Press Release - March 22, 2011

March 22, 2011 – New York, NY- JB Homer Associates hosted its Winter CIO/CTO Breakfast Roundtable "The Role of the CIO/CTO in 2011 in Enhancing the Customer Experience and Contributing to Revenue Growth", on March 8, 2011, and was moderated by Judy Homer, President.

JB Homer’s Breakfast Roundtables are by invitation only events that provide an intimate and informal forum for CIOs and CTOs to meet with their peers to discuss challenging issues that transcend their respective industry verticals.

After the session one of CTOs commented: "these sessions are well run, with no hidden agenda, and are genuinely about getting CIOs to talk about their challenges. A CIO who participated in a previous Roundtable said "several of the people I met at the session I attended I am still in contact with 2 years later".

The success of these Roundtable discussions is attributable to the high level of involvement of the participants. Once the overall theme for a session has been proposed by JB Homer, all subtopics and primary talking points are then contributed by the Roundtable participants and form the basis of the discussion.

This session’s participants included IT executives from a wide spectrum of organizations: GAF Materials Corporation, Princeton Financial Services, The NYC Department of Education, Chase Home Lending, Capital One Financial, The Westcon Group, Aerogroup, The Blackstone Group, UBS Wealth Management, MarketAxess, and Heineken Americas.

The topics covered included:

• Reinventing the role of the CIO to create better synergies with the CEO.
• How CIOs have incorporated solutions into their 2011 IT strategic plans to deliver innovation and grow revenue.
• Developing a strong working partnership between the CIO and the CMO to optimize the customer experience.
• The competitive advantage gained by productizing analytics in the B-to-B space.
• Educating the business leadership to think like a CIO in leveraging technology solutions.

Takeaways from this Roundtable:

• Reinventing the Role of the CIO - the role of the CIO has become more of a business leader increasing involved in achieving business as well as technology goals.
• The New Critical Working Partnerships - today one of the most important working partnerships, both in the private and public sectors, is between the CIO and the CMO. Together they establish the customer engagement strategy to identify their customers’ needs, and create customer-centric marketing strategies and campaigns based on a real-time view of their company’s desired customer to deliver increased revenues and market share.
• How to Get to Innovation - innovation may ultimately generate additional revenue, but all the participants agreed that to get the support and funding needed for those innovative solutions that have made them successful, they first had to build a foundation of trust by delivering technology solutions capable of supporting the core needs of the business.
• Productize Your Analytics to Strengthen Customer Loyalty – analytics are increasingly being packaged and used as a vehicle for promoting customer loyalty especially in the B-to-B space. Offering to share your analytics data with your B-to-B customers will make your company a more trusted and valued business partner than your competitors.
• Hold the Business Accountable – the burden of establishing the ROI of any project or program no longer falls solely on the IT organization. CIOs now involve their business leadership in projects from their inception, establishing early on the desired ROI and resources needed. They revisit the progress of projects with their CFOs at pre-established intervals to reassess if the business is consistently meeting the numbers needed to continue to justify the IT expense associated with supporting these projects - or if their IT resources would be put to better use if diverted to more productive channels.

With CIO/CTO discretionary compensation becoming increasingly based on their contribution to revenue and profitability, the feedback following the session was that the topics discussed were both timely and valuable, and that the meeting model was one that they will take back home to their own organizations to promote similar open discussions with their leadership teams and customers about topics of mutual interest.

JB Homer’s next CIO/CTO Breakfast Roundtable will be held in New York in the summer of 2011, exact date and theme to be announced.

Additionally, JB Homer hosts the CIO BREAKFAST CLUB group on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com as a daily online forum for technology executives to discuss similar compelling topics with their peers. This group has attracted a global membership spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

We invite you to visit our website at www.jbhomer.com for additional information on JB Homer Associates.