OC CIO Minutes January 19, 2013

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

January 10, 2012 meeting

 

Present:        Jon Grunzweig, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Subbu Murthy, Joel Manfredo, Jeff Hecht, Keith Golden, Jeff Reid, Jennifer Curlee, Dave Phillips

 

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

2/14/13         IT Governance                             Subbu Murthy, uGovernIT

3/14/13                                                 

4/11/13         Social Media                                Sean Brown/Scott Korgan

5/9/13           Preparing for Cloud Computing    John Mooney, Pepperdine

Action items from the survey:

1.             I will contact each member who didn’t respond to the survey to find out why they didn’t respond and why they don’t attend that often.

2.             Each member present will invite at least one new CIO (or equivalent) to join and become an active member of the group.

3.             Other occasional speakers could include a CEO, and/or CFO, lawyers, executive recruiters, sales managers, and vendor management.

Topic:          Controlling Project Costs

Jon used the Endeavor’s last mission as a project that had some problems despite the planning that went into preparing the best route through LA to it’s final parking spot.  Why is this so like a number of IT projects? Too many moving parts?  Changes in scope? Incomplete scope and estimates? Poor cooperation between IT and the business?  Unscheduled events? Issues with the vendor and/or supplier? Lack of sufficient training?  Unfortunately this is true even on projects that have been done before, or at least similar to ones that we have done before.  Jon focused on the accountability cycle, on control of scope, hours charged and the timeliness of cost tracking.  Several members spoke to the notion of projects being a 3-legged stool – scope, cost and schedule – any changes to one affects the other two.  You either design to a budget or budget to a design.  Perhaps performance incentives help.  Jon describes some of his foundations for control in slide 14, and onwards. Scope can be defined in terms of deliverables. Each deliverable should include testing and integration, deployment and training, (and on-going support?).  Costs include estimated costs by deliverable and actual cost tracking by deliverable in a timely fashion. Sometimes fixed price contracts work when the deliverable is the responsibility of a vendor or supplier. Schedule is again defined by deliverable, and by deliverable dependency.  Jon’s presentation was well received and led to an active discussion.  The slides are posted at:  http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

 

OC CIO Minutes December 13, 2012

1993-2013

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

December 13, 2012 meeting

 

Present:        Joel Manfredo, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Joe Desuta, Jon Grunzweig, Jeff Reid, Jeff Hecht, David Mann, Keith Golden, Dave Phillips

 

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

 

1/10/13         Controlling Project Costs                        Jon Grunzweig

We discussed the responses to the survey. In summary, the positives include choice of topics, interaction with other CIOs, formal presentations and lively interaction, full participation. The negatives include the attendance, which sometimes is small.  To improve the situation, I will contact each member who didn’t respond to the survey, and each member present will invite a new CIO (or equivalent) to join and become an active member of the group. Other occasional speakers could include a CEO, and/or CFO, lawyers, executive recruiters, sales managers, and vendor management to speak on what they expect from CIOs and the IT department.  Despite the comment of “same old, same old”, topics for 2013 could include Cloud computing, mobile, social media, SCRUM, offshore, IT Governance.  Two members volunteered to present the following: John Mooney (Six imperatives to Cloud Computing}, and Sean Brown (Social Media). We are looking for more volunteers!

Topic:          Branding and Marketing IT

Joel Manfredo started by warning IT to take control of your brand, or others will.  The first slide was an overview of the organization, what it took to right the ship, the goals, methods and results – be transparent, or be gone.  The next few slides are the IT Service Management path to maturity from 2009 through 2012.  The need for an IT Brand is to become relevant, to move past the traditional back-office to the front office.  The Press suggests that IT is irrelevant, but we do good work!  So we need to communicate better, and run like a business. What is a brand?  See slides 12, 13 but not 14 or 15!  How to develop a brand is covered in the next several slides.  Noel then described the process they went through at the County of Orange.  He showed us their Marketing Brochure, which is very good.  He showed us several other documents including the IT Service Catalog, which all carried the brand, the same look and feel.  We all complimented Joel on another good presentation.  His slides can be found at:

http://www.slideshare.net/occio