OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 4-8-08

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
April 8, 2010 meeting

Present: Dave Phillips, Sanjeev Sobti, Tina Haines, Vinu Gurukar, Joe Cracchiolo, Jennifer Curlee, Sean Brown,

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:

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: Developing and IT Strategy

Dave Phillips conveyed Rich Hoffman’s apologies to the group for not been able to introduce the topic for discussion, but he had to attend a meeting in Europe. In the early ‘90s when Rich was CIO at Yamaha, he hired Dave to assist in the development of their IT strategy. It’s a topic near and dear to Dave, and to this CIO Round Table, which has explored the issues several times in the past. When he joined Stanford University in 1970 to become Director of the Campus Computing Center, Dave’s first assignment was to head up the project to develop a long-term strategic computing plan for the Stanford community. He spared the group the agony of reading the tomb that was produced but shared with them the letter that Bill Miller, the VP Research and Provost, wrote and distributed to the deans, department heads and principle investigators at Stanford, spelling out the scope of the project and its importance. It was and still is essential to get executive management sponsorship of such a project. When Dave started the Peer Consulting Group in 1988, one of his first assignments was to lead the development of an IT strategic plan for Fluor Daniel, and the handout contains several pages from different reports and presentations involved in that project, to ensure that:
- the executive sponsorship is visible to the management of the company
- the scope and value of the project is defined
- it is driven by business requirements
- it is developed in a reasonable time frame
- it is flexible enough to accommodate change
The Critical Success Factors approach was selected to identify the business drivers, and he described how this approach was implemented at Fluor. These CSFs were used to determine the applications strategy, which in turn provided focus for the individual strategies for data, systems acquisition, hardware, communications networks, etc., for the project environment and the global company. Be careful not to underestimate the effort required to produce the list of CSFs, and the IT strategies. Dave then touched on prior presentations to this group on this topic. On April 8, 2004, Richard Cormier, then CIO at Edwards Lifesciences, agreed that the business should drive the strategy but that technology is expanding the options for revenue growth. He identified several approaches to developing an IT strategy including Michael Treacy’ Business Process Focus Model, where leaders choose one of 3 core business process (operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy) to focus on. On Oct 13, 2005, Subbu Murthy started his presentation by asking what is strategy, the “how” to get to the vision. Then you can use frameworks like John Zachman’s Framework for Enterprise Architecture to define the “what”, the initiatives and projects that need to be completed. On April 12, 2007, Jeff Reid described Conexant’s approach to IT strategic planning and he too listed several process methodologies to help you develop an IT strategy, including Weill and Broadbent’s approach. He stressed the advantages of selecting a process that matches the business and its culture.

In the general discussion, a number of points were made. It pays to know where you are today relative to your competition, and to identify what are your business requirements for change. Within IT, and early step might be to produce an inventory of software and hardware. Within the business, separate the business processes into major categories, such as those supporting operations or manufacturing, those which affect sales/distrbution/customers, and those used by the supporting service organizations. If an ERP system appears to be needed, identify the benefits and problems that would be solved. If you go that direction, take advantage of the best practices that are codified into the system. Using the All in One approach can reduce the time to implement a new ERP system. Perhaps a phased approach to implementation works better for you.

Now that she is on the recruiting side, Tina has noticed a movement away from implementing ERP systems, towards defining business information strategies.

Jennifer says that IT works horizontally across the organization, often acting as the catalyst to resolving differences between departments, so it’s important that the CIO develop alignments and good relationships with other department managers.

See you on May 13 , 2010 – 7:00 a.m. in the RJTCompuquest conference room at:
940 South Coast Dr., Suite 260, Costa Mesa, CA 92626