2010 Goals and Priorities

By Larry Bonfante

This is the time of year when many people reflect back on what has transpired over the course of the current year. It's also the time many of us give a great deal of thought to our priorities and goals for the upcoming fiscal year.

With that in mind, here are a few of my priorities in 2010:

Cloud Computing - We are in the process of migrating all of our back-end systems into the cloud. We will continue to host our consumer facing solutions as we have to date, but all internal client support systems will be moved from a typical hosted partner model into a cloud computing environment. This will save us about 70 percent of the historical cost of hosting these systems.

E-Commerce - We are working on partnering with a firm for a new and enhanced suite of e-commerce capabilities to better serve and support the online needs of our more than 740,000 members. We want to make their shopping experience a more positive one and facilitate up-selling of our core membership products and services.

E-Discovery - We are making a significant investment in enhancing our efforts for both retaining and searching e-mail messages and online files to better support our e-discovery needs for potential pending litigation. This is a huge challenge for most organizations, and unlike other areas of "compliance" (i.e. PCI, SOX, HIPAA, etc.) there are no exact rules of the road for a CIO or general counsel to follow!

Video Editing - In 2009 we made a big push into the digital asset management space by digitizing our historical video footage of U.S. Open and U.S. Open series matches to repurpose these assets to support the needs of our broadcast partners, sponsors and marketing partners. We are investing in video editing capabilities to help us create finished products so that we can repurpose and monetize these video assets.

So if you were wondering what to put under my Christmas tree this year, this gives you some gift ideas. Or you can always just back up a loaded Brinks truck as that is one gift that is always well received!

Larry Bonfante is CIO of the United States Tennis Association. Click here to read Larry's columns in CIO Insight.