OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 02-11-10

1993-2010
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
February 11, 2010 meeting

Present: Jim Sutter, Scott Campbell, Sanjeev Sobti, Jeff Hecht, Jeff Reid, William Zauner, Hicham Semaan, Vinu Gurukar, Jennifer Curlee, Sean Brown, Dave Phillips

We welcomed Sanjeev Sobti, Virco, and Vinu Gurukar, Edwards Lifesciences, to the meeting. The minutes of this and other meetings are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to other material, when available.

The following have volunteered to introduce topics in 2010:

3/11/10 On-demand computing Jeff Reid
4/08/10 Developing an IT strategy Rich Hoffman
5/13/10 IT Governance Carmella Cassetta
6/10/10 Social networking site comparisons Jeff Hecht

We still need discussion topics and volunteers for the rest of the year.
Check the updated spreadsheet for unassigned topic suggestions.

Topic: e-Collaboration, and the role of Web 2.0

Jim Sutter, Peer Consulting Group, started by identifying business pressures, like globalization, the green initiatives, and cost cutting, which encourage e-Collaboration. His 3rd slide lists business drivers and the IT developments that enable them. For instance, globalization was enabled by the Internet, Wide Area Nets, e-mail, etc., all to support business growth. The strategy depends on whether the company strives for customer intimacy, or product innovation, or operational excellence, which determines whether they invest in people, product development or process improvement. He took us through a series of slides that describe process as requirements and business rules, supported by applications/software, which need an infrastructure/platform to run on. But it’s never that easy! The 21st century organization tends to have less hierarchy, more teams and empowerment (it’s OK to break the rules!), and is network-based. There are many workshop support products like Lotus Notes/Exchange/Outlook and blogs, wikis and social networks. There is a new generation of software, which is platform independent and Web 2.0 based. Web 2.0 facilitates connections, relationships, context and helps resolve ambiguities. There is a growing adoption of Web 2.0 by companies such as Texas Instruments and Stormhoek Vineyards – check Jim’s slides for more information on these and other applications. Jim's slides are at http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

Each attendee was asked to share with us their use of e-Collaboration and of Web 2.0.

Scott Campbell, First American Trust, said that there is a culture at First American that seems to exclude collaboration at any level, and so use of these kinds of tools is not encouraged. He really enjoyed the topic – it was a good refresher for him in how to collaborate with others to your advantage.

Sanjeev Sobti, Virco, described his company as a manufacturing company of 2,000 people and you would think that collaboration would be natural. This is not so – in fact the individual departments seemed to be against the concept.

Jeff Hecht, Word & Brown, said that they use lots of collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs, but not many of the popular ones. There is a lot of collaboration with their offshore partner, but with little control so there is some concern about exposure of information when using public Web 2.0 tools. HR is not for it, and has developed a policy statement against it.

Jeff Reid said when he was at Conexant, they made heavy use of collaboration tools such as IM with their India and China partners. They did not make much use of the social networking tools. At Toyota Material Handling, everything was locked down. Now he has opened a Twitter account just to become familiar with the tool and its potential use in a corporation.

William Zauner, JAMS, said that Operations chose not to encourage use of collaboration tools, but not so in IT where they use them fairly extensively. They use My-page on Sharepoint for the department. He thanked Jim for the presentation.

Hicham Semaan, Quickstart, that they encourage the use of the tools, such as IM, Sharepoint, Facebook, and Twitter. They found that they needed more structure to be effective. It can be very productive but he sees both sides of that issue, and is concerned about potential time wasting. They also put training tools on the web. They have had problems with people at home using work tools to respond to questions.

Vinu Gurukar, Edwards Lifesciences, said that since they are a medical device company, they are highly regulated. The R&D department wants to collaborate with many people, but all they have is email and twitter messaging. The industry demands validation and regulation. Another challenge is the recognition by HR that use/availability of these tools can be a good attraction and retention feature for hiring new talent. How do blogs, wikis, and the like, fit best into this environment?

Jennifer Curlee, Surefire, that they do use a wiki-based tool within each department, but HR wants to block the use of any tool at home if someone is on sick leave or on a leave of absence. They do block the use of social networking sites at work, and also have software to track usage by keystrokes. They do use blogs for marketing products and to conduct forums.


Thank you, Jim, as always for a very good presentation and handout.

See you on March 11, 2010 – 7:00 a.m. in the RJTCompuquest conference room at:
940 South Coast Dr., Suite 260, Costa Mesa, CA 92626.