Tracks
19 Tracks
| IT Leader Track: Applications | There are only three kinds of software solutions businesses need: ones that deliver business value better, ones that deliver business value faster and ones that deliver business value cheaper. The best ones do all three. Application leaders need to figure out how to provide this trifecta of software solutions in an increasingly complex development and management environment. From SOA to mashups to SaaS to cloud computing, the road to truly valuable software — solutions with worth you can prove — is difficult but navigable. For Application leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: Which approaches to application acquisition or development, integration and delivery, and ongoing support and maintenance will allow me to create the best, fastest and cheapest software solutions that deliver sustainable business value? What are the economics behind new architectures like SOA, WOA and EDA, and alternative delivery models for software, like SaaS and cloud? Are the cost savings, efficiencies and flexibility real and quantifiable? What are the tradeoffs? How do I justify my legacy modernization projects in the face of budget tightening? What metrics can I produce that will convince business leaders we’ll be better off in the long run for the investments made today? What investments should I be making today — in e-business, Web self-service, marketing and loyalty, price optimization and the like — to hasten my business’s return to growth post-recession? | APP |
| IT Leader Track: Business Intelligence & Information Management | The world’s business environment has changed dramatically in the last year. CIOs and their leadership teams need to adapt to new business models, manage changes in business processes, make knowledge workers more productive and exploit information (both inside and outside the firewall) as a strategic asset. Exceptional leadership is needed for five key initiatives: 1) Business intelligence and performance management; 2) enterprise content management; 3) social software and collaboration; 4) enterprise information management; and 5) data management and integration. CIOs will either provide the leadership and investment that these initiatives require to transform their business, or their business will be operating in the dark using outdated information, tools, skills, processes and business models. For Business Intelligence & Information Management Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: How do organizations get the most business value out of their business intelligence and information management initiatives? What’s the opportunity cost of failing to do so? What are the right set of skills, organizational models and governance required to make BI & IM leaders and initiatives successful? How do you fuse information inside the firewall (i.e., corporate data) with information and applications outside the firewall (e.g., consumer Web applications, social networking applications) to create a manageable and scalable set of innovative tools for my business leaders? How will the consolidation of major vendors with offerings for BI & IM initiatives affect my sourcing of solutions? How viable are the emerging vendors with offerings for these initiatives? | BIIM |
| IT Leader Track: Business Process Improvement | Improving business processes consistently ranks as the most important priority for CIOs and is a top priority for Symposium attendees this year. That’s not surprising, as process excellence contributes to a number of other business priorities, including customer acquisition and retention, risk management, worker productivity and, of course, the critical act of cost optimization. Our volatile macroeconomic environment highlights the importance of business process improvement and, for some enterprises, regaining control of critical processes will be a matter of survival. For Business Process Improvement Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: Done well, how will cost savings, time-to-market improvement, customer retention, and/or revenue growth flow from my process initiatives? Which kinds of business processes are the low-hanging fruit, the improvement of which will drive the highest yield in the shortest time? What steps should I take to improve disparate processes and manage them through a “business process competency center”? To judge the effectiveness and value of BPI initiatives, what should I measure and how should I measure it? What best practices can I use to model, analyze, execute and optimize business processes that span business units, organizational silos and geographies? | BPI |
| Virtual Track: Business Executives | BusExec | |
| Virtual Track: Cloud Computing | Cloud computing's impact is substantial and growing. We look at every facet of this emerging computing model in this collection of sessions throughout the week – from what it is, to when you should and shoudn't use it, to how you manage it, to its benefits and the inherent risks. | CC |
| IT Leader Track: CIO | CIOs face unprecedented challenges leading IT, needing to reduce costs while simultaneously delivering innovation to drive effectiveness. The CIO program at Symposium concentrates on the issues, decisions, needs and actions required for IT success. To succeed, CIOs must enhance IT performance through new tools and practices. Using these tools, CIOs will position IT and business expectations for IT now and in the future. The future requires defining new sources of IT-led innovation and competitive advantage. For CIOs, Symposium 2009 will answer: What must I do to raise IT performance and reduce IT costs? How will IT create business value and contribute to renewed business activity? What needs to be in my 2010 IT strategic plan, and what expectations should I be setting for the business and my organization in 2010? How do I get the people, resources and capabilities necessary to deliver on my plan? How do I motivate, measure and guide performance? What are the skills, abilities and relationships required of me and my team to lead today and into the future? What are the future source of IT-driven innovation and competitive advantage? | CIO |
| IT Leader Track: Infrastructure & Operations – Communications | Networking and communications technologies and services are the lifeblood of successful organizations. Yet, like in all areas of IT today, the business is demanding cost-optimized network services that are flexible (e.g., MPLS), provide process improvements (e.g., unified communications), and increase worker productivity (e.g., mobile applications and solutions). Communications leaders must continue to drive business priorities through the application of these communications technologies. For Communications Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: What strategies and tactics can I use to reduce my overall communications expenses, without sacrificing availability and reliability? What steps should I take to finally realize the efficiencies and opportunities that unified communications has promised for so long? Which advancements in mobile devices and applications are worth investing in – the ones that will truly and demonstrably improve worker productivity? What technologies and initiatives – such as Internet telephony, instant messaging, telepresence and mobile working – will help achieve cost savings in the enterprise overall? Which communications and networking vendors will survive the market consolidation and turmoil? | COMS |
| Virtual Track: Consumerization, Web 2.0 and Social Software | Friend or foe? How should you approach trends like consumerization and social computing? Banish them to protect the enterprise, or leverage them to innovate and grow? In this collection of sessions, we consider the benefits and risks of embracing consumerization, Web 2.0 and social software, and the opportunities lost in not embracing them. | CWSS |
| IT Leader Track: Enterprise Architecture | Enterprise architects in best-practice organizations are responding to today’s challenging environment by using the tools of strategy to manage IT costs while providing a platform for innovation. By moving beyond the “old school” obsession with granular standard setting and instead focusing on information exchange and business process management, enterprise architects are learning to love social computing and user-centric technology, not see them as threats. In addition, enterprise architects’ holistic, business-first perspective is helping to supercharge the development of new business models and provide more precise measures for business value delivery. For Enterprise Architecture Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: What immediate steps can I take to manage IT costs in a thoughtful and business-sensitive fashion? How can we resize, re-engineer and reality-check the IT project and IT asset portfolios to deliver more business value while reducing complexity and enabling change? How can we use pragmatic, “lightweight” planning approaches to enhance innovation and incorporate new technology without sacrificing the benefits of reduced complexity and economies of scale? | EA |
| Virtual Track: Emerging Trends and Technologies | You can't make wise investments today without a solid understanding of what will be, or at least what could be. In this collection of sessions, we look at a variety of emerging trends and technologies, assess how likely they are to endure and impact your enterprise, and help you prepare to capitalize on them. | ET&T |
| Virtual Track: Governance and Compliance | In challenging, volatile and highly scrutinized times, governance and compliance become all that more important – and a lot more challenging. In this collection of sessions, we look at best practices across governance and compliance initiatives. | G&C |
| Virtual Track: Green IT | Whether the "green" you seek from green IT is environmental consciousness, sustainability or simply the green of cost savings, this collection of sessions will help you understand what's real and what's hype when it comes to green IT. | GREEN |
| IT Leader Track: Infrastructure & Operations – Data Center, Client Computing and IT Operations | Combine virtualization, consolidation, automation and cloud computing – and throw in a recession – and you’ve got the makings for huge expectations of cost savings delivered by infrastructure & operations (I&O) leaders. Of course, you also can’t falter when it comes to improving service quality and increasing agility. And what about upgrading those aging PCs? Such is the plight of today’s I&O leaders. For I&O leaders focused on data centers, IT operations and client computing, Symposium 2009 will answer: Where and how can I wring yet more costs out of my data center and client computing environment, without sacrificing performance and reliability? How can I best utilize virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, ITIL and other key I&O trends to lower costs, improve service and increase agility? I can’t afford to move forward on all fronts – so which ones do I do now and which ones to do I defer? How do I demonstrate and articulate the value of servers, storage, PCs – all things infrastructure – to my business leaders? How do I drive efficiencies and cost savings in my help desk, support and configuration management systems – all things IT operations? And how do I also create a support environment that can easily scale up and down as my business does the same? | I&O |
| IT Leader Track: Keynote | Key | |
| Virtual Track: Modernization | It's been a rough year for modernization projects, as cost optimization has come into conflict with the expense of these complex projects. In this collection of sessions, we'll look at the importance of modernization efforts, how you justify investments in them, and how to get stalled projects moving again. | MOD |
| Virtual Track: Pattern-Based Strategy | With the benefit of hindsight, the early signals that form patterns of change are easy to spot. So why don’t business leaders ‘see it coming’ more often and act faster before change happens to them? The answer lies not in simply knowing more. There’s already too much information available that’s overlooked, ignored or under-utilized, as the general lack of commercial preparedness for the current economic situation showed. The solution is to implement a framework to proactively seek, detect, and act on signals that form patterns in the marketplace. This is what we call pattern-based strategy. | PBS |
| IT Leader Track: Program & Portfolio Management | Program and portfolio management leaders have extraordinary influence over what actually gets done in business technology – or, at least, you should. After all, it’s your job to value, prioritize and then see through your enterprise’s key initiatives. In today’s challenging economic environment, valuing, prioritizing and seeing through projects and programs is more challenging than ever, and requires new approaches. For Program & Portfolio Management Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: How can I create an optimal portfolio of programs and projects that deliver the most value at the least cost? What new approaches to valuing and prioritizing projects do I need to use to ensure I’m delivering the right mix for the business? How can I build flexibility and agility into my programs, so that my enterprise can capitalize on, or mitigate the risk of, today’s volatile and fast-changing business environment? | PPM |
| IT Leader Track: Security & Risk Management | What are the elements of an The irony of great security, risk management and business continuity programs is that they’re appreciated by the business only when something goes wrong or, ideally, a great wrong is averted. Part of this is the immature treatment of these disciplines, but part of it lies in security and risk management leaders’ failure to clearly define and articulate the business value of what they do. You need to create a proactive program that appropriately addresses risk, meets compliance requirements, and is directly linked to business performance. For Security & Risk Management Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: How do I create clear links between risk management initiatives and business performance? How much security is enough security, particularly with ever-tightening budgets? What are the elements of an effective proactive program to address reasonably anticipated threats? In the absence of a breach or disaster, how do I drive executive support and funding for a proactive approach to security, risk management and business continuity? | SRM |
| IT Leader Track: Sourcing & Vendor Relationships | The only nice thing about a recession is the shift to a buyer’s market. Are you capitalizing on that? This is a natural time to refresh your sourcing strategy and reassess your sourcing engagements with strategic vendors and service providers, to clearly understand whether or not you’re getting out of those relationships what you’d expected. And it’s also time to consider the wide variety of alternative sourcing models emerging in the market (e.g., SaaS, infrastructure utilities), to see if they would fit your needs as well or better. For Sourcing & Vendor Relationships Leaders, Symposium 2009 will answer: Why, when and how should I reassess sourcing strategies? What course corrections are indicated by the current economic conditions? What specific actions and demands should I take and make when negotiating and renegotiating my sourcing contracts? What are the benefits and pitfalls of emerging alternative delivery models like SaaS, infrastructure utilities and business process utilities? Are they mature enough to deliver the flexibility and reliability I need? How do I create a world-class strategic vendor management program that not only helps me capitalize on today’s buyer’s market, but also makes me stronger in my provider dealings over the long term? | SVR |
