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Page 1 of 3 Rod Masney’s tenure as chairperson of the American SAP Users Group (ASUG) ended last month. It was a position that Masney had held for two years. During that time, he led the group as it set up a new, internal management structure. He also saw membership increase to 50,000 professionals, with a big influx of new members coming from the mid-market sector.
Rod was appointed to the ASUG board as the Director of Chapters in 2003 and was the group’s executive vice president in 2005. In addition, Rod helped set up the ASUG Indiana chapter and served as its chairperson in 2001.
Masney is also the global information and technology architect at O-I (which was formerly known as Owens-Illinois), a $7.6 billion manufacturer of glass containers, where he’s responsible for the definition, development and deployment of O-I’s global information technology architecture as well as the company’s worldwide SAP implementation.
Rod has a unique perspective on SAP implementations and the SAP user group, which he recently shared with CIOZone chief content officer John McCormick. This is an edited version of their conversation.
CIOZone: What are some of the new things ASUG is working on?
Masney: One of the big initiatives that we've been working on over the last year is trying to enhance our operational excellence. Historically, the organization has been run by volunteers and an association management company.
We did some research and decided to begin to address some of the things that needed to be improved in the organization. We have a great community, great content, great face-to-face events – but we realized we needed to bring on people to really help drive the organization forward. To help it to be more nimble, be more responsive to the member needs, as well as more responsive to our partner.
We hired our first employee in August last year, and that's Steve Strout as the Chief Executive Officer. And he has been building his team and working with SmithBucklin, the management company that’s run ASUG, and Tech Image, which helps us with media and PR.
And we're developing policy to help guide the organization.
ASUG’s board of directors has spent a lot of time over the last year focused on the future of this organization.
I'm hoping that the ASUG board of directors and I can look back in five years and say to ourselves that we, as a group, really made some great strategic moves to help this organization forge on for a long time.
CIOZone: Any programs ASUG is particularly proud of?
We have a university alliance program, which is composed of universities using and teaching SAP. There have been questions about constrained resources in the industry for SAP resources. The university alliance program is a great channel, a great outlet to find young people coming out of college who had been through a curriculum where SAP has been used as a tool.
So there are great opportunities, I think, across our entire membership base that we want to elevate in a different way. And at the same time provide a broader portfolio of products and services to our installation members.
CIOZone: Products and services such as?
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