OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 11-10-2011

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

Present: David Mann, Phil Scott, Sean Brown, William Zauner, Jon Grunzweig, Subbu Murthy, Keith Golden, Jeff Reid, Joe Desuta, Jim Sutter,

Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers:

12/8/11 Google Aps. Joe Desuta, First Team Real Estate

Please send me your suggestions for topics and speakers for the first 6 months of 2012.
Topic: Social Media

David Mann introduced Phil Scott, Neudesic, to present the topic – Phil has CIO responsibilities at Neudesic. Attached is a copy of his presentation slides that are well worth reading again. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook meet some of the needs of users but not those of most businesses. Individuals want to be able to connect with people on an opt-in basis, easy user interface, large audience conversations, and grass roots empowerment. Businesses want to know each user, leverage LOB systems, respect for records management policies, content moderation and extensive reporting capabilities. There are many social media options. In a cloud-only environment you have systems like Yammer, Salesforce or Microsoft’s Office 365. In an on-premise single system, you could use Sharepoint, Newsgator, Jive or Socialcast. Neudesic’s Pulse is another option for both environments providing a collaboration fabric to leverage existing investments to allow users to follow and comment on without learning a new UX. Social media can exist in the cloud, or on premise. The market trend is Sharepoint, and the need to support video properly. Future challenges include needing to address user adoption, provide location-based services, more integration with messaging tools and using HTML 5 as the mobile platform. To get started with social media, Phil’s advice is to identify internal champions, limit the change imposed on users, and avoid brave new world scenarios.

We asked the group if IT was taking the lead on social media usage in their environments, or is a user group such as Marketing pushing it.

William said that IT has obtained domains on Twitter and Facebook, but it is Marketing that has taken the lead in using social media within the business.Jon described his environment as old school, with older employees with little interest in using public social networking. IT is pushing using Sharepoint.Subbu said that budget constraints didn’t allow much experimentation. The focus is to fix the infrastructure. Marketing is taking the lead in social networking.

Keith said that they are implementing CRM, and looking at the next step. There are small pockets of interest but IT will be out in front.
Jeff is working closely with Sales and Marketing on the use of Twitter and Facebook. They are looking at Sharepoint but not moving very fast.
Joe indicated that Sales and Marketing are taking the lead, but not making huge progress. IT is looking at Google for social collaboration.

Jim observed that at, one client, it was HR taking the lead in this space, using mainly Twitter and Facebook. A few years ago, IT made a big investment in Tibco, and now they are looking at Sharepoint.

Thank you, Phil and David, for a lively introduction to an interesting topic.

OC CIO Minutes October 13, 2011

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
October 13, 2011 meeting

Present: Sean Brown, Charles Wilson, David Mann, Subbu Murthy, William Zauner, Keith Golden, Jennifer Curlee, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers:

11/10/11 Social Media David Mann, Neudesic
12/8/11 Google Aps. Joe Desuta, First Team Real Estate

Please send me your suggestions for topics and speakers.

Topic: Trends in Business Analytics

We welcomed Charles Wilson, Director of Business Analytics at RJT Compuquest, to his 1st OC CIO Round Table, to introduce the topic - his presentation is attached. His focus was on the changes in business and in business analytics. The operating environment is focused on coping with risk, complexity and regulation, while the customer/employee expects the company to cope with the demands of mobility, social media and openness. Slide 4 lists the risk events encountered in the past few years in areas such as political, financial, compliance, strategic, operational and environmental. The next few slides touch on the technology innovations, comparing the way it was (having to move data from one environment to another in order to do the analytics), and the way it is with in-memory data analytic technology. The cost of inventory carried is still a good indicator of understanding the market, and returns and allowances of how well the product fits the customer requirements. The integration of what happens at the front line, through transaction analysis to the financials and reporting requirements is key. Charles spoke to the importance of context and master data enabling analysis. It seems that only 10% of the people within an enterprise use business analytics, mainly because of performance and cost. His slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio

We asked the group how many employees they have working on business analytics.

William said that he has one person dedicated to business analytics. He has a fairly well defined set of analytics, and they provide very useful information to their customers. It is hard to get political and technical market information.

Jennifer also has one person dedicated to producing business intelligence, plus people within Finance who are assigned, and customer service staff to control the quality. They discovered a fairly high degree of fraud on selling through the Internet. Their integrated ERP system is very useful, plus a replication read only source.

Keith complimented Charles on his presentation. They are not yet at that level, as they are still focused on integrating their systems and cannot do much in BI/BA yet. He is making changes in IT to enable them in the future.

Sean also thought it was a great presentation. From a SAP perspective, they find that the direction of using in-memory sources is the way to go.

Subbu said that there was a difference between micro and macro analytics. He has found that CIOs tend not to use these tools internally. His goal is to build analytic tools for the CIO/IT space.

David said that there is a team within Neudesic concentrating on BI/BA. In the medical area, they are working with hospitals to use analytics to prevent repeat treatment. He agrees that context is king!

OC CIO Minutes September 8, 2011

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
September 8, 2011 meeting

Present: Hicham Semaan, Jim Sutter, Sean Brown, Jeff Hecht, Keith Golden, Jeff Reid, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers:

10/13/11 Business Analytics trends Sean Brown/Charles Wilson, RJT Compuquest
11/10/11 Google Aps. Joe Desuta, First Team Real Estate
12/8/11 Social Media David Mann, Neudesic

Please send me your suggestions for topics and speakers.

Topic: Microsoft Update

This is the second time that Hicham has shared with us his take on Microsoft progress and direction, based on his attending their Partners Conference, held this year in LA. There were 15,000 attendees, representing 8,000 - 9,000 partners worldwide. His overall take on Microsoft is that despite being a very successful company, they are being challenged on several fronts, and their market niche – PC/desktop software for business – is under attach from several different angles and companies. The do seem to own the “connect” environment for gaming control replacement. Linc, their unified communication product is very strong, It makes connections very easily, has built in video conferencing, and is better than VOIP. Hicham is looking at replacing his phone switch with it, but acknowledges that it would be hard to run a call center using it. The question of reliability is still an issue. It runs on Windows. His slides looked at IT today, and into tomorrow, and how Microsoft will affect that. Slide 2 touched on transformation – how to manage consumerization at home and in the office (he has a slide which spells out Microsoft’s strategy), moving to the cloud (slide 5) and enhancing productivity (a strong point for Microsoft, see slide 6). His 7th slide pulls it all together. These provided a platform for a very active discussion – I think it took us 45 min to get through the first 2 slides! Another successful presentation because it shares with us the direction that Microsoft is headed and Hicham provides a filter through which we can reflect on how it might affect each of us. His slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio

OC CIO Minutes August 11, 2011

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

Present: Ashwin Rangan, Jeff Hecht, Jim Sutter, Jon Hahn, Joe Desuta, David Mann, Sean Brown, Andy King, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers:

9/8/11 Microsoft Update Hicham Semaan, Quickstart
10/13/11 Business Analytics trends Sean Brown/Charles Wilson, RJT Compuquest
11/10/11 Google Aps. Joe Desuta, First Team Real Estate
12/8/11 Social Media David Mann, Neudesic

Please send me your suggestions for topics and speakers.

Topic: Mobility

Ashwin acknowledged that a lot of his presentation was borrowed from Simon Guest, Neudesic, from his mobility roadshow. There are 80,000 activations per day counting both AT&T and Verizon, and Microsoft has spent $1B actively marketing Window Phone 7. This causes problems with what to do with the older devices – refurbish them or mine for metals. Also you would think that you could run out of new customers but people are buying 2 or more for various reasons. Symbian has 40% share of the OS worldwide, with Android at 18%. In the US, Android has grown to 33% share in 12 months, with Apple making a steady ascent. Check out Ashwin’s slides as he lists iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Microsoft summary numbers – interesting reading. In terms of application development, is it best to write once for all devices (Open Source - HTML5), or target for your particular device? It’s the same old problem. The device feature matrix is interesting – again I recommend you spend some time studying the slides in Ashwin’s handout. They are at:
http://www.slideshare.net/occio

We asked the group to share with us their biggest challenge with mobility.

Jeff’s biggest problem is that they are in a regulated industry, and security is the challenge. Everyone wants to have their own type of device so they have to pilot them to determine which devices can run on their networks, and allow only those devices which meet basic standards.

Jim related that his client's biggest challenge is to accommodate all their innovations – the field people want to do competitive analysis on their smartphones. They are also thinking about having their own ap store.

Jon’s biggest challenge is user support, as the devices come from all over the world. He has no mobile aps as yet.

Dave’s challenges include the variety of platforms because they work with many different clients, and how to implement the gatekeeper concept so that everything developed for one client stays that way. Nuedesic has invested heavily in mobility.

Joe stated that mobile aps are not on his radar as yet. He has a nice suite of applications, which might not migrate to the mobile environment that easily.

Sean said that as a SAP partner they have invested heavily in mobility. There is a lot of proof of concept activity going on.

Andy said that they are a Blackberry user, with a legacy ERP system. They will be evaluating the integration of desk top PCs, to tablet, to iPod

OC CIO Minutes July 14, 2011

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
July 14, 2011 meeting

Present: Jennifer Curlee, Jim Sutter, David Mann, Sean Brown, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers:

8/11/11 i-pad and mobility Ashwin Rangan

Please send me your suggestions for topics and speakers for September through December.

Topic: IT as a Service

Jennifer started by quoting IT costs as a % of revenue – Gartner states 3.5% (4.3% of operating expense) whereas Computer Economics states it’s more like 1.5% to 1.8% of revenue. IT costs per user are down from $8K in 2006 to $7K in 2010. Forrester claims that it would be much better if IT costs were stated in terms of service items users understand (like email, web hosting, etc.) rather than in IT units like servers, storage arrays, etc. Chargeback/allocation is useful because it helps contain cost, demand accountability, transparency, value and impact of IT. The challenge of establishing of a chargeback/allocation system is that what’s included as IT costs varies from company to company. What you might like would be simple to understand, accountable, fair, predictable and controllable. Various chargeback models are based on either or all of direct costs, % usage and/or subscription fees. Jennifer’s handout contained many examples of the different methods. If you want a service based pricing approach, it should be based on a measured unit of service, supports a price to value relationship, and requires a service catalog to provide a framework for IT as a business within a business. To get started you must produce a catalog of services, estimate TCO per unit and establish a pricing structure. Jennifer included samples of infrastructure chargeback from BizCloud catalog, and from Amazon. To support such a system you have to have chargeback tracking tools, which she also listed.

Thank you, Jennifer, for an excellent presentation and handout. We had a very interactive discussion throughout maybe because of rather than in spite of the small turnout. It’s a topic that we could revisit again soon. It certainly reminded us of the struggles we had in the past trying to implement such systems, whether to distribute costs, or at least control costs and/or influence usage.

OC CIO Minutes May 12, 2011

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
May 12, 2011 meeting

Present: Jeff Hecht, Keith Golden, Jim Sutter, Jeff Reid, Jennifer Curlee, Jon Grunzweig, Joe Desuta, David Mann, Sean Brown, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers:
7/14/11 IT as a service Jennifer Curlee
8/11/11 i-pad and mobility Ashwin Rangan

At the meeting, the members agreed to suggest topics and speakers for September through December.

Topic: Cloud Computing update

Jeff Hecht started out with a great slide showing why some companies are for and some are against cloud computing. At its best, cloud computing enables IT to be more responsive to business needs, and more efficient, but it requires a cautious rethink of IT. You can’t move applications to the cloud without understanding the completely different environments. Maturity of key elements such as virtualization, SOA, and broadband networks has made the cloud viable. There are many reasons to embrace the cloud such as low start-up costs, consolidation, scalability, reliability and DR. Check out the IDG slide for drivers of cloud initiatives within companies. It allows you to optimize the cost of capacity. But there are many reasons to be wary of cloud computing, and none more than security and compliance – 74% of IT management does not believe the costs savings outweigh the security considerations. There are 4 models – private cloud (single entity), public (open to all), hybrid (a mingling of both), and community cloud (supporting several organizations with like interests) – and 5 key characteristics (on-demand self service, ubiquitous network access, location independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and pay per use). There are 3 delivery models – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. I thoroughly recommend that you read Jeff’s slides to get more detail on the concepts, terminology, and especially the concerns about security, threats, and countermeasures. The scale of the cloud providers is amazing – see slides on Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and be careful to read the detail in the SLA agreements. This was an excellent presentation. Jeff lists the many links to more material on this subject.

We asked the group to share with us their experiences with cloud computing to-date.

David Mann said that his company has a company, which provides services in the cloud computing environment, but they have not yet started to use the cloud for internal mission critical applications

Joe said that since this was his 2nd day in a new job, he is not absolutely sure but feels safe to say that they are doing nothing in the cloud as yet, but are interested in it and it will be something that they will consider.

Jon said that they do use Storage as a Service, and other simple SaaS, and are talking with Microsoft. They are investigating options and will probably use Azure for development.

Jennifer said that they are looking at anything that will reduce in-house IT resources. They are looking at putting email in the cloud, and other options. They are ITAR compliant, which means that they cannot use a service from an overseas location

Jeff Reid is using SaaS and Salesforce.com. They are generally very open to this, but at the same time are concerned about the risks and security issues. He feels that the cloud killed Iron Mountain

Jim’s only exposure to this has been when he was on the Board of a start-up. He can see that it would be attractive to a same company, but is trying to envision a larger company relying totally on the cloud.

Keith said that he is in constant contact with cloud service providers. His 5-year road map visualizes extensive use of the cloud, and he is trying to work out how they get there from here. He is evaluating CRMs – the sales VP does not like Salesforce.com. Other divisions are starting to sign up for cloud services.

Thank you, Jeff, for an excellent presentation and handout. It can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

OC CIO Minutes May 12, 2011

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
May 12, 2011 meeting

Present: David Mann, Joe Desuta, Brian Zrimsek, Jeff Hecht, Brad Reece, Jon Grunzweig, Sean Brown, Jennifer Curlee, Subbu Murthy, Keith Golden, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers – note the change in June and July:

6/9/11 Cloud computing update Jeff Hecht
7/14/11 IT as a service Jennifer Curlee
8/11/11 i-pad and mobility Ashwin Rangan

At the June meeting we will be selecting topics and speakers for September through December.

We welcomed Brad Reece, Edwards Lifesciences, and Brian Zrimsek, Irvine Company, to their first meeting.

Topic: Enterprise Social Networking

David Mann quoted Wikipedia and defined a social network as a structure tied together by a common interest. An enterprise social network is essentially putting the consumer facing technology behind the firewall. Traditional corporate communications tools tend to exclude rather than include, ignore business systems, and always are a step behind. A better model would share ideas more readily, leverage existing applications, and empower users to get things done now. He has an interesting slide on adoption patterns of email, chat, blogs & wikis, and social networks, which are really taking hold. Facebook has 661M users as of 4/1/11 (10% growth in 3 months), 150M mobile users, and the average user spends 13 hours per month. Twitter has 175M users, 65M tweets per day (up from 16M in 4/09). Enterprise social networks rarely fail, but use selectively to begin with, and find a leader to champion the effort. Context is king; data is cheap. Use you social platform to unlock system data and business events. Allow users to put data into context. Choose a safe starting point. Social tool players include Yammer (SAAS model with connection to the Active Directory), Newsgator (Sharepoint), Chatter (Salesforce.com) and Neudesic Pulse – a detail feature comparison is available. Those of you who want the competitive analysis, contact John Vogeley, General Manager of Pulse product: cell: 949-307-5195, John.Vogeley@neudesic.com. Things to look for include multiple delivery models, security, mobile platforms, system integrity, platform and architecture.

We asked the group to share with us their experiences with enterprise social networks.

Subbu found that the demand for this capability came from Marketing, not IT, and he is trying to find a governance and compliance model to fit, because it is not just within the enterprise. The CIO is following, not leading, and the technology is changing. He urged care in selecting the trial product and trial project.

Joe is presently consulting with a small company, and he wondered what size company does it make sense to try this. The general opinion of the group was that it can work in companies of 10-20, and can easily grow with success.

Jeff has used Pulse, with mixed results. It is good on a project, where instant sharing of information is very useful. He has not found a real negative, although younger people tend to gravitate to using social networks more than the older employee.

Brad has been using social networking tools for about a year. His company’s approach is very scientific and thorough but it turns out that the selection of a particular tool is not that important.

Jon said that his effort to use social networking is at a stalemate. Half the company employees are over 50, so the use of social networks will be driven by IT and will involve mostly the younger employees.

Sean complimented David on an excellent presentation, and he welcomes the use of social networking tools in an enterprise. It will allow the younger employee to grow and is a great development tool.

Jennifer is using a blogging tool because her inside sales force need to communicate better with their external counterparts. They are going to be using Salesforce,com. They have fired an employee for misusing Facebook for spreading derogatory remarks about a fellow employee.

Thank you, David, for an excellent introduction and handout. David's slides are at
http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

OC CIO Minutes April 14, 2011

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
April 14, 2011 meeting

Present: Joe Desuta, Ashwin Rangan, Jim Sutter, Jeff Hecht, Subbu Murthy, Hicham Semaan, Jennifer Curlee, Dave Phillips

The following is a list of future topics and speakers – note the change in June and July:

5/12/11 Enterprise social networking David Mann
6/9/11 Cloud computing update Jeff Hecht
7/14/11 IT as a service Jennifer Curlee
8/11/11 i-pad and mobility Ashwin Rangan

Topic: The value of QA

Joe Desuta used the Wikipedia definition of QA – the systematic monitoring and evaluation of an activity to improve the probability of attaining a quality product or process, but it does not guarantee the outcome. QA as an IT function is not limited to software - any testing falls under QA. It is hard to quantify the ROI. It is relatively easy to find bugs in the features, but how does one put a value to that? How do you QA performance and/or data errors? Testing takes time and tends to delay the release but it is important when problems with the new release or product affect clients (or worse in a regulated industry), not just internal staff. The value of QA varies significantly, depending on the size and type of company, as does the ratio of tester to developer. Should the test team be part of the development team? Who is responsible for data integrity? The approach to QA is changing, from the traditional waterfall method (which makes a lot of sense when going to a new release of a package), to a more agile method where QA occurs a lot earlier and is part of the development team, sometimes part of the requirements team, where you can define for testability. Testing for security is becoming part of the requirements. The trend in QA is to use script free approaches, and to use testing tools in the cloud, tools which are more supporting of the Agile approach. Joe included the magic quadrant for integrated software quality suites.

We asked those present to share with us their experiences with QA.

Hicham wondered about the performance testing issues of QA. QA adds value by improving the product by finding errors before it is deployed, but is this enough?

Jennifer is a fan of QA but feels that it could add more value if it focused also on improving documentation and training.

Jeff is also a fan of QA but has in the past tended to include that effort as part of the development team.

Ashwin is now part of a heavily regulated industry, where testing is mandatory, with a track and trace requirement. About 10% of the 7,000 employees are in QA. In IT he has a 6-person QA team doing code testing, and an independent IT team involved way ahead in the protocol definition effort.

Jim said that he might be a bit out-of-date on this issue. He was on the board of WaveMaker, which was sold to VMWare and which saw a huge improvement going Agile. The winery tends to not have a separate IT QA group, as quality is not as big an issue as performance. He noted that in the auto industry, defects per 1,000 is used as a measure to quantify quality.

Subbu noted that one could be surprised by defects in things that you would assume were error free. He mentioned that social security numbers are not unique!

Thank you, Joe, for the interesting introduction and the handout. Joe's slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

OC CIO Minutes March 10, 2011

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
March 10, 2011 meeting

Present: Jeff Reid, Keith Golden, Jennifer Curlee, Jeff Hecht, Sean Brown, David Mann, Tony Aldemir, Ashwin Rangan, Joe Desuta, Dave Phillips

We welcomed Ashwin’s guest Tony Aldemir, Edwards Lifesciences, to his first visit to the OC CIO Round Table. The following is a list of future topics and speakers:

4/14/11 The value of QA Joe Desuta
5/12/11 Enterprise social networking David Mann
6/9/11 IT as a service Jennifer Curlee
7/14/11 Cloud computing update Jeff Hecht
8/11/11 i-pad and mobility Ashwin Rangan

Topic: Outsourcing

Jeff Reid started by defining terms, making the distinction between outsourcing, off-shoring, near-shoring and remote infrastructure management (RIM). The total value of outsourcing contracts in 2010 was $62B, a 6% growth per year – 8 of these were mega deals of $1B or more. India still leads by a large margin, but China is catching up, with the Philippines also growing. Jeff also listed cities by nation as big outsourcing centers. For outsourcing, he listed some of the pros (lower costs, increased efficiency, focus and corporate profits) and cons (increased PM complexity, loss of control and IP vulnerability). For off-shoring, the US pros include increased corporate profits, and the cons include unemployment, loss of industrial base and high trade deficits – the developing countries benefit, which is good if there are reciprocal agreements. He noted that the City of Costa Mesa was considering outsourcing several business services and functions, and he quoted the proposed cost savings and other benefits. The reasons for outsourcing include cost restructuring (move to variable costs), improved quality (with SLAs), service contracts, access to best practices, access to knowledge and a pool of talent. The reasons not to outsource include the outsourcer tends not to work directly for the process managers, loss of quality, language/accent difficulties, culture gaps, security and effect on employee morale. The set-up time for the switch to an outsourcer can be longer than expected, especially if both parties are not equally prepared. Communication is key; ability to create SLAs is important; training and repeat training is needed; the legal contract is important but doesn’t guarantee success; the issues don’t go away, just change; continuous change management is important; so is governance. Jeff attached a page or two on how to get started.
Jeff mentioned that most of his experience with outsourcing was from prior jobs – his new employer does not do very much, except with a local company.

We asked those present to share with us their experiences with outsourcing.
Keith said that he is not outsourcing IT at the moment – his current challenge is with manufacturing in Mexico. In the past he was involved mainly with task outsourcing. His main concern is when you outsource, knowledge retention is a problem.

Jennifer is looking to outsource as much as possible. She is down to 3 people in her development group, and is looking for skills in small measures.

Jeff Hecht said that they do a lot of business process outsourcing, such as claims processing. They acquired a company out of Dallas, which did a lot of outsourcing. The weakest area is QA. A great deal of IT is outsourced to China and India, where they found it very important to align the teams – the in-house contact(s) with the remote supporting staff, team by team. 24 by 7 support is outsourced, and the head of the remote staff was here for 3 weeks.

David echoed what Jeff said. His new employer provides outsourcing services to clients who demand both on-shore and off-shore services. They are US-based but have 100 people in India.

Tony said that they are in the process of outsourcing their upgrade to the JDEdwards ERP system. It’s a big enough job with the primary responsibility assigned to a core team within IT, supported by a major effort offshore. The reason for this approach is to mitigate the risk and protect against staff and knowledge retention issues. There is a timing tissue, a target schedule and a concern about change management.

Ashwin said that his direction is to do more and more off-shore, and to only do things here that add value. The timing is the only issue. He has had good experiences with outsourcing both at Conexant, where they started with IT and Y2K, proved that it was a viable approach, and by 2006 had outsourced 1200 design engineers at 4 locations in India. His experience with B of A was even more expansive outsourcing to 32 centers.

Thank you, Jeff, for the introduction and the handout, which I recommend to all those who did not attend then session. They are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio

OC CIO Minutes February 10, 2011

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
February 10, 2011 meeting

Present: Keith Golden, Ashwin Rangan, William Zauner, Cameron Cosgrove, Subbu Murthy, Jennifer Curlee, Sean Brown, David Mann, Mike Weller, Joe Desuta, Dave Phillips

We thanked Keith Golden for his presentation and welcomed Mike Weller to his first visit to the OC CIO Round Table. Several members volunteered to introduce future topics:

3/10/11 Offshore outsourcing update Jeff Reid
4/14/11 The value of QA Joe Desuta
5/12/11 Enterprise social networking David Mann
6/9/11 IT as a service Jennifer Curlee
7/14/11 Cloud computing update Jeff Hecht
8/11/11 i-pad and mobility Ashwin Rangan

Topic: The evolving role of the CIO

Keith Golden started by reviewing the changes over the last 50 years, both in computers, applications and the demands on the person in charge. The title changed from DP Manager, to MIS Director, to VP Systems/Computer Services, to CIO, where the “I” stands for Information (or Innovation, Integration, Irritation) to Career is Over. The role is a combination of innovator, turnaround specialist, operations/process expert, business leader and strategist. The CIO must align with the business and business strategy, develop leadership and people skills, anticipate and drive change, cultivate board level influence, partner more, spend less and deliver. Technology keeps changing, and the CIO has to keep abreast, or loss out to bright young users who are familiar with the latest mobile technology options. The customer is asking for BP optimization, using new technologies like cloud computing. The ensuing discussion touched on the need to set the right expectations within the enterprise, and report against that. How should the CIO change to adapt to the future? Who should the CIO report to? How integrated should “integrated” be? Many of the CIOs present had their own ideas. Keith's slides are at http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

David thanked Keith for a very good presentation. He agreed that it is a changing role, and if we don’t change, we will become obsolete. His aim was to become business partners, part of the strategic team, which just decided that they wanted to focus on the business, and not on running IT. They have just outsourced the running of IT to the company they hired to help develop their applications.

Jennifer Curlee is part of a small manufacturing company, which is in a downturn situation. The workload for IT has increased but not the budget, and so IT has to outsource as much as possible. As CIO she focuses on the strategic objectives.

Subbu also thanked Keith for his presentation. A CIO is facing a challenge as the user and business is becoming more knowledgeable. Thus a CIO has to become more innovative, and must gain the trust of the other executives. The CIO has to develop the skill set of a CEO, collaborate with other CIOs in like situations, and come up with an IT scorecard to report progress.

William Zauner said that he felt that the role of CIO would continue to be important in technology companies for at least 5 years. In other companies, the role will become less important and they will outsource most of the function, because of the availability of the applications and the technology options such as cloud computing. Now SAP can be
Installed in companies of 10 people on the cloud.

Joe sees CIOs becoming trusted partners and advisors to their CEOs, who tend to be hands-off on technology options, especially in smaller companies.

Mike agreed especially as users become more self-sufficient, more technology literate. The role of the CIO will become one of being the navigator.

OC CIO Minutes, January 13, 2011

1993-2011
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
January 13, 2011 meeting

Present: Hendrik Gerryts, Paul Gray, Jeff Reid, David Mann, Jon Hahn, Jon Grunzweig, Stephan Birnbach, Keith Golden, Bob Houghton, William Zauner, Jim Sutter, Jennifer Curlee, Jeff Hecht, Dave Phillips

Our thanks to Hendrik Gerryts, RJT Compuquest, for making the presentation on BI.

It was nice to see Paul Gray, IS Professor Emeritus, Claremont, on a rare visit. We welcomed Jon Grunzweig, Majestic Realty.

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

Topic: Business Intelligence

Hendrik gave several definitions of BI – techniques used in spotting, digging out, and analyzing business data; technologies which provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations; DSS by any other name; bringing the right information at the right time to the right people in the right format. The chart on page 4 of his handout is good. He gave a short history of BI, starting with a 1958 article by Hans Luhn, and the relationship between a BI system and a data warehouse, based on Forrester definitions. BI can be applied to measurement, analytics, reporting, collaboration and knowledge management within an enterprise. There are many keys to a successful BI strategy, including choosing the right C-level sponsor (not the CIO), common data definitions, understanding what the user/business needs, and choosing the right tool and systems integrator. He also included a list of CSFs for the implementation of BI. He quoted a Gartner paper from 2009 on the future of BI – I’m not sure the members totally bought into the predictions, but the following trends seemed reasonable. By 2014, one third of BI will be delivered through mobile devices, analytic processing will use in-memory functions, and more of the spending will be on system integrators not software vendors. The last 3 slides contain a list of BI products which contain a reporting tool, BI vendors and a 2 by 2 chart showing challengers and leaders.

We asked those present to share with us their experiences with BI.

Paul Gray, who wrote the first book on BI, is a member of INFORM, an applications group which does OR and analytics. IT tends not to be into modeling or analytics. This is an opportunity for IT to get involved with OR to become closer to the end user.

Jeff Reid reminded us that he has just started with a new company, and they are not heavy into BI as yet. They have a data warehouse application, and are trying to consolidate data more efficiently. They are a SAP shop and will look at compatible tools.

David Mann said that they had no BI implemented as yet either, but plan to this next year. They will aim to use the tools to provide them insight into patient loyalty, claim analytics, and fraud detection, and are interested in the use of mobile devices.

Jon Grunzweig said that he works for a private company in the office/retail/industrial warehousing business, which has just completed a 2-year study of BI tools and applications, but lacked a user sponsor/investor driving the effort. They went through a process of building a portfolio analysis capability using Microsoft BI tool set, but it wasn’t until the owner started to understand the potential that they gained traction within the company – a great case study.

Jon Hahn said that he also had just started with a new company (since May), and his near term goal is to modernize all the systems. BI comes relatively low on their priority list at the moment, but they do have one BI application for reporting purposes.

Stephan Birnbach said that he has a tale of what not to do with $1M. They ended up with a COGNOS application with low adoption. IT took over ownership of the system, and never gave it back to the user. They do have an analytics application in use.

Keith Golden is also only ¾ months in a new job. His predecessor purchased COSNOS but it will take a full year of basic blocking and tackling to get it effectively implemented. Yesterday, they listened to a presentation by Microsoft on their tools but it seems that Excel and a spreadsheet approach will be still in major use.

Bob Houghton spoke about his years at Western Digital, DDI and RealtyTrac - all three had implemented BI. A CSF is to get business ownership of the effort. The biggest fight he had was from within IT in the choice of the “right” tool, but if you do it right then it becomes indispensable.

William Zauner said that they use a DW and an application called Business Objects, which is a good tool other than single sign doesn’t work. The DW applications are pretty extensive and they have some analytics capability. The presentation tool (Excelsius) and its mobile application are loved by the executives. The biggest problem has been to get one version of the truth - one definition of the data.

Jennifer Curlee took over the reporting, after she convinced the CFO and his people that there was a better way, using the BI tool to report the data from the DW. There are still two versions of the displayed data, and she has to deal with a friend of the CEO who has other reporting ideas.
Jeff Hecht explained that this was their 3rd attempt at a BI project. They will use Microsoft tools, and they have several of the problems that are common to most of us – multiple ownership of the data and multiple legacy systems. Several years ago they built a dashboard application, but the owners never really bought into it, and one version of the truth is still a major problem.