OC CIO Minutes September 13, 2012

1993-2012


Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

September 13, 2012 meeting



Present: Mikael Elley, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Joel Manfredo, Jon Grunzweig, Jeff Hecht, Jennifer Curlee, Dave Phillips



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



10/11/12 CIO Compensation Ken Wechsler, Radford

11/8/12

12/13/12 Joel Manfredo

1/10/13 Controlling Project Costs Jon Grunzweig



Topic: IT Challenges of a startup organization



Sean Brown introduced our guest speaker, Mikael Elley, CIO of Fisker Automotive, makers of luxury high performance cars. Founded in 2007, Fisker’s mission is to create environmentally conscious vehicles with style, power and performance. The first is Karma Electric Vehicle, launched in 37 months. To get operational with Karma, they had to go from Start-up to Enterprise ‘overnight’. The strategic objective was to facilitate a lean organization, focus on cost and resource effectiveness, enable streamlined business objectives for better utilization of resources, applications and infrastructure. To do this they had to define objectives, set focus, set strategy, define roadmap, execute and measure. Mikael’s slides go into more detail as to how they did this, and I recommend you take the time to read them. He talked about some guiding principles for organization development. He ended up with a private cloud, which surprised some of our members, because public clouds are generally favored by start-ups. He explained that their basic philosophy was to grab all data for future sharing, and security of that data was paramount. He described the definition of business processes, led initially by IT but with buy-in and discipline through partnership with the business. They implemented SAP ERP in 16 weeks – again look at his slides – and have a road map through 2015.



We had a lively discussion and shared lessons learned. Perhaps the highlight came after the discussion when we all went down to the parking lot and had an opportunity to see, feel, and get in and out of a beautiful car.