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 .