OC CIO Minutes August 9, 2012

1993-2012
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
August 9, 2012 meeting

Present: Joe Stein, Sean Brown, David Mann, Jon Grunzweig, Alison Wantanabe, Joel Manfredo, Keith Golden, William Zauner, Jim Sutter

The following is a list of topics and speakers through October:

9/13/12 IT Challenges of a startup organization Mikael Elley, Fisker Automotive
10/11/12 CIO Compensation Ken Wechsler, Radford

Topic: Innovation

Our subject for the breakfast roundtable was Innovation. Our speaker was Joe Stein, President, Simply Innovate, who has had leadership roles in IT and corporate transformations and innovation.

Joe began by demonstrating the paradox in the U.S. While 84% of companies agree that innovation is critical to the bottom line, only 15% are satisfied that the pace is adequate. At current trends, China will surpass the U.S. in patent filings. And, only 21% of companies have a designated head of innovation.

In IT, innovation is always occurring, both in delivering new solutions, as well as coping/enabling technological upgrades in the infrastructure. Joel mentioned that 70% of IT personnel rate themselves as late or last in adopting the latest technical offerings.

David explained that this was a result of CIOS wanting to avoid risk...that many technologies are oversold and are immature at their introduction. Jon echoed that it was another paradox...the need for reliable delivery requiring stability, balanced with need to insert disruptive technological change.

Joe outlined a process for innovation consisting of the following elements:
Identify (analyze, research)
Ideate (borrow, gather, brainstorm)
Filter (prioritize, rank)
Implement (project charter, project plan, implementation plan, test, rollout)

Joe listed the five pillars of innovation: culture, structure, idea nurturing, roadmap and "killing starving monkeys".

There was discussion of the difficulty in "killing starving monkeys" and most of the members of the round table recounted good and bad experiences in opposing certain projects or shutting down unsupported initiatives. Joel urged the group to rely heavily on the finance group and force them to step up to their role in demanding project justification. He also highlighted the need, as part of "branding" the IT leadership, to publicize success.

Joe cited Spigot's ICON....a free crowd sourcing software tool, useful in acquiring ideas. He emphasized that good project leaders were good people leaders as opposed to just being skilled with project tools.

Joe provided a comprehensive handout highlighting the points covered in the presentation. It can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio