Discussion: Today’s CIO is a business leader involved at the board room level providing technology as an integral part of the business solution. This discussion will focus on the role the CIO plays on the leadership team and the positive characteristics that make him/her effective in this role. We will also address how to re-make yourself and staff to meet the challenges of the changing landscape. Many significant opportunities/issues face the CIO daily. What are they and how do we address them? What are some best practices that allow you to be an effective CIO?

Business Problem: What if you could take 300 servers without VMware software and move them to 8 servers, 1 Rack with VMware software? In a recent Gartner report, it is estimated that through 2007, organizations with more than 200 servers will waste between $500,000 and $720,000 annually supporting underutilized application/server combinations. VMware Virtual Infrastructure Solutions allow corporations to run multiple Operating Systems on a single server or workstation. The impact of this is that enterprises can use dramatically less hardware and manage their existing hardware more efficiently.
IT Solution:

• Server Consolidation and Containment: Learn how to bring unmanageable server sprawl under control by using virtualization to run multiple workloads on few servers and to reduce future needs for physical servers.
• Development & Test Optimization: Transform the software lifecycle by using virtualization to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve quality in development and test.
• Business Continuity: Reduce downtime by making high availability and disaster recovery solutions more cost-effective, simpler and more reliable.

Discussion:A recent Forrester article highlighted that aligning IT strategy with business strategy has been one of the top issues confronting IT and business executives for more than 20 years. Given this focus and attention over the years, most enterprises should finally have attained good IT and business alignment, but recent polls of CIOs and business executives reveal that aligning IT and business goals remains as a top concern. Our session will bring together leading CIO's to discuss:

Business Problem: Economic forces and accelerating change are driving the need for flexibility and re-use. As the marketplace globalizes, new markets, new workforces, and new competitors are making companies look for ways to adapt more quickly. While business leaders were focused mostly on cost-containment in the past, we’re seeing that growth is back at the top of the today’s CEO’s agenda and that growth demands the flexibility to be more nimble than competitors.

IT Solution: Service Oriented Architecture has the potential to create new opportunities for businesses of all kinds. IT advances such as virtualization and the more widespread use of open standards are giving companies the tools necessary to collaborate and redesign business processes. These elements converge to enable businesses to reshape the way their IT assets create value, enabling them to develop innovative solutions that help deliver new products and services to the market. At the same time, these elements enable businesses to reuse existing assets, which ultimately give them the flexibility to address market demands faster and more efficiently. In a survey of more than 450 CEOs world–wide, revenue growth and increased responsiveness were seen as the most important needs in today’s economy. This isn’t to say that cost reduction has lost its importance. On the contrary, businesses are looking for ways to make better use of the investments that they already have. In another world-wide survey of CIOs, reuse emerged as a top driving force.

Business Problem: As the number of remote and mobile workers increases, so does the amount of critical business data being created at the edge of the network. Most organizations tend to ignore this distributed data, leaving that information at risk. Availability and accessibility to critical business data means it needs to be protected and secure for recovery and compliance purposes.

IT Solution: Utilizing Continuous Data Protection such as PC backup and recovery, Server backup and recovery and DataDefense that automatically backup and protect distributed data that resides on devices operated by remote and mobile workers. Server and PC backup and recovery backs up and protects that data so it can be recovered. DataDefense is a multi-layered security application that can automatically encrypt and eliminate data on a laptop or PC if that device is lost or stolen.

Discussion: Confusion surrounds IT Service Management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library(ITIL) concerning goals, expectations, implementation, and tool requirements. The goal of the discussion is to succinctly describe each, their relationship to each other, and how they fit into an IT strategy involving both process re-engineering and tools to facilitate the processes. Presenters will deliver information defining both tool and process strategies and share real world experiences from some of the countries largest implementations. Capital One Finance, with 3000+ IT personnel, 2000+ servers, 20,000+ desktops, and data storage capabilities rivaling The Library of Congress and Cox Communications, with approximately 6.7 million total customers.

Discussion: Today's CIO is challenged to support the highest levels of corporate performance within a strict budget. The risks of information security, retention and compliance loom large. Enterprise data management strategies enable you to accelerate performance while controlling cost and mitigating risk. Join this panel for a practical, in-depth discussion on managing your enterprise data to unlock business value and deliver results.

Discussion: To respond to market demands organizations are changing their business models more rapidly than ever before. A sound sourcing model and sourcing core competency are top priorities in today’s competitive global marketplace. Optimizing this business model requires investment in your people as well as a sourcing process. Developing a sourcing core competency in your organization starts with a strategy that defines:

• Business objectives
• What business services must change
• An execution strategy to achieve the desired outcome

This session will address strategic sourcing options and get viewpoints from leading IT executives in a panel format.

Discussion: Explore the changing world of not only Infrastructure Technology, but Business Continuity. Organizations are facing governance and other fiscal and fiduciary requirements that are forcing costly decisions that may or may not close the gap between a business and its IT capability at time of crisis. Our speaker will discuss the drivers and justifications for building sound infrastructures that will not only make businesses more resilient at time of crisis, but support business application and process requirements more effectively on a daily basis. Learn how the business context of IT can help support the business value of IT.

Discussion: This panel discussion will highlight best practices and lessons learned about CIOs' most critical issues. Subjects to be discussed include: How do I relate to management at the boardroom level? How do I keep the IT organization aligned with business goals? How appropriate are outsourcing and offshoring for our enterprise? How do I manage a virtual organization? How do I ensure that business management has the information they need to optimize corporate performance? What roles should emerging technologies such as service-oriented architecture and software-as-a-service have in our business? This is designed to be an interactive discussion with audience participation. Bring the issues which keep you awake at night for a lively discussion.

Discussion: Join us for a Question and Answer panel discussion with representatives from various organizations to discuss the pitfalls and shortcuts to building, managing and maintaining a quality Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan in todays chaotic world.

• How have firms found real ways to fund a program?
• How have organizations managed to keep a DR or BC plan current in the face of ever changing technology and business process?
• How does acquisition impact a plan?

One of the more significant features of the CIO Forum and Executive IT Summit is the opportunity to meet with your peers and discuss and explore solutions to common issues. To facilitate this human resource networking capability we have initiated and installed in the Forum's agenda several "Birds of a Feather" quorums. They are designed to be simple, informal and very discussion oriented. Yet at the same time they will be facilitated by an experienced professional in the subject matter field. We are confident that as an attendee to the "Birds of a Feather" you will gain maximum benefit from your presence and participation.

Presented by: Doug Hubbard, President, Hubbard Decision Research, Inventor of Applied Information Economics (AIE) and has critical praise from Gartner, Meta, Forester, and Giga Information Group. His articles and interviews are published in CIO Magazine, Information Week and Baseline Magazine. He derives his findings from 45 case studies done with the AIE method over the last 10 years.

Business Problem: Most IT organizations don't measure risk in the same way an actuary or statistician would and most don't attempt to build economic models to estimate even the most "intangible" benefits. This results in missing some of the most important trends, risks and metrics in IT today.

Solution: Using data from 45 statistical case studies with a total of over 3,000 variables and hundreds of tracked forecasts, Hubbard has found four key revelations that may profoundly affect what you measure, where you invest and how you control risks Hubbard Decision Research, Published numerous times in CIO Magazine

Discussion: Demands for increased service and responsiveness, decreasing budgets and the need to maximize the use of physical assets with limited skills are common realities of IT management today. IT Executives must find a way to continue to support their mission-critical workload while developing and delivering new products and services, in most cases, without additional funding for these projects. While at the same time, the business demands increased availability of business processes and flexibility to respond to changes in opportunities. Virtualization technology, applied to systems and storage can help to provide a solution for these challenges. This panel of Virtualization thought leaders and practitioners will highlight real-life examples of the use of Virtualization technology and answer your questions.