Every session provided insightful perspectives that I am able to apply to my company. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to interact with and get to know my fellow CIOs on a personal level.
Zack Hicks, CIO & Group VPToyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc.
The biggest threat to the future of the IT profession is the growing divide between the skills needed for new jobs and the skills currently available in the marketplace. Research shows that the growing skills mismatch is caused by a leaky pipeline, poor support for early education and low degree production for engineering and computer science. Left unchecked, this talent shortage will imperil the strategic value IT can bring to the enterprise. Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, will discuss the talent shortage and how CIOs can become advocates incite passion in the IT profession.
Many companies have cut back in recent years due to the economy and budget pressures. But successful companies looking to maintain a competitive edge have found ways to wisely invest in technology. For Scott Di Valerio, the CFO of Coinstar, Inc., transformational work in IT and engineering for the past year-and-a-half has been the driving force behind Coinstar’s ongoing success. This session will discuss the value technology brings to the organization from the CFO perspective and how to enable technology innovation and spend based on the company’s strategic direction.
Session discovery topics:
Staying relevant: proactively changing to fluctuations in your niche
Sustaining success: organizational design, structure and implementation
Driven by the business mandate to create a culture of innovation and drive collaboration, Salvatore Calta and the Business Transformation team are focused on three key elements of transformation: business, IT and work. Calta will present IBM’s internal transformation journey, detailing how IBM has transformed to meet financial targets, gained efficiency through the virtualization and standardization of global infrastructure, and embraced cloud computing and business analytics. Calta will also explore how IT supports employees around the world in the age of mobile technology.
Session discovery topics:
Business transformation — establishing governance and integrating IT with the business
IT transformation — enabling efficiency with technology
Work transformation — fostering mobility and collaboration transformation
In the midst of economic rebound, many IT organizations are still being asked to strictly manage, if not further cut costs from their budgets. Weyerhaeuser has taken a unique approach to addressing this challenge of cost reduction. With the retirement of their CIO in 2010, Weyerhaeuser leadership asked Brad Pomroy, Steve Hill and Chris Van Liew to fulfill the functions of the CIO and find a way to cut costs. With a 20 percent reduction year over year for the last three years, join Pomroy, Hill and Van Liew as they discuss how their roles as three strategic IT leaders have allowed Weyerhaeuser to simplify processes, streamline collaboration, and maintain agility, all while achieving their cost reduction goal.
Throughout the last decade, security practitioners have talked about many keys to being accepted, sitting at the table and improving information security within their organization. These included such ideas as risk management, understanding the business, aligning with the business and delivering return on investment. Information security is part of the business and needs to behave that way. To do that, you must be relevant to the organization. Join Eric Cowperthwaite as he discusses the critical steps CISOs should take to be a strategic part of the business.
The adage, ‘adapt or die’ has proven true over the last decade as organizations have found ways to survive the turbulent economic times. The CIO has proven just as adaptive, finding ways to remain relevant in today’s high-performance enterprise. Looking at the maturing technology landscape, how is the ‘traditional’ IT organization changing to keep pace? What skill-set must CIOs develop next to remain indispensable? Join moderator John Hughes in this discussion on how to redefine your IT organization and re-energize your role as CIO.
Downsizing, outsourcing and cost reduction remain disruptive factors in today’s business environment. All the while, business leaders must drive growth and profit while delivering results for the end user through forward thinking strategies. Join Andrew Macaulay as he shares Clearwire’s story of successful business alignment, transforming the people, processes, and technology behind the scenes. When the reputation of your IT organization is viewed as a value add, the people behind the product will continue to feel valued, while helping to maintain a tight bottom line.
Session Discovery Topics:
Transforming the people and process
Taking technology to the next level of business enablement
The struggle to protect the organization’s information and systems continues, despite significant investment in information security controls. The exploitation of information security vulnerabilities by our adversaries is inevitable. The failure to protect information assets by organizations is partly due to inadequate security strategies, and risk management must be an important part of any successful information security strategy and program. The risk management process requires a consistent and coordinated method to analyze, mitigate, implement, and assess risks. This process must be repeatable, straightforward to use, and easy to understand. Join Dr. Ewell as he discusses the risk management process and how to implement a program that will help promote meaningful dialog with executive management to relate your information security program issues, mitigation strategies, and resource needs.
The last few years have brought a significant number of influencers and disruptors to the technology landscape — the implications of these new trends will most certainly change the CIO’s role within the business. New technologies require new skill sets and the future CIO will need to know how to innovate quickly, fail early and learn fast. A veteran CIO, Don Riley will discuss the outlook of today’s technology landscape and what skills he believes the future CIO must have to successfully drive and challenge the business. Join Riley to see how he’s navigating disruptive technologies while building technology leaders of the future.
For Drexel DeFord, the CIO at Seattle Children’s Hospital, the downturn in the economy meant an aging and slower fleet of PCs. Clinicians were spending too much time waiting for PCs to boot up rather than studying a patient’s electronic health record, creating challenges for providers, patients and families. Together with VP and CTO Wes Wright, the Children’s team moved from a PC-fleet to private cloud, implementing virtual desktop and replacing more than 3,000 PCs with zero-client devices. The results: time saved, investment returned, workflow improved, easier management of images and improved security. DeFord and Wright will present on how they have leveraged technology at Seattle Children’s to facilitate better care for patients and more efficient care for Children’s Hospitals across the Northwest.
Adapting to the speed and frequency of change in technology is getting much more difficult. Organizations are looking to the IT team to help anticipate these changes in order to support their strategic directives. A rising challenge that CIOs are facing has less to do with technology and more to do with transitioning people to align with the overall strategic direction of the company. How do you counter resistance from the leadership and employees? What does it take to get buy-in? Beth Galliher-Ponce has faced similar challenges within Milgard and will share what she found to work best within her organization.
CISOs continue to leverage mobile technologies to deliver effective and progressive capabilities to the business. Organizations are increasingly deploying mobile devices and apps, social and cloud-based services, and are being rewarded with significant productivity gains, cost savings and a higher level of customer satisfaction. But how do IS leaders support corporate applications on mobile devices in order to enable the workforce, all while balancing the issue of security? What level of protection is required when you have mobile clients with access to your network? What kind of policies should be in place when you have different classifications of data? Join your information security peers in this session to hear lessons learned on mobile innovation and gain insights into strategies on balancing security challenges.
The scope of end-user technology knowledge is changing at breakneck speed. Every day brings new rules of engagement between the customer and the enterprise. In a world where customers are fully in the driver seat and have power over our brands and businesses and can even dictate the delivery method of services, how does the CIO stay ahead? Anne Saunders, senior marketing executive and board member at companies like Nautilus, Starbucks, Bank of America, and AT&T, will describe the evolution of customer engagement over the past decade. What does the CIO need to know about the way today’s end-user consumes technology? How can partnership between the CIO and CMO provide your company with a competitive advantage? This session will give firsthand insights into how a seasoned ambassador of world-class brands has seen technology change the way the customer interacts with business.