September, 2007
by Denise P. Kalm
Denise Kalm has 30 years experience in IT including application programming, enterprise systems management and performance management/capacity planning at Pacific Telephone and Bank of America. She moved to vendor land in 2000, spending 5 ½ years with BMC on the EPA product line, then recently became the senior product marketing manager for enterprise job scheduling products at CA, Inc., formerly Cybermation. She is a regional officer of CMG, has held many volunteer positions within that organization and is a frequent contributing author. Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist. Her hobbies include flying, Jazzercise, writing and scuba diving. Her book, Lifestorm, on the Oakland Hills fire, is available on Amazon. She is an executive and personal coach as well, offering phone and in-person coaching.
About the Author
Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc. formerly Cybermation
1. What drew you to CMG in the first place?
I learned about CMG soon after I specialized in the performance area ten years ago. When I came to Hyperion, I was happy to find that CMG was considered as an important educational and networking event for the performance engineering group and each engineer was supposed to attend it every other year. I attended my first CMG conference in 1999 and presented my first CMG paper in 2001.
2. What keeps you there?
CMG is the best conference in the performance field. Being a volunteer, vendor-independent organization makes it unique. It is the place to get information if you need something more than a vendor's class. In addition, of course, it is a great networking opportunity. Attending CMG provides a validation of work done in the performance field as well as an insight into areas of opportunity in one's organization.
3. What inspired you to seek national office? Working in the conference committee, I often got answers like "it was decided by the board" and "we can't change that." Therefore, when I was approached by Ray Wicks from the nomination committee, I thought I might be more successful in promoting my ideas on this level. Another thought was that I might add a little diversity to the board with my background as a performance tester and performance engineer.
4. If someone didn't know you well, what would be the 3 things you would want them know, prior to voting?
During the last ten years, I have specialized in performance and worked in different roles including performance tester, performance analyst, performance architect, and performance engineer.
I believe it is important to go beyond the everyday routine: follow what is happening in the industry and share your experiences through papers and presentations. A part of my collection of performance-related links and documents can be found at www.alexanderpodelko.com. Volunteering for CMG gives a real chance to make a difference.
My experience is not limited to engineering only. Before specializing in performance, I led software development for a startup (specializing in business and accounting software). Once upon on a time I was even the interim CFO there. Later I got an MBA from Bellevue University. I hope my business background will be useful for the CMG.
5. If you could make one change to the organization or the conference, what would it be?
The main challenge, in my opinion, is to bring new groups of people to the conference. That is not something that is possible with one change.
Maybe it is time to re-think the structure of subject areas while keeping in mind potential areas of growth.
6. What is working well now?
I believe that the CMG is moving in the right direction; CMG-T looks like a particular success. Now the task is to bring in the various groups of people involved in computer measurement and management, who, in turn, will bring expertise in additional performance-related areas. I think that performance testers are a good place to start and hope that my expertise and connections in this area could help. Other potential groups should also be identified and embraced.
7. What isn't?
The importance of measurement and management of computer systems has skyrocketed recently as systems become more and more complex and the number of people involved in the performance area has grown tremendously. In many cases, these people are not dedicated capacity planners or performance analysts. Quite often, they are testers, developers, architects, managers, or administrators having significant responsibilities in performance-related areas. The role of performance testing is growing and there are performance testing teams in almost every large organization. The problem is that these people are not involved in CMG (and often are not even aware about its existence), while it is definitely the place for them to be.
8. What are the 3 adjectives you would use to describe yourself