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: How does IT ensure it is viewed as a critical element of profitable growth for the enterprise despite mandated IT initiatives such as compliance.

IT Solution:

• CIO strategies for growing IT and its value in growth companies
• Moving compliance initiatives from defensive to offensive
• Achieving financial return from business continuity investments

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: 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: 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 availabilty 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.

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:

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?

Discussion: Our corporate IT organizations face the same challenges as our customers with regards to understanding companies’ business goals and more closely aligning technology with these business goals. Lance Perry will discuss creating business value within IT -- business and IT alignment -- using Cisco's own internal challenges, initiatives, and experiences as an example. Topics include business process management, alignment of business and technology architectures, and IT Governance.

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: Every day the media, analysts, and vendors tell you that IP Communications (IPC) is the great enabling technology. Listen as a panel of technology executives share with you the reality of IPC, from the early decision making process through implementation and the resulting ongoing benefits of the convergence of voice services. Join the panel in a discussion of the myths versus realities as you take the opportunity to ask questions and benefit from their experiences.

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 sever "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 subjectmatter field. We are confident that as an attendee to the "Birds of a Feather" youwill gain maximum benefit from your presence and participation.

Discussion: CIO’s may have different experiences and expectations involving benchmarking. There is a wide range of opinions as to the scope and potential value driven from benchmarking. Some of the justification ranges from efforts that have a laser-like approach to improving a particular service or even a process within a service, to desires to compare all IT Functionality versus comparable peers and competitors. There is no single motive. However, there appear to be many similarities across industries on the CIO’s perceptions of the pre-requisites for benchmarking success of any scope.
The CIO forum will host an interactive session where Charlotte area IT Leaders will solicit feedback on these pre-requisites:

• The corporate culture that supports collecting and sharing information;
• Understanding of common definitions for services;
• Reliable, timely systems for collecting qualitative and quantitative information;
• Proper procedures and methodologies to protect the anonymity of the participants, and
• A reputable third party to collect, segment and analyze the information.

The outcome from the dialogue is to discuss the commonalities and to see whether a regional network of IT professionals would drive benefits.

Discussion: Have you tried to measure or forecast the value of a proposed IT project or your entire IT portfolio? Are you struggling with whether to adopt a new method? Is there reason to believe it actually works? Avoid the pitfalls and identify winning strategies by learning from those who have been there. An impressive panel of IT leaders has come together to discuss how they measure the value of IT and how they justify IT investments by forecasting value. The panel will discuss what methods they’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t.