Discussion: The focus of the session is for our panelists to review their industry experiences with Hiring, Motivating, Training and Retaining the Very Best in IT. They will share how they made it through the ranks in IT and why they chose their career paths. The panel will discuss hiring criteria and key competencies required. The specifics of creating a training program that is sustainable and building a development path for your teams. Once your team is established; how do you keep it, energize it and nurture it. What program works? Why we need to focus on retention strategies and succession planning. How do you incorporate these techniques into your daily tactical routine?

• Introductions and "how we got where we are"
• Hiring Process
• Motivating
• Training and Development
• Retaining the very best

Business Problem: The major issue being addressed is the reduction of downtime due to planned outages (e.g. hardware upgrades or maintenance) as well as unforeseen incidents such as server failures, power failures or viruses. We will be demonstrating how simple it is with newer technologies to upgrade server and storage, and provide simple yet robust protection from all types of disaster scenarios.
IT Solution: Server and Storage virtualization can help by providing the following:

• zero downtime hardware upgrades and maintenance
• zero downtime data and workload migrations
• simplified offsite replication of application data and server images

The use of virtualization as a means to reduce or eliminate both planned and unplanned downtime has become widely adopted. Hear from our panelists, who have adopted virtualization to eliminate planned downtime and address various emergencies such as server failures, data corruption, and site level disasters.

Discussion: The demand for trusted information continues to spiral upward, driven not only by investments in CRM, ERP, SCM, BI, and data warehousing, but also next-generation strategic initiatives in master data management (MDM) and information-as-a-service (IaaS). The cross-enterprise complexity of these emerging business requirements have led to an obvious yet often ignored fact: Technology is only part of the solution. Until you understand and embrace data governance, your information management initiatives won't deliver their promised value. Effective governance requires defining organizational roles and responsibilities, including ownership of the processes and policies by which information is captured, maintained, and consumed. In this session we will explore best practices and shared learnings for implementing effective governance strategies, while avoiding costly mistakes.

Business Problem: Driving innovation and value across the enterprise with open source.
IT Solution: Open Source - For more than a decade open source and Linux have helped to significantly transform the economics of IT. Fueled by an enduring collaborative model, it has had far reaching affects on the value of enterprise computing and innovation. In her talk, Tom Rabon, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs of Red Hat, will draw on the needs of today's CIOs and map the adoption of open source in the enterprise. As we look ahead, hear how Red Hat is helping customers realize better performance from development to deployment, not just through Linux, but through a deeper open source strategy.

Workshop: This executive session is designed to be a group learning experience based on career management challenges. This workshop will include a group work session based on actual career situations. Each group will present its findings, followed by open discussion and sharing of ideas. In addition, the actual results of the situation will be presented. Learn from the experts as well as your peers. Take a huge leap towards enhancing your career.

Discussion: Service management, asset management, service catalog, service costing: These ITIL concepts are all pieces of a bigger puzzle that, when successfully implemented, puts clients in control of their utilization of IT as a strategic resource. Just as important, it can help ensure that IT has the resources to deliver what’s needed. This presentation looks at how these ITIL practices can help you, while pointing out some key pieces that are still missing. Presenters include an expert on financial management, an expert on asset management, and an IT executive who has put ITIL to work. This is not a session on arcane ITIL theory. The focus is on practical and actionable information for meeting and exceeding ITIL requirements

Discussion: IT faces an ongoing challenge to satisfy the strategic and business unit needs of the corporation. This session will explore the issues faced in pursuing the elusive goal of ‘alignment’, and how IT can structure itself to best reach toward this goal.

Discussion: A vital part of Business Continuity (BC) is Disaster Recovery (DR). In this section we will give a high level overview of VMware Virtualization in the context of Disaster Recovery. We will explore the challenges of traditional DR, the properties of virtualization for DR, and how you would use VMware to achieve DR. We will look at several methods or steps that can bring you over time from a semi-traditional backup / restore method to a fully automated hot site DR.

Discussion: Darwin will speak to the realities of the CIO’s role today and the requirements going forward, which will be both more complex and require more leadership capability. Beyond that, Darwin will speak to the "call to action" for those in the field, if CIO’s are to be responsive. This call to action will be about leadership that can deliver the basics of IT in a flawless manner. It is about earning ones way into the enterprise’s inner circle of leadership with earned trust, respect and credibility. It is about leading change in ones self and others. Therefore, what must CIO’s do or do differently. This will include proactive approaches to the transformation required between where CIO’s are today and where CIO’s must be tomorrow. Finally, there will be a period of dialog with the attendees to explore, challenge, probe and test concepts presented.

Discussion: Is your organization facing budget cutbacks? Many IT decision makers are eager to learn how to continue to support and maintain their IT Infrastructure while cutting their operating costs. The breakout session will focus on considerations for customers who wish to simplify their IT Infrastructure, consolidate workloads, and increase availability. This panel will discuss Open Source and integrated virtualization capabilities with a choice of deployments: standalone, virtual servers, cloud computing or software appliances. Unlike expensive, proprietary solutions, Open Source allows the use of Enterprise Linux, Solaris and Windows. Learn how open source solutions can virtualize any server without additional software, operating system subscriptions, or hardware.

Discussion: Hear directly from graduates about what RLF has meant to them and their career, home, and community. Learn how RLF has helped graduates gain authentic leadership; through discovery - unique to each individual - and time for reflection and for lessons to take root, resulting in permanent change.

Discussion: Geospatial technologies have gone from creating a simple map at a standalone workstation to sharing spatial data across all departments of an organization, and throughout the world. This panel will discuss the what, how, where, and who of geospatial technologies. The session will answer in an interactive format three questions: What are geospatial technologies? How has the technology evolved into an enterprise wide system? Where does a CIO find the next generation of geospatial professionals? This discussion will focus on the foundation of geospatial technologies and the value of integrating spatial and non-spatial information to improve operations within an organization. CIO’s will gain knowledge and insight into the benefits of geospatial technologies and where to find someone to implement and keep it all running.