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!