Conference Program

 

8:00 am - 9:00 am - Registration and Continental Breakfast

 

9:00 am - 10:00 am 

Meeting the Global IT Challenge:  Serving as a Strategic Leader in Your Organization

Patricia Shafer, President, Compel, Ltd.

 

A growing body of research indicates that executives and managers often perceive that IT investments are not as efficient or effective as they could be, and IT professionals need to enhance their abilities to add value by “providing relevant business solutions.”  The presenter will share the results of her research initiative, “The Whole World at Work: Managers Around the Globe Tell Us What Still Needs to Change in Organizations.”  During a two year period she conducted over 160 interviews in multinational corporations representing nearly 30 nationalities in North America, Europe, Asia/Oceania and sub-Sahara Africa, in which working managers shared frustrations with and aspirations for IT and its leaders.  Attendees will understand why the most successful 21st century organizations will be more connected, communicative, collaborative and consensus-building - but only if new visions of technology are developed to meet the challenge. 

And, only if new models of IT leadership emerge

 

In this session, attendees will learn:

• What managers around the world are saying about the ideal organization of the future, how to successfully manage change, and effective leadership on the global stage

• Barriers to achieving these ideals, including missed opportunities to capitalize on technology

• What this means for technology leaders and those charged with training and developing leaders of the future

 

10:00 am - 10:30 am - Refreshment Break

10:30 am - 11:30 am 

Innovating With Discipline: How to Leverage IT to Drive Innovation in the Enterprise

Duane Meaux, Client Partner, Geneca

 

Anyone who takes on the challenge of technology innovation -- whether to cut costs or create competitive advantage -- knows that innovation goes hand in hand with risk. So while your executive team may express support for new ideas, they are often apprehensive about innovation and view it as high-risk effort with uncertain returns.  In order to be successful, it is becoming increasingly important for you to understand and communicate the concept of Innovating With Discipline.

 

This presentation demonstrates an objective, pragmatic approach to managing the relationship between innovation and risk.  This approach will bring a higher level of certainty to even the most risk prone initiatives and help your team progress from seeing risk as a danger to be avoided to a necessity that can absolutely be managed.

           

Topics covered include:

• Creating an innovation environment with your business partners

• Measuring and communicating the return on innovation investments

• Enabling Innovation Certainty

• Classifying types of project risks

• Assessing project risk, size and complexity

• Risk mitigation processes: What’s available; what works; and areas of needed expertise to carry it off

11:30 am - 12:30 am

The Best Technology : How to Apply it to your Business Processes

Andrew Lauter, President, PSC

Whether it is e-mail, the Internet, master scheduling, ERP, CRM, workflow, portals or content management, we are all using some form of business technology. The challenge is in using it in the most efficient way to meet your business goals. There are three levels of activity to consider when applying technology to a business: the individual level, where the work is performed, the group level where individuals collaborate as part of a process, and at the enterprise level, where technology unites individuals and group into a single, highly efficient entity. All levels must work together in the same technological framework if business goals are to be met. The speaker will discuss the concepts and requirements for each level as well as give examples from actual case studies.

 

Attendees will learn how to:

• Use the latest technology to provide critical information to employees

• Keep that information in context with the overall business process

• Take the lead in leveraging technology to drive business growth

• Prove to executive management what specific technologies are working today.

 

 

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Luncheon

Rogan Oborn Orndorff Zimmerman

 

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm 

Quality of IT Services: How to Increase– (panel discussion)

Moderator: Brian Rogan, SVP of Strategic Business and Marketing, Sierra Atlantic

Panelists: John Oborn, SVP, Chief Information Officer, Health Care Service Corporation
Diane K. Orndorff, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Laidlaw Education Services

Scott Zimmerman, CIO, CenterPoint Properties

 

 

In this session attendees will hear from enterprise IT executives as to how they have increased the quality of IT services at their respective organizations.
 

Attendees will be provided with frameworks and suggestions to use that include:

• How design and implement strategies to increase quality

• How to establish effective communication channels

• How to balance the needs of different enterprise business units

• How to manage expectations of delivery of services

• Suggestions to make IT indispensable to the rest of the organization

• How to rate the delivery of those services

 

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm Refreshment Break

 

 

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm 

Compliance: How to Achieve Compliance Without Lowering Operational Excellence

Lance Masten, Senior Product Manager, Quest Software

 

Compliance affects almost every organization in business today, whether it’s from an external source like the

 SEC or internal initiatives to improve internal controls and security.  Companies are spending large amounts of money to meet these objectives and at the time they are sacrificing operational excellence.  Due to these facts, corporations are looking to consolidate efforts that will help them achieve both their security requirements and their day-to-day operations. 

 

In this session, attendees will learn:

• How to perform a risk analysis and determine where your organization is today

• How to implement Compliance Lifecycle

• How to handle the inside threat- why it’s important and what it means

• How to ensure reputability and authenticity

• How to implement remediation policies and what is appropriate

• How to lower the overall cost of compliance

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

IT Leadership: How to be an Effective IT Leader– (panel discussion)

Moderator: Dave Anderson, President & CEO, Binary Visions

Panelists: Yvonne Scott, CIO, GATX

Larry Kallembach, SVP & CIO, MB Financial

Mike Kozlowski, CIO, Rust-Oleum, Inc.
Dave Lemme, EVP & CIO, Anixter

 

The key to any organization’s success is having leaders that can help take the business to the next level.  For current and future IT leaders, understanding the needs of the business is crucial to their growth.

 

In this session, attendees will hear from seasoned IT executives on how to be an effective IT/Business Leader and how to lead one’s staff into the future.

 

Areas that will be addressed include:

 

• Skills needed to be successful in the business IT climate

• Managing business expectations

• Pitfalls to avoid

• How to acquire those skills

• How one should manage their staff

• Cross function job rotation

• How to handle chargebacks

• Driving efforts vs. simply aligning IT with business projects

• How to discuss how new technology will improve ROI