OC CIO Minutes April 12, 2012

1993-2012
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
April 12, 2012 meeting

Present: Jon Grunzweig, Jeff Reid, Keith Golden, Joe Desuta, Jeff Hecht

Thank you, Jon Grunzweig, for stepping in to make this presentation on short notice, and to Jeff Hecht for taking over as meeting facilitator, and meeting notes generator.
The following is a list of topics and speakers through September:

5/10/12 Global Company IT Challenges Rich Hoffman, Avery Dennison
6/14/12 Big Data Paul Gray, Claremont (Emeritus)
7/12/12 Mobile Device Security David Mann, Neudesic
8/9/12 Mobile Application Development
9/13/12 Ken Wechsler CIO Compensation

Topic: Building IT Teams

Jon Grunzweig started his presentation with some discussion about why teams don’t perform well. These include fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results and absence of trust. Jon then moved on to how to build good teams. Throughout the remainder of the session there was a lot of interaction and discussion on what had worked and not worked for Roundtable members and the discussion went beyond building IT Teams into areas about how IT can be more effective in general. You can look at the presentation outline document for some of the specifics of the best practice things identified for building teams. Jon also provided some specific insights on his own ideas. Jon believes you need both a formal and informal approach and there is no one right way. Some of his key elements included having a plan, setting the example, being consistent, adapting and adjusting, setting the bar high and trying to get IT folks to shift from technicians to thinkers. Jon introduced an idea of using Themes where he discusses an idea with people for a while and trying to keep in front of people. He tries to repeat the message multiple times to drive it home. He provided us with several pages of Themes he’s used in the past and the group found many of them very useful. Jon believes keeping a little mystery or a certain incompleteness of information to the team can help be a motivator. There was a bit of discussion in the group about this and some discourse on the value of transparency versus withholding certain pieces of information strategically. An underlying idea in several parts of Jon’s presentation including ideas about marketing or branding IT and its activities both internal to the IT organization and to the business stakeholders. This was a very well done and thought provoking presentation/discussion. The handout materials are especially worthy of review (check out the Themes for sure). Nice job Jon.

Keith Golden suggested when you are staffing for teams there are times when you have to make a choice between a highly technical/specialized individual and one who gets along better with teams. This can be a hard choice since both are desirable. Keith believes there is value in creating some tension within teams and occasionally being unpredictable. This was echoed in Jon’s presentation about keeping some mystery. Keith has not had the flexibility he’d like to create all the incentive programs he wanted, e.g. making more of the IT folk’s compensation bonus based. He also mentioned using IT Town Hall meetings to be sure all the IT folks know what they are doing as a department. Keith believes quarterly planning is about the right time frame, creates real planning but is still short term enough to be flexible. He also likes the idea of holding back of information sometimes (the mystery idea again), especially in the budgeting area.

Joe Desuta puts a premium on aptitude and attitude in selecting team members. He prefers a highly motivated individual to a highly skilled one with a less excellent attitude. Joe talked about setting the bar high as a way to challenge the employees. During a discussion side bar IT Steering committees Joe expressed some frustration regarding his experiences with them. He is not in agreement on the air of mystery idea, instead thinking transparency and consistency in delivering the hard message has more value.

Jeff Reid has been experiencing some quick changes in priorities and direction based the specifics of his current organization. Part of that may be the economic times, part the size of the organization but it’s created a flux that can be hard to manage. It also takes a toll on teams whose goals change in mid-project. Jeff sees some of the value in the mystery idea but doesn’t like to see it when the information is associated with employment. In past positions he used to make sure the department did some fun activities but budget pressures have curtailed that. The presentation reminding him that getting back to that is important even with a very limited budget. Jeff has used the IT Town Hall meetings in the past as well and shared the idea of bringing in the head of a different department to those meetings. Jeff Hecht talked about how the marketing IT idea flowed through the presentation and agreed that it was something we should all be doing all the time. He was impressed with a lot of Jon’s ideas and especially liked the themes approach and many of the specific theme ideas in Jon’s document. He gets the idea of keeping some mystery in the process, not to be completely predictable, but also sees being as transparent as possible as a motivating force with the “we’re all in it together approach”. Jeff talked about the idea that you get the behavior you reward, so if want consistent performance you have to find a way to reward that consistency not just an extreme firefighting exercise.Good session –thanks to Jon for the presentation and all for the spirited participation. The presentation is at:
http://www.slideshare.net/occio/ .