OC CIO Minutes, November 11, 2010

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
November 11, 2010 meeting

Present: Subbu Murthy, Jim Sutter, Joe Desuta, Keith Golden, David Mann, William Zauner, Jeff Hecht, Sean Brown, Jennifer Curlee, Hicham Semaan, Dave Phillips

REMINDER: The next OC CIO meeting will be at the new RJTCompuquest office, 18301 Von Karman, Suite 5000, Irvine, CA 92612.

The following have volunteered to introduce topics through April 2011:

12/9/10 Lack of Standards in mobile computing Cameron Cosgrove
1/13/10 Business Intelligence update Sean Brown
2/10/11 The evolving role of the CIO Keith Golden
3/10/11 Offshore outsourcing update Jeff Reid
4/14/11 Cloud computing update Jeff Hecht

We welcomed Joe Desuta to his first meeting.

Topic: IT Dashboards

IT has responsibility for many different functions within a company – for example, project management, change management, problem ticket management, helpdesk management, and asset management – all currently managed by separate tools or systems.
Subbu suggested that there is real value to be gained from integrating the reporting of status through a dashboard view of significant progress in these major categories, while providing the ability to drill down for detailed status of any particular project or problem area. The rationale for this includes facilitating better governance, providing transparency, resource management and integrating across multiple tool kits. The pragmatic approach to building dashboards is required, one that is ITIL compliant, modular, using commonly available platforms like MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos, OBIEE, and QlikView. Subbu compared the perfect life of a CIO versus the real world challenges of balancing budget vs. priority, wants vs. needs, resource vs. budget, infrastructure vs. applications, now vs. later, and business value vs. IT costs. It depends on which stage of maturity the CIO has evolved into – is he/she focused on operational efficiency as the technical expert, or has he/she learned the business and is now focused on strategic effectiveness as a Business Process expert, or has he/she become the market expert and focuses on revenue, on being entrepreneurial. The IT dashboard would look significantly different depending on which stage of maturity the CIO has evolved into. Thinking about IT as a multifunctional entity, where access to status in each area would be of value to the CIO, provoked an active discussion amongst the group!
We asked those present to share with us their use of dashboard technology to stay on top of various activities.

Jeff said that they don’t have any type of integrated tools to review progress but do have separate tracking tools, such as the helpdesk ticket open/closed status. Jeff focuses on tickets that are open too long. They also care about customer satisfaction and track that separately. They also have alerts regarding resource usage, and a green/yellow/red alert system for projects. He liked the idea of being able to drill down.

William also said that they don’t have an integrated dashboard but since they are a small shop, he stays in touch with project status by human contact. They do have a dashboard for the phone system. They also use a great BI tool, Xcelcius, to track judges current business and projections.

David M. agreed that they track most of this through the use of disjointed systems. He liked this approach. They have a time tracking system which tracks time charged to projects, but does not do a good job of tracking individual resources.

Keith is just taking over as CIO in a new company, and it is hard to get to grips on problems, to become aware of what is going on. He is stressing accountability, and is focusing on getting the underlying systems working before implementing a dashboard.

Joe is not at a stage where this approach fits. He just finished a project using Salesforce.com, where which method you use to display status is important. The ability to drill down is also very important.

Jim said that at one of his clients, the CIO does not have an integrated view on purpose. They take the view that they do not want to be separate from the company, and use the same tools as accounting for budget tracking, HR for personnel tracking, PMO tracking tools used by plant engineering (who do have a form of dashboard).

Hicham said that they do have a complex dashboard system tracking budgets, spreadsheets and tickets - all built in Excel – and would love to have something like this for the whole company. He is not sure where he would start – in IT, or elsewhere in the company.
Subbu - thank you for a great presentation and discussion. The slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .