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.