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.