East Coast CIO Forum – Jun 17, 2009

As a follow up to our June 17th meeting, we would like to thank Manny Acosta, CIO of Financial Guarantee Insurance Company for hosting our East Coast CIO Forum event.   Special thanks to  Dr. Lilian Abrams for providing us with a baseline on all generation types resulting in a most refreshing evening focused on Gen Y, and everyday reality.   Special thanks to  Jeff Hammerbacher  for flying in from California, and for sharing his passion and knowledge in the Hadoop space. In addition, to all our new guests, thank you for sharing your points of view! To all of our regular attendees, thank you for your ongoing support. Lastly, to everyone, thanks for your outspoken wisdom and passion,  and for helping make this event a smashing success!

Some thoughts from the meeting included the following:

From Dr. Lilian Abrams re:   Today’s Multigenerational Workforce 

  • Mindset and values of Traditionalists, Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y
  • Key “Gen Y” Values:   Instant, Personal, Interactive, Values, Valued, Diverse, Multi-Task, Tech-Savvy, Communal
  • Gen Y Guiding principles are the same as ours, with a slightly different emphasis
  • Tips for success
    • Focus on proper on-boarding techniques
    • Match person to role/task
    • Set & measure (interim) goals
    • Motivate using their values
    • “Catch ‘em doing something right”
  • Allow blend of work & personal like/fun
  • Communicate

 From Jeff Hammerbacher re:  Managing Petabytes with Open Source   

  • Hadoop (and associated software components like Hive, HDFS) is incredibly powerful and worth looking at.
  • Hadoop  is the software behind Facebook, Yahoo, and other data intensive sites (and has its genesis in Google’s Map reduce and Big Table tools which power its search engine).
  • Hadoop is suitable for unstructured, read optimized data sets suitable for data warehousing and well suited for supporting ad hoc data queries against very large data sets.
  • Hadoop uses low cost (typically pre-owned) hardware to organize massive amounts of data in a fault tolerant manner.
  • Hadoop is not good for structured data that changes frequently, or data where sub-second response times are required.
  • Some of the key underlying concepts include:
    1. The file system acts like one big database.
    2. Hadoop tries to get computation as close to the data as possible.
    3. It uses commodity hardware.
    4. The system is smart enough to be “self healing” (detecting dead and new nodes and automatically configuring itself accordingly)
    5. Other database technologies are used for well known defined problems.
    6. Data is incredibly important and needs to be saved as much as possible.                   

General Observations:

Our final discussion with both Lilian and Jeff were fascinating and refreshing.   As an outstanding representative of Gen Y,  we very much appreciated Jeff’s tips on management style.  In addition,   Lilian’s real life examples will definitely help us see our teams in a different light.  Contact information for Lilian can be provided for those interested.   Feel free to give us a call.    Lastly,  Cloudera is hosting a “Hadoop Summit East” on October 2 in New York; more information is at http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-summit-east.

Thank you again for joining us, and looking forward to seeing you all in the fall!

Wishing you all the best for the summer of 2009.

Registration for the September 17th meeting has begun.   Additional notices will be sent out shortly.

The following companies are currently registered for the meeting:  

Cloudera, Promontory Financial Group LLC, MSD Capital, Alliance Bernstein, Morgan Stanley, SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance,  Touro College, Barclays Capital,  Eton Park Capital Management, McCann-Erickson Advertising, AEGIS, Exigen Capital, Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, ESP Technologies Corp., Pequot Capital, PSS Systems, Plural Investments, LLC, Cushman & Wakefield, Inc.,Barnard College, Toys R Us, Folica.com, Investment Technology Group, Inc.,  Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Bank of America, Girl Scouts of the USA, Columbia Business School, Dunn and Bradstreet,Federal Reserve Bank of New York, McGraw Hill Companies.

June 17th Agenda:

Today’s Multigenerational Workforce  –  Dr. Lilian Abrams

  • Working with/managing people who are older, younger, or the same age as ourselves,
  • Achieving optimal management goals using techniques for each generation and for times of financial crisis.
  • Getting a strong pulse on your clients and workforce;  finding out what makes them tick, and learning how to influence and motivate them.
  • Preparing organizations effectively to take advantage of strengths while shoring up weaknesses.

Managing Petabytes with Open Source   –  Jeff Hammerbacher

  • What is Hadoop?
  • Solving big data problems with Hadoop at Facebook and Yahoo
  • Short history of Facebook’s Data team
  • Hadoop applications at Yahoo!, Facebook, and Cloudera
  • Integration of Hadoop into the enterprise data center
  • Where the world is headed:  “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”

PLEASE NOTE:

Registration for the June 17th meeting will proceed through end of month.    Special thanks to Emanuel Acosta, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer of FGIC, for hosting this upcoming event.    Logistics for the Boardroom at Financial Guaranty Insurance Company as well as requirements for security will be distributed to all registered attendees. FGIC is located opposite Grand Central Station.

BIO:  Jeff Hammerbacher

Jeff Hammerbacher is the Vice President of Products and Chief Scientist at Cloudera. Jeff was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced several academic papers and two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

BIO:  Lilian Abrams, Ph.D., MBA

Dr. Abrams has consulted in Organizational Development/Effectiveness (OD/OE), Leadership Development, Training, and Applied Research since 1987.  Her specialty areas include executive coaching; all forms of leadership development and training; change management; performance management; strategic communications; diversity; and applied research.  Recent clients include Horizon BCBS, SEIU, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, SIAC, Ford Motor Company, Cornell University, Local 1199, American Home Products/ Wyeth, and the State of New Jersey.

On the West coast until 1998, Dr. Abrams held Organization Development and Research Consultant positions in two premier HR consulting firms, Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt.  She also held internal positions within Kaiser Permanente (California) as Organization Effectiveness Consultant and as Management Researcher.  Her work included leadership training design and development; managerial coaching; change and conflict management; team-building; performance management design and implementation; M&A integration; communications planning; competency development; strategic planning; diversity; and national and global employee research using surveys, focus groups, and interviews.  Clients include VISA, Arco, AAA, Universal, The Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror, Circle K, Children’s Hospital of Orange County & Mission, Northrup-Grumman, Hughes Aircraft, McDonnell-Douglas, & Weyerhauser Mortgage.

Dr. Abrams was Senior Manager, Organization Effectiveness, for Nabisco.  In this role, she designed and oversaw a successful three-stage leadership development program for high-potential early-career leaders.  This program included extensive capabilities assessment, individualized coaching sessions, and real-time, high-level “business challenge” projects.  Dr. Abrams designed and implemented an innovative Mentor Matching tool with the assistance of the Gallup organization, to match participants with senior business mentors, and designed and delivered training to participants and executive Mentors on “Managing the Mentoring Relationship”.  Dr. Abrams also utilized her extensive research experience to oversee the implementation of a new annual employee survey, linking results to key Nabisco human resource performance indicators.

Since 2000, Dr. Abrams has designed and delivered various trainings and other efforts to enhance organizational performance.  She has delivered management knowledge and skills training as well as individualized coaching to groups of new managers, new supervisors and supervisor candidates for a financial services firm.  For a service firm, she designed and delivered a new performance management system and trained company leadership on the new system.  She designed training materials on new performance management standards for HR staff to deliver to all managers at a financial services firm.  For Ford Motor Company, she designed second-generation “Managing Inclusivity” Diversity curriculum, and designed and delivered a “Motivating Others” course for mid-level managers at a pharmaceutical firm.  She has designed and delivered such diverse courses such as “Assessing Training Needs” and “Stress Management” for hospital staff at all levels.  Other projects include career coaching for Cornell MBAs; improvement recommendations for a pharmaceutical’s senior HR team; competency development; consumer market research tool preparation; and a division-wide OE assessment and coaching process for a mid-size HR consulting firm.

In addition to client work, Dr. Abrams is an adjunct professor in New York University’s (NYU) graduate Master’s program in Management and Systems.  She re-designed and regularly teaches “Transformational Leadership and Team-Building” online, as well as “Business Research Methods”, a required Master’s thesis proposal development and qualifying course.  On an ongoing basis, she teaches the required “Research Project – Thesis” course for advanced students, and serves as the department’s academic resource and overseer for all student Master’s thesis projects.

Professionally, Dr. Abrams served as Chair of NJODN’s Annual Sharing Day Program Committee for three years (2002-2004), while also presenting workshops annually.  These included “Tales Out Of Coaching:  Successful Strategies With Coaching Clients”; “Getting from Data to Action”, and an introduction to online teaching.  She co-authored the 2003 Survey Report on the Future of OD, and the consequent article, “Assessing the Field of OD” appeared in the Journal of Behavioral Sciences (December, 2004).  Her co-authored article, “The Future of Organization Development:  Enabling Sustainable Business Performance through People”, was published in the OD Journal in November, 2007.

Dr. Abrams earned her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior (Psychology) in 1995 as well as an MBA in 1990 from the Peter Drucker Graduate Management Center at The Claremont Graduate University.  Her awards include the Rosenthal Investment Management/Corporate Finance Award, the Henry Kravis Entrepreneurship Award, and multiple fellowships.  Undergraduate awards include a BA in Psychology from UCLA, Phi Beta Kappa, and both College of Letters & Science and Latin (magna cum laude) honors.