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: Data is growing 50-80% each year. Regulations governing the retention, availability and access to data coupled with increased security threats and the likelihood of litigation has added to the CIO’s burden at a time when Boards and CEOs are demanding greater alignment with the business and increased efficiency. Soliciting support from legal counsel may help CIOs receive the funding they need to meet RTOs, RPOs and retention policies if the technological solutions they are requesting meet certain criteria.
IT Solution: It is virtually impossible for any CIO to stay ahead of the technology curve yet failing to deploy state-of-the-art solutions to protect corporate data may mean that the company has failed to meet its fiduciary responsibility to stakeholders and open the door to costly litigation. Law suits are a cost of doing business and the burden of producing data needed for defense falls on IT. Outsourcing backup and archiving tasks to proven, independent third party providers shifts the risk and the burden out of IT and allows CIOs to focus on improving productivity and enhancing the value of the company.

Discussion: The emergence and growing value of revisiting automated and non-automated business processes. Why is this happening? What skill sets are required to perform business process analysis? How much respective functional knowledge is necessary?

Discussion: Value, have you tried to determine what value IT has been delivering to the business and what the value IT needs to deliver in the future? How do you plan for the delivery of value and how do you know when value is truly delivered? Value can take on many forms, from making the business more profitable by operating the IT solutions more efficiency and reducing costs to delivering new solutions that enable the business to recognizing new business opportunities and revenues. Value can also be created by enabling new business processes that enable business units to operate more effectively and efficiently. The panel will discuss where they are currently delivering value to the business and where they see the opportunities to deliver new or enhanced value to the business units.

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: The demands of an increasingly competitive global marketplace – driven largely by the networked world – are driving companies to find new ways to grow their businesses, while at the same time they must operate as efficiently as possible. Responding to competitive pressures and market opportunities requires business systems – and supporting technology infrastructures – to be quickly adaptable and flexible in structure. That is where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes in. SOA takes everyday business applications and breaks them down into individual business functions and processes. An SOA lets you build, deploy and integrate these functions and processes independent of the applications and computing platforms on which they run. But with any new idea, an approach or strategy on how to implement in your enterprise is necessary. Moderated by Sophie Mayo, this panel of IBM SOA thought leaders will addresss the best practices to operationalize, standardize and fund SOA in your company and take your questions.

Discussion: Among today’s leading IT issues/challenges is the necessity or lack thereof for a definitive IT Strategy within the enterprise. Initially examining a workable definition and the obvious benefits of IT Strategy this distinguished panel with its varied IT executive experience, will quickly focus on the more controversial or debatable aspects of this critical IT topic. These topics or IT Strategic elements will include;

• The differences (if any) between Strategic IT Planning and a IT Strategic Plan.
• The existence of IT Strategy without a corresponding Business Plan.
• The process and respective effort to establish, develop and implement IT Strategy and then maintain its effectiveness on a perpetual basis.
• The necessity or benefit of merging the result of IT Strategy into the Budgeting Process.
• Recognizing that the technology landscape is constantly facing change and IT executives and respective staff are frequently changing jobs how can any IT Strategy be successfully conquered.

All of the above and more will be addressed thru an opening panel summary discussion quickly followed by constructive and spirited comments/questions from the session attendees

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: Viewing Information Security and Privacy from the three Sectors of the Private, Academic and Public communities, this high caliber group of experienced IT Leaders will address a variety of topic issues. They include:

1. What are the current/future challenges?
2. How can intellectual knowledge be protected?
3. Does physical or cyber security enter into IT responsibilities?
4. Where does the function of Security and Privacy report within the enterprise?

In addition the panel will involve the session attendees by soliciting their questions and comments to this critical IT challenge of Information Security and Privacy.

Description: Symantec is taking an in-depth look at the updated Internet threat report built with input from CIOs around the world.  Join Ariel Silverstone as he discusses the practical real-life experiences, the lessons learned from over 200 million connected devices. He will discuss noticed trends and what can be done to address these threats in your company. The updated threat report itself can be found at the Symantec display.

Business Problem: The session will showcase how customers can be more agile and create people-ready / people-centric business solutions using Microsoft technologies. The presentation will focus on the technology that are available today as well as technologies released over the next 6 to 18 months.

IT Solution: The session will highlight the investments Microsoft is making in new development technologies, platforms, and scenarios will transform how information workers create, consume, and leverage business information. The session will highlight technologies like Windows Vista, Office 12, and Visual Studio.

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: 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.

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: 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:

• Why is alignment so elusive?
• Does alignment still matter?
• When can enterprises ever expect to attain it?
• What do you personally do to drive it?
• How do you motivate and mobilize your organization to achieve it?
• How do you measure alignment?

Discussion: Whether you have been a CIO for many years or only a few, we all want to learn how to become even more effective. This session will ask some key questions of our panel of experienced CIO's to see:

• what they think are the most important characteristics of an effective CIO
• how they have overcome the obstacles they have encountered
• what educational programs have helped them and could help both newer and more experienced CIO's
• what techniques they have used to improve their effectiveness
• how they have worked to improve the quality of their personal lives, given the demands of the job.

Discussion: Leveraging identity and access management solutions to control & monitor access to logical and physical resources throughout the enterprise. Identity is the foundation for logical and physical access entitlement and organizations are burdened with the responsibility of justifying and auditing the access users are granted. The global economy has forced businesses to deploy strategic systems that increase their ability to adapt and respond to customer demands. Increased political oversight and public demands for readily accessible government services combined with budget restraints has placed similar demands on government entities. These complex technology eco-systems are comprised of diverse, distributed, and disconnected systems, which has resulted in the emergence of “Islands of Identity. User identities are often stored in multiple repositories and are rarely synchronized. Identity management has become increasingly more complex as application, system, and platform diversity grows to lower IT costs. The access management responsibilities of the internal IT staff are no longer limited to operating systems. They are expected to manage a user’s identity and privileges across a wide array of systems, platforms and applications which are often geographically dispersed.
The strategic deployment of an IAM solution can result in a significant ROI for an organization. Once implemented the organization is empowered to respond to their dynamic business climate, government & regulatory compliance while providing end to end audited access for employees, contractors, vendors, partners and customers.

Discussion: Much of the buzz surrounding CIO level issues and concerns focuses on big companies: large projects, large staffs and large budgets. By contrast, this session will concentrate on the viewpoint of the mid-size company CIO. What unique factors effect IT performance and issues in mid-cap companies? Are opportunities for innovation, staffing, the strategic value of IT, even career management, different at a mid-size firm? A panel of three experienced CIOs – from Aqua America, Lancaster General Hospital and Air Products and Chemicals Inc – will provide perspective on a variety of topics, with plenty of opportunity for audience participation.

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 two 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 Kimberley Clark Corporation, with operations spanning the globe.

Discussion: As the closing Keynote for the conference this panel of renowned IT visionaries will look forward and discuss the issues facing CIOs. Extensive audience interaction is expected on topics including Risk Management as it pertains to both Security and Compliance, Mobility and Collaboration for Flexibility, IT Governance for Business Alignment, Impact of Open Source on Futures, Outsourcing and Globalization—Are there limits?, Software as a Service, SOA, Role of Thin clients, Impact of Virtualization and others. Come join us for a look at your future.