RegionalAdvisoryCommitteeMinutes-InformationTechnology,InformationSystems
Doing What Matters -San Diego Regional Advisory Committee
Location: City College, San Diego
Date: 11/22
Enc: Attached was a guideline ppt sheet that showed generic questions and three breakout sessions.
General Items
• Rose from City College is working on common naming convention or ability to cross reference course names across region. This was briefly discussed at the Oct SD4C session as well.
• Virtualization is up and coming
CompSci Session: Benjamin Katz (CEO JSX S/W Dev start up), Anitra Willis (Director, Student Affairs Tech
Services, UCSD), Sam Johnson (SAN DAG, IT Shop)
Rose will be sending out the aggregate minutes.
• The prospects over the next 5+ years for hiring is strong. Most companies cannot find enough of the "right" persons.
• What is right? -> o Seemed that both programmers and IT professionals were needed, possible a bit more interest for IT- Networking and SysAdmins. IT and Developers must be able to understand both the technology and business behind the tech. o For Programmers, mobile app dev is HOT, HOT, HOT. No surprises on that. 30-40% of development today is for mobile and is increasing by the day o Students with experience. IExperience is a catch 22. How do you get experience if you can't get hired and what qualifies for good experience?
• Rose is starting regional wide intern web site that companies and students can go to do matchmaking. Companies do not have much money for internships. Students seem to be ok with this. Other issues, companies do not want to pay liability insurance for students. SDCCC has a means to cover students from a liability perspective. Don't know if this is through work study or other mechanism. If work study, can Palomar and MiraCosta do the same. I would think so. Other pay issues. Since IT, many companies want to have background checks. SAN DAG allowed SDCCC to do bkgd checks before and a couple slipped through with history on their records. Therefore, SANDAG only uses their own internal background check agency. Who pays for the bkgd check? Also for UCSD, who pays for parking $81 I month.
• End of Semester Capstone projects and other group work simulations go a long way.
• Also, the CompSci panel liked the Programming Olympics that MiraCosta participated in and did well in. (June - Larry Forman, SDCC, lforman@sdccd.com would like to learn more about the Olympics.) They especially liked that the Olympics were developing code outside of class labs for simulated "real" customers.

• Certifications and AAs are good, but they really want to see some work experience. Go back to Catch22.
• School, 2 year, 4 year, or certificate did not seem to matter. Skilled with experience seemed to be the best combo per the panel. However, anything less than a 4 yr degree will stunt a person's salary. This is confirmed at SAIC frequently. After 2-4yrs, a person's pay maxes out. Govt would only pay so much for less than 4 yr degree. If paid above that, the company would need to eat out of pocket/ lose money on a person to retain. o General Student Characteristics -
• They felt that many of the students did not have adequate soft skills. Can do items once pointed out, but need more critical thinking/ abstract skills.
• They do not want robots. Students need to be flexible and be able to morph to what is at hand. If they have experience in Java, they should be able to do C,
C++, C#.
• They expect new employees to know MS Office Suite (Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint) and be able to convert data to info as well as being able to decompose a complex subject for a non-techie.
• Dress at employers was key as well. Knowing what clothing was appropriate. o Developers are lacking DB skills. Must be able to add connectors to their code to hook into backend DBs-three tier architecture. Access does not count. MySQL, SQL Server,
Oracle, DB2, PostGres, etc.
• Things that are hot o Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, etc. o Website Analytics. Knowing how to derive info o Virtualization - VMWare and MS Hyper-V. I would assume open source KVM as well. o Data Analytics -At first they said no but then said, we need to be able to pull info from data (ie data analytics) o GIS was requested/ big. Definite need o Knowing how to use tools for drawing network/ computer diagrams and project management. Sequence diagrams, rack elevations, network dwgs. Be able to use products like MS Visio and Project, but be able to morph to other vendors similar projects (critical thinking
I not being robots)
Information Week- IT job Outlook

Increased spending on salaries, training, and budgets puts IT in a "sweet spot for employment and investment," says latest Society for Information Management data.
Good news for IT employees, from frontline staff up to CIOs: Salaries are on the rise, businesses are spending more money on training, and IT budgets continue to increase.
Those results come from the 34th annual SIM IT Trends Study for 2013. The Society for
Information Management (SIM) study is a based on a survey of 650 of the organization's members, with three-quarters of respondents saying they're the highest-ranking IT person inside their organization.
"It's a good time to be a geek: Salaries are increasing, money going to training is increasing -­ which is typically a sign of employers trying to keep their IT people -- and we see turnover increasing, which is typically a sign of a healthy IT job market," Leon Kappelman, a professor at the College of Business at the University of North Texas who focuses on IT management issues, told us over the phone.
[What field needs graduates the most? Read Data Scientist: The Sexiest .Job No One Has.]
"I see it in my kids getting jobs at 22, 23 years old, at $65,000 per year, with a $4,000 to $5,000 signing bonus, and getting two to three job offers," said Kappelman, who led the SIM study. "IT contract shops -- business is really good for them, too. All those things tell me that it's a good time to be in the IT job market."
Bolstering that finding is the fact that 20% ofIT leaders told SIM that a skills shortage keeps them awake at night.
The SIM study's findings square with a recent survey, conducted by staffing firm TEKsystems, which found that a majority of CIOs expect to see IT budgets and IT employees' salaries rise in
2014.
Beyond better job prospects for IT newcomers, the SIM study also found multiple signs that
ClOs are succeeding in doing what business executives have long demanded: bringing more of a business focus to IT operations. For starters, 45% ofCIOs now report to the CEO, 27% to the
CFO, and 9% to a business unit executive. Continuing a downward trend, only 14% now report to the COO.
Meanwhile, half of 160 CIOs -- answering an optional question in the study -- said that they meet with the CEO or CFO weekly, and a majority do so monthly. Furthermore, 82% of CIOs rated the quality of those interactions with CEOs or CFOs as being "very positive" or "highly positive."

"IT is becoming more customer focused, and that's one of my biggest takeaways from looking at several of the data points, including that one," said Kappelman. Even so, CIOs still face a perception problem with CEOs and CFOs. Kappelman cited studies by professional organizations that serve CEOs and CFOs, which found about 80% of executives still don't see IT as a competitive differentiator for their business.
Interestingly, however, the SIM study also found that the top metrics used to gauge the success of internal IT projects were projects being delivered on time (a factor for 66% ofrespondents), projects being delivered on budget (50%), increased customer satisfaction (33%), meeting service-level agreements (30%), and productivity improvements (29%). Ranking much lower on the list: increasing the number of products and services (13%), creating innovative ideas (12%), and contributing to revenue growth (7%).
"So the message to senior management is, quit bitching about IT not being strategic, and change their incentives," said Kappelman. "If you want them to be more strategic, pay them to be more strategic."
For the first time, the annual SIM study didn't just ask CIOs about the most important IT management issue facing them or their business, but rather the most important issues facing them and their business. That distinction triggered some sharp differences.
Businesses' top investments in 2013, for example, were for analytics and business intelligence -­ also ClOs' leading concern -- followed by customer relationship management software, cloud computing, and enterprise resource-planning applications. But when it came to information security, which CIOs ranked as their second biggest concern, it ranked only 14th in spending.
Likewise, disaster recovery was CIOs' third greatest concern, but only in 11th place for IT spending.
Kappelman said that although the difference in importance of security and disaster recovery might seem alarming, it makes sense. "To IT, they're table stakes. I can't even talk about strategy, innovation, or anything like that if I'm not secure or don't have continuity if something breaks.
You'd expect [security] to be a big priority for IT, because if something breaks, they lose their job. Similarly for disaster recovery, ifa server goes down, the business shouldn't go down."
Overall, the study found that IT prioritizes technology projects that offer a lot of bang for the buck. "You see things like enterprise architecture and integration being of higher importance to
IT, because IT can definitely make it more agile and help to save money. So even though they're not a big spend either, you can see why IT would want to make sure they went well, because it indirectly helps the business."
Although the SIM study's findings are good news both for IT employment and C!Os bringing more of a business focus to bear, the study results also raise the question of whether businesses' current levels of investment in hardware and software are sustainable. Past SIM studies -­ especially in 2009 and 2010 -- found that a relatively low percentage of the IT budget was being invested in products and services, while much more was going into salaries. Kappelman says that

was to be expected, because when times are tough, businesses can choose to not replace hardware, but would prefer to not slash their IT employee head counts.
Currently, however, the relative amount of the IT budget being invested in products and services has shot up. "We're in a sweet spot for employment and investment," Kappelman says. "I don't know exactly what to make of this, but I think we're in a catchup period, which is good for the vendors. But at the same time, 1don't think it will last -- we'll just see where it goes."
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