|
Bob Keefe, a senior vice president and chief information officer for Mueller Water Products, is the president of the Society for Information Management, the leading association for chief information officers. He recently spoke with CIOZone's Chief Content Officer John McCormick.
In the first part of the interview, Keefe talked about the role of CIOs and the issues confronting today's IT leaders.
In this second installment, Keefe talks about what's going on at SIM and his goals for the organization, which is made up of 3,500 CIOs and other IT executives, prominent academics, and partner-level consultants. This is an edited version of the interview.
CIOZone: What goals have you set for yourself and the organization in 2008?
Keefe: Continuing to grow the membership and continuing to improve upon our flagship programs are goals for myself and our board.
We've increased membership in each of the last few years.
And last year, we had the highest attendance at our SIMposium annual conference, enrollment in our Regional Leadership Forums [a leadership development program for SIM members] was the highest it's ever been, and our Advanced Practices Council [SIM's CIO-level forum and research effort] hit their target.
I think we've tried to focus the last few years much more on individual chapter support, and trying to spread their best practices to other chapters. We're trying to cross-pollinate, or cross-fertilize, best practices and share them among the chapters because it's that local group of IT leaders that really makes SIM work.
We've recently relaunched our Web portal. I hate to say it, but we probably didn't have the best Web presence for a society that is mostly IT professionals. But we have tried to build one now that is commensurate with our profession. We'll continue with social networking and other aspects that will help us create unity among all of our members.
Fortune magazine called SIM the field's top professional group. And we're trying to live up to that.
CIOZone: There's also the SIM Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the organization that's trying to advance the IT profession by funding educational programs, research projects, and charitable programs.
Keefe: You know, we feel obligated to be part of the community, to reach out, to attack some of the issues that are needed for the entirety of the profession - like getting more people to enter the profession. And we pull in a lot of our IT professionals, be they practitioners or vendors or academicians, in these efforts.
We have programs around the middle schools and at the college level. We also have Teen Tech Week summer camps to try and get middle schoolers and early high schoolers involved in the profession and understand that it's really a very rewarding career. And quite frankly, to the high schoolers and the middle schoolers, it's really a cool profession because they're dealing with technology—the things that they love—like Facebook, cell phones, laptops and other gadgets. I think it might have been the folks at Gartner who said that we're the technology immigrants and our children are the technology natives. They have grown up with the gadgets.
CIOZone: The RLFs, the Regional Leadership Forums, seems to be generating a lot of buzz. This is an intensive, nine-month leadership development program in which participants are required to read an extensive list of IT management books, hold discussions with other IT executives, examine case studies, and learn how to negotiate and manage change and diversity. I believe there are already some 2,000 graduates. But there have been some new developments.
There's a couple of things.
We've had RLFs in the Northeast, in metro New York, in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest and other regions. But what we started fairly recently is that if a particular company has put people through the program and they find it a useful program, we've had leadership programs driven directly at the company. So that's something new.
We've also had what we called "The Taste of RLF," to get the program out to the chapters. It's kind of a one-day RLF, in which we invite member companies or member organizations to come and learn a little bit more about RLF. They get a one-day experience with RLF. And I think that's paid dividends in getting people exited and enrolled in the program.
CIOZone: And what about the Advanced Practices Council, which is a research and best practices forum for CIOs? Some 30 major organizations—including Air Products and Chemicals, BP, Chubb, NASA, PepsiCo and others—have already gotten behind the effort. But this program also seems to have garnered a lot more attention recently.
Keefe: Yeah, you know, I think so, too.
There has been a movement in the APC to focus in on alliances we have with some university professors. And, frankly, the research that's been done by academicians for the APC has been quite good.
And soliciting research ideas from the academic world, and then trying to focus that on things that practitioners are either just beginning to think about or are struggling with, that brings currency to it.
And then the way the projects are managed, I think, is exceptional, because there are milestones. So if the APC group does not see the kind of focus on the issues it thinks should be there or if it doesn't feel the research effort gets off to a good start, it only goes so far. There have been a couple of projects that have been stopped, where they said, "OK, we either need to realign this project so that it's getting to the meat of the matter that our membership really wants, or we need to stop it right here."
So I think just the whole management of it has really helped yield better and better results.
CIOZone: And it seems the APC is really matching up with the concerns of SIM members and other CIOs. And I'm thinking particularly of the CIO of 2010 project that came out last year. It hit on the key concern of IT hiring and retention and offered advice on how to groom the next generation of CIOs.
Keefe: It's important for us to get at the meat of the matter.
CIOZone: You've been with SIM for quite some time, and served as an officer both at the chapter level and international level. But being president has got to be quite an experience.
Keefe: I'm just so privileged to have been asked to lead the organization. It's a real great time to be a part of the IT profession and part of SIM. I think there's still quite a few things that we can improve upon, but I think we're doing a lot of things well.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
