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.