By Lamont Wood
Winter 2007

California Gets a CIO
California will soon have its own cabinet-level CIO, thanks to a bill that recently passed both houses of the state legislature without a single dissenting vote. Known as Senate Bill 834, the new law gives Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger until the start of 2008 to establish the CIO cabinet post and make his initial appointment.

Technically, California already has a CIO. J. Clark Kelso, who is also a professor at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, was hired in 2002 under a law that defined the position as an office in the state technology department, rather than a cabinet post. But that law expired, thanks to a sunset provision, shortly thereafter. Kelso's predecessor had departed as the result of a procurement scandal; the legislature did not renew the law; and as a result, Kelso has been operating without statutory authority ever since.

The new law reflects the legislature's recognition of the importance of information technology by elevating the stature of the job to the cabinet level, Kelso explains. Otherwise, the law formalizes what Kelso already does in terms of IT planning, coordinating and advising. "I have had good visibility in the governor's office," Kelso says, "but that's not the same as being a cabinet secretary."

But the new law has a catch: S.B.834 does not establish any budget for the new CIO cabinet post. So state finance authorities will have to decide on appropriate funding and staffing. While California officials haven't defined the new CIO's first project, we trust it does not involve screensavers that read, "I'll be back!"

IT Services Elevates IT Governance to the Next Level
For CIOs, it's not how much you do, how you do it or how quickly you do it, but what business value you deliver thatmatters most. In other words, "What have you done for the enterprise lately?"

This fall CA rolled out products and services aimed at helping CIOs answer this thorny question. CA Clarity™ r8 provides CIOs with a big-picture view of all of the services they deliver to the business, as well as financial transparency into their costs. It's essentially a dashboard to help CIOs more directly net out their business-level impacts on the organization.

The CA Clarity r8 dashboard provides real-time insight into the total cost of each IT service, aggregating all the components required to deliver that service, including assets, applications, people, projects and ongoing support. The end result: an IT service portfolio that gives CIOs an apples-to-apples comparison of IT investments — and helps ensure that those investments are aligned with business priorities.

The Next Hot Button: Application Performance Management
Application performance management (APM)—a combination of consulting, monitoring andmanagement functions—is among the top three challenges facing managers of large wide area networks. In fact, according to a recent survey conducted by YankeeGroup, APM is topped only by cost-containment and the need to provision sufficient bandwidth. The survey, conducted in 2005, surveyed 1,198 managers of WANs with more than 1,000 servers each.

The APM challenge comes as WAN managers struggle to keep applications up and running across their networks. As a result, the market for APM products and services is poised for healthy growth. In fact, Yankee Group expects total APM sales to hit $461 million in 2010 in Western Europe alone, up from $315 million in 2005, for an average annual growth rate of 8 percent.

APM is generally offered as away to track the performance of applications across a WAN or LAN. CIOs obtain APM products and services from service providers who are seeking relations with customers that go above and beyond connectivity services. Such offerings tie neatly with current outsourcing trends, and the Yankee Group expects APM to be increasingly outsourced as enterprises migrate to service-oriented architecture.