How do you define IT Leadership?   Does it consist of aligning IT with the business?  Driving business efforts forward?  Increasing quality of IT services?  What skills does it take to be an effective IT Leader?  How do you lead IT during challenging economic times?

What You Will Learn

Content that will be presented includes:

• Top IT Performance: How to Measure Whether You are Leading Your Organization to Their Potential
• Beyond Alignment – Strategies for IT to Add Significant Business Value
• How to Answer the Top Questions that CEOs will be Asking CIOs
• Competing for the Future: How IT Can Lead by Moving to an Entrepreneurial Mindset
• Cloud Computing & IT Innovation: Ready for Prime Time or Still a Bit Hazy?
• Measurements that Matter: How to Put ‘The Right’ IT Metrics to Work

Conference Program 

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

9:00am-10:00am

Top IT Performance: How to Evaluate if You are Helping Your Employees to Reach Their Potential
Jack Wright, President, American Institute of Learning & Cognitive Development

What percentage of your career do you think you were led well by more senior IT managers?  What would you have changed that would have helped you perform better?  If you asked your staff the same questions today, what would they would say about you?

Success as an IT leader depends on whether you master the leadership skills to motivate and guide your employees to achieve a higher level of performance.  These skills include the latest thinking in the areas of:

• Emotional intelligence

• Functional cognition

These skills are essential for current IT leaders and for the next generation of leaders that will follow.  In this session, attendees will learn a framework for how to improve their leadership skills and instill these skills in their IT staff.  

We will review the 14 leadership characteristics used by the United States Marine Corps for training its officers.  These traits are the ethical foundation for leading to inspire mutual respect and trust between the officers and the enlisted personnel they are responsible for.  These 14 attributes translate very effectively for corporate executives and can provide a foundation for a self assessment as to an executive's Additionally, we will review the weak leadership traits that undermine the effectiveness and efficiency of any organization and its leaders. 

The next component we will cover will interlink the Marine Corps leadership skills with emotional intelligence and how these two sets of skills inter-operate to ensure positive, motivated employees.

The third element to discuss is functional cognition, or how good leaders can help improve the critical thinking skills to further motivate their employees and allow employees to achieve greater performance improvements and efficiencies so they are equipped to perform at a higher level.

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

10:30am-11:30am

Beyond Alignment – Strategies for IT to Add Significant Business Value

     Bruce Massel, VP Information Technology, Fidelitone Logistics

Many IT executives have realized that success with the business goes way beyond alignment.  It comes down to adding value, whether it be adding expertise to enterprise innovation, adding new services, and/or adding to the  bottom line.

In this session, an experienced CIO will share how he has leveraged his experiences and business insights into taking his IT organization to the next level and garnering the respect of the business.

Topics that will be discussed include:

• What does ‘adding value’ really mean
• How to lead and inspire your staff to act like business leaders
• How the thought process needs to change
• What actions you can take now

11:30am-12:30pm

How to Answer the Top Questions that CEOs will be Asking CIOs

Moderator: Brian Farrar, Partner and Founder, Maven Wave Partners

Panelists:
Larry Kallembach, EVP & CIO, MB Financial
Chris Nabinger, Executive Partner, Gartner Group

Lac Tran, SVP, CIO, Associate Dean, Rush University Medical Center
Mike Kozlowski, CIO, VP, IT, Rust-Oleum Corp.
John Phillips, SVP & CIO, Briggs Medical Service Company

and other enterprise IT CIOs/Leaders will share their experiences, insights and lessons learned

In 2009, many organizations slashed spending to get through the difficult economic times. 

However, much of the cost cutting went to extremes and placed many organizations at unacceptable business risk.  CEOs and CIOs have learned important lessons from the last two years.   For IT to win in the recovery, CIOs need to be able to ask these questions and more.

• Given that any of the actions we took introduced unacceptable business risk, what is our plan to fix it?
• How do we leverage non-discretionary spending to lead to significant innovation?
• How can we better support standard applications rather than overdependency on in house solutions?
• How can we drive unnecessary complexity out of IT by retiring outdated technologies?
• Should we be using outsourcing as flex capacity?

In this session, attendees will learn from a panel of senior IT executives as to how they are answering these challenges.

12:30pm - 1:30pm - Luncheon

1:30pm - 2:30pm

Competing for the Future: How IT Can Lead by Moving to an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Moderator: Mark Hattas, CEO, Geneca

Panelists:
Hardik Bhatt, CIO, City of Chicago

Sharon DeWitt, IT Director, Scot Forge

Sam Ferguson, Director of Information Technology, City of Schaumburg

John Sweetwood, CIO, Fortis Clearing

and other enterprise IT CIOs/Leaders will share their experiences, insights and lessons learned

Most IT organizations are facing the following challenge of a dual focus: How to achieve sustainable growth while ‘keeping the lights’ on.  IT executives are more than ever being evaluated on how they help drive revenue.

How can this be effectively accomplished?

In this session attendees will learn:

• How to move from a cost cutting mindset to an entrepreneurial one
• How to identify the transformational changes that involve cultural, organization, infrastructure and processes
• How to balance the conflict that will exist between entrepreneurial teams and those that are running the existing ‘business of IT’

2:30pm - 3:00pm - Refreshment Break

3:00pm - 4:00pm

Cloud Computing & IT Innovation: Ready for Prime Time or Still a Bit Hazy?

David A. Chapa, Director, DP Strategy/Global Alliances, NetApp
 

In the last year cloud computing has gained tremendous attention in the industry.  Yet, the very definition of cloud computing depends on who you talk to.  Many organizations are still trying to figure out what it means to them, what level of cloud service they may be willing to embrace and what are the real/tangible benefits.   Will cloud computing present the same challenges that the outsourcing model of 2000 did?

In this session, attendees will learn:

·         Is cloud computing ready for large and mid-tier enterprises?

·         If so, who is embracing it?

·         What are the benefits of a private cloud versus a public cloud?

·         What the differences are between Infrastructure-as-a-service, Platform-as-a service and Software-as-a-service

·         How will IT executives be able to leverage the cloud for company innovation

4:00pm - 5:00pm 

Measurements that Matter: How IT Should Support Business Metrics Initiatives
Moderator: Grant Vankerk, Senior Solutions Consulting Manager, Hitachi Data Systems

Panelists will include:

Praveen Gupta, Management Consultant, Accelper Consulting, Adjunct Faculty, Illinois Institute of Technology

Tom Coleman, CIO/CPO, Sloan Valve Company

As IT is under constant pressure to lead and show business value, many executives face the daunting tasks of leveraging metrics.  Since there is no standard framework that fits all enterprises and their respective verticals, IT leaders need to determine how to best support metrics that the business is using to evaluate performance.

In this session, attendees will learn from a panel of CIOs as to how they are supporting the business.

Conference Price: $219.00 per person

Each attendee will receive a certificate awarding 7 CPE credits for CISSP continuing education, in addition to 0.7 CEUs and 7 PDUs. CISSP is a registered certification mark of (ISC)², Inc.