OC CIO Minutes March 14, 2013

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

March 14, 2012 meeting

 

Present:        Charles Wilson, Sean Brown, Jeff Hecht, Jeff Reid, Keith Golden, Jim Sutter, Joel Manfredo, Jon Grunzweig, Jeff Crowell, Dave Phillips

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

3/14/13         Big Data – an update      
                     Charles Wilson

4/11/13         Social Media        
                     SeanBrown/Scott Korgan

5/9/13           Open

6/13/13         Preparing for Cloud Computing   
                     John Mooney

John Mooney has a conflict for the May date and asked to be rescheduled.

Topic:          Big Data – and update

Charles Wilson gave us an update on Big Data, which was based in part on his presentation in Oct 2011 on Business Analytics.  Sean took pictures of Charles’ white board summaries and these are attached.  Charles stated that more than 50% of analytics projects fail, either because of expectations being too high, or that the results are not good.  What do you need for success?  Charles feels that a positive ROI is good and it has to be adopted by the company.  What do we need for adoption? He proposed 3 qualities that have to be present:

It has to be easy to use – this often means visualization (specialized and interactive) is good. 

It has to have business value.  The logic has to rely on solid processes using tools like ERP, and to be calculation intensive to provide financial consolidation.

It has to fast, which means using more main memory rather than disk, in order to be dynamic, which implies a balance between cost and size of the data base.

Charles proposed 7 core dimensions of a successful project – see ..attachment …082042.jpg.  These are customer, product, time, entity/geography, measure, source and scenario.

This is a complex topic and we had an active discussion of the options and alternatives.

 

OC CIO Minutes February 14, 2013

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

February 14, 2012 meeting

Present:        Subbu Murthy, Sean Brown, Joel Manfredo, Jeff Hecht, Keith Golden, Jeff Crowell, Dave Phillips

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

2/14/13         IT Governance                             Subbu Murthy, uGovernIT

3/14/13         Big Data - update                         Charles Wilson

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

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

 

Topic:          IT Governance

Subbu Murthy started by defining IT Governance as a subset of corporate governance, focused on IT, necessitated partly because of initiatives like Sarbanes–Oxley.  From a CIO ‘s point of view, the scope involves all of IT so that everything IT does helps the company achieve its objectives.  This includes services requests and new project requests, because of business changes, technology changes, regulatory changes and new ideas for creating value.  One thing for certain – there is always more work than available $ or resources.  So the goal of IT Governance is to make sure that IT $ and time are spent on the right projects, at the right time.  CIO’s are faced with business as usual (service requests), the need to do more with less, and the need to increase business revenues.  Big company CIOs cope with this differently from S/M CIOs – see Subbu’s slides 8-11.  On demand CIO services are gaining traction – slides 12/13.  Subbu’s slides cover a governance framework, a maturity framework, and the need for an integrated solution.  They are well worth reading and prompted a lively discussion.   His slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

 

Thank you, Subbu, for a very interesting presentation. 

 

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

 

OC CIO Minutes November 8, 2012

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

November 8, 2012 meeting

 

Present:        Joe Desuta, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Jeff Reid, Keith Golden, Jeff Hecht, Dave Phillips

 

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

 

12/13/12       Branding and Marketing IT                      Joel Manfredo

1/10/13         Controlling Project Costs                        Jon Grunzweig

 

Topic:          Google Apps - Revisited

 

We thanked Joe for giving us an update on Google Apps, which he presented 12 months ago, and a progress report on his implementation projects.  To remind you, Google Apps is Cloud based email (Gmail), productivity tools and collaboration software. At this time, Gmail has about 1% of the total market share of email, but 50% of the cloud-based email. Slides 4 and 5 list the various tools, reliability SLA and costs.  Now the battle is between Gmail vs Office 365. Over 4M businesses have gone Google (see slides 9, 10 and 11). 

Joe then gave us an update on his implementation projects.  First Team is a full service real estate co., founded in 1976, #1 independent in OC, 40 locations, 2,000 employees and agents.  They had a good business case for going Google – email reliability, cost justification by forgoing upgrades, leverage Google Apps for productivity gains and competitive advantage.  Migration is in progress with about 1500 users migrated so far. Switching emails is transformational – many users already familiar with Gmail, which is much better than OWA.  Google Apps enables collaboration on several levels.  Migration is harder than it should have been.  Reliability and security have been achieved.  Lesson learned - don’t skip on training.  All In all, Google has been the right bet for First Team.  It should merit consideration for a cloud-based solution.  We recommend that you read Joe’s slides for more detail. They are posted at:  http://www.slideshare.net/occio

 

OC CIO Minutes October 11, 2012

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

 

Present:        Ken Wechsler, David Mann, William Zauner, Jon Grunzweig, Jim Sutter, Joe Desuta, Dave Phillips

 

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

 

11/8/12      Google Apps Update                Joe Desuta

12/13/12    Branding and Marketing IT       Joel Manfredo

1/10/13      Controlling Project Costs          Jon Grunzweig

Topic:          Compensation trends

We welcomed Ken Wechsler to our meeting and thanked him for driving up from San Diego early in the morning, in wet weather, to talk about compensation trends.  He started with US forecasts of GDP and unemployment rates, which look to be improving slowly, as do the stock prices. Hiring trends are up, and voluntary turnover is rapidly increasing in San Diego, the Bay Area and in the US in general. In the Life Sciences and Technology overall salary budgets are increasing, and most companies are expecting to pay cash bonuses in 2012.  He shared with us details on individual payouts by level.  Equity strategies include a mix of stock options and RSUs (restricted stock units) as a retention incentive.  He had several slides on the mix of equity vehicle usage and cash by position and level.  His slides on CIO compensation and trends were very interesting, especially the one by organization size:

 

CIO Compensation – By Organization Size

Compensation packages varies significantly by the size of the organization.

 

Component / Org. Size	< $200M	$200M - $1B	> $1B
Base Salary	$208K	$245K	$300K
Target Bonus	30%	35%	50%
Target Total Cash	$254K	$325K	$462K
Annual Equity Grant	$56K	$131K	$177K
Total Direct Comp.	$260K	$458K	$641K

 

Interesting information!  The whole presentation was very interesting and we thanked Ken for taking the time and making the effort to attend our breakfast meeting.  His slides can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio

 

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.