CA 92606.
It’s the KIA Motors building at the end of Peters Canyon Road next to the 5 Freeway. Peters Canyon Road is off Walnut between Jamboree and Culver, near the 5 Freeway. Park in the Visitors parking lot, near the 3 flags, and walk to the glass lobby.