February, 2010
by Julie Hughes
The Greater Atlanta CMG met on October 21, 2009 at the midtown Bank of America building located at 715 Peachtree Street.
The meeting began with Kevin Mobley, our fearless President, showing a video from the internet about some new Google beta services. The title of the presentation was "Cloud Encounters - a Panel Discussion and More." The group discussed the implications of the future as our computer usage could shift from individual machines and/or in-house based services to the internet cloud. We talked about having documents, spreadsheets, conferences and all of the computer usage today shifting to the internet, being used by anyone in the world. Kevin informed us that the US Armed Forces currently have worldwide operations and are strategically planning to move some of their current operations to the cloud. Of course, a major issue is security, and that will have to be resolved before any usage is safe for the army and/or corporations. Everyone was fascinated with the video demonstration of voice collaboration and language translation concurrently. The video on YouTube is thirty minutes long and Kevin showed a few minutes for discussion.
Next, Bob Chaney, from Delta Air Lines, told the group about "ITIL V3 - It's all about the customer." Bob has recently completed his ITIL certification. A really short description of Bob's topic is that ITIL V3 focuses on the business and making continuous service improvements. As Bob spoke, Kevin used his laptop to log into the internet and create a twitter GACMG account. As Bob spoke, Kevin made "tweets" on the internet so that others who couldn't come to the conference could learn about the discussion. Kevin wrote the GACMG log for his notes as Bob spoke. For those who want more notes than the writer has presented, go to twitter.com/GACMG. On the GACMG blue header, double-click on the name and read the log as the page scrolls. Bob told us that as he took the class, he found out that the ITIL group had not heard of the CMG group. So he told them about CMG and has helped them hook-up.
Charles Foy was a Mullen Award winner at CMG 2008. He was invited to speak to the GACMG meeting, and his talk was titled "Say Goodbye to Post-Mortems, and Say Hello to Effective Problem Management and Increased Availability." Charles gave an excellent presentation as he walked through the evolution of the way Siemens was able to provide better service. He talked about his role as an analyst at Siemens and how they resolved problems well, but there wasn't a process to prevent future re-occurrence. He described how the post-mortem problem analysis process evolved and how they constructed a database of variables to track, and thereby created a better measurement system for service quality. We really appreciate Charles taking the time away from his work and coming to tell us about his experiences. Now they have increased their service and reliability and have learned a lesson about problem management that they would like to champion to others.
During the presentation Kevin continued to tweet. It's unbelievable, but he received an error notice from Twitter. The system had exceeded its capacity and he couldn't post any more notes for a while. This is true - I really mean it. We were in a meeting talking about computer measurements and capacity and the internet was full!
Charles' presentation is at the base purpose of what CMG is all about - professionals who can take the time learning from the experiences of those who are willing to share. If you want to know more details, the internet capacity problem eventually resolved itself, and there is information on Twitter. By the way, Craig Mullins, our next presenter, used Kevin's twitter information and joined the GACMG group on the internet. So, here we are in a conference with two attendees twittering each other - go figure. There was only one person between them at the table. Couldn't they just TALK to one another? (ha-ha)
Next was lunch - Yeah. We had a great buffet lunch sponsored by NEON Enterprise Software. We were able to talk to one another during this time, and both Kevin and Craig didn't have to depend on Twitter anymore for information.
After lunch Craig Mullins, from NEON, introduced us to a new mainframe zIIP engine performance enhancement (and money saver). His presentation was titled "zWhole Wide World of Specialty Processors." He showed how corporations could save a lot of money by diverting more general-purpose work to the specialty zIIP engine, which normally processes database calls and RACF security calls. His company offers a free 60-day trial. More information on the particulars may be found at their web site. They also plan to be very visible at the national CMG conference in December at Dallas.
We had a general discussion of the changes in the economy and other things happening in our places of work, Atlanta, and the world. Bottom line is - our world is changing and we must adapt. It was all very challenging and fascinating. Thanks everyone involved for a GREAT meeting that gave us the opportunity to learn more and talk with others who perform similar jobs. Also, thanks to our presenters and to NEON for the sponsorship. Our next meeting is planned for mid-April 2010. The GACMG regions website, http://regions.cmg.org/regions/gacmg will have the details as they evolve.
One final note from the author: GACMG has begun using Twitter to communicate with its members, and more information on many details of the meeting is available at Twitter. Establishing an identity and account on Twitter is free. After logging on search for GACMG and become a member to follow us in the future. To read the detail notes go to the bottom of the log in order to follow the stream of the conference from the beginning. Thanks go to Kevin, Craig, and others for providing us the notes. Also, thanks to those who were able to attend physically and virtually.