Agenda

Thursday June 7, 2007

Overland Park Marriott

7th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium

Knowledge & Networking
7:30 am Attendee Check-In; Breakfast Served: Capitol Breakfast Buffet
8:20 am Welcome Message
8:30 am Leadership Intelligence: Developing the Next Generation of IT Leaders
 


Robert A. Rouse
Director of the Regional SIM Leadership Forum & Professor of Computer Science
Washington University

Leadership remains the competitive advantage in conquering IT complexities of the 21 st Century. It is the key for IT professionals and leaders in government, non-profits, business and social enterprises. Leadership is the critical success factor for individual contributors, managers as well as those with formal leadership responsibilities. Organizations can develop leaders by intentionally providing experiences and educational opportunities to a wide variety of talented individuals

Most leaders discover their own unique and authentic leadership capacities. They acquire them through continuously learning from day to day experiences as well as reflecting on their own lives, defining core beliefs and personal aspirations. Becoming an effective leader is not learning the “10 Lessons of Great Leaders”, but discovering one’s own authentic strengths and style. Leadership is a combination of what you know and who you are. Learning the “things” of leadership like strategic planning, financial analysis, and industry knowledge are necessary but not sufficient to know your personal capacities to influence through your core values and ability to get others to follow your vision and direction.

Over the past fifteen years the Leadership Forum has helped high potentials discover themselves as leaders. What works for them and their organizations will be the heart of this presentation. Current senior leaders with the responsibility of developing new leaders for the future and those who aspire to leading in their lives will discover proven paths to build their own capacities and the capacities of their organizations.
9:45 am
Empowering the Information Worker in a Professional Services Firm
 
Sponsored by Microsoft

Matt Bremer
Software Engineering Manager
Bryan Cave

Bryan Cave represents a wide variety of business, financial, institutional and individual clients in a range of matters and is a leader among corporate, transactional and litigation law firms. Discussion will focus on how Bryan Cave is leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to eliminate internal economic and geographic boundaries allowing them to operate by their "One Firm" philosophy and bring to bear the expertise and resources of their lawyers and professional staff worldwide for their clients every day.
9:45 am Grid Storage Architecture, Next Generation of Enterprise Storage
 

Sponsored by NEC

Michael Thomas
Storage Architect
Federal Reserve Bank, Kansas City
   
Is your enterprise storage environment still using decades-old RAID based arrays? Does your IT organization have problems with scalability, manageability and resiliency? Are there pain points in your backup and recovery process? What is "grid storage" and how will it affect the enterprise in the next few years?  If these issues face your organization, attend this session focused on Grid Storage, where we will host an interactive discussion on:
  • What storage issues face today’s IT organizations?
  • Where have storage products failed in the past?
  • What makes grid easier to manage than SAN? How does grid storage compare to SAN?
  • Is grid storage the next step in the natural evolution in SAN and RAID?
  • What is the business value of grid storage architecture?

Michael Thomas from the Federal Reserve Bank has done extensive research and quantifying the impact that the adoption of grid storage could have on his storage environment. It appears that early implementations may target disk based backups and network file servers with solutions for disk based backups hitting the market this year. Grid storage represents a big advance in enterprise class storage, find out what this next evolution in storage is all about.
9:45 am IT Procurement: Reduce Costs by 30%- 40%, and Get What you Want Every Time
 
Sponsored by Corporate Contracts

Steve Tesdahl
SVP of IT
Aviva

Who is negotiating for your organization's IT software, hardware, services, and telecom?  Vendor salespeople routinely receive several weeks of training each year to ensure that they get their company the best possible deal, which translates into you paying more and receiving less.  Unless you have a similarly trained and experienced negotiator working for you, it is almost impossible for you to control your costs and get the terms that you need (like service levels, and the right to terminate if you aren't getting the level of service you require).  That's where Corporate Contracts comes in...
11:00 am
Building Competitive Leverage
 
Sponsored by Relational Technology Solutions
Joel Sorenson
AVP of Technology
HNTB Corporation

In the current economic environment, corporations achieve financial leverage through a complex balancing act that spans capital structure, disciplined management, maintaining a strategic focus on core competencies, and aligning management and owner incentives.  While financial leverage has long been a crucial factor in assessing a company's viability in the marketplace, technological leverage is emerging as an equally critical element. 

According to updated figures on worldwide IT spending released in January by analyst firm IDC, organizations spent $1.16 trillion on information technology in 2006 and will increase spending at a compound annual growth rate of 6.3% to reach $1.48 trillion in 2010.  With so many resources being dedicated to IT, and with technology's ever-increasing role in providing business-critical functionality (such as converged telecommunications networks, e-commerce portals, server and storage resources), the need for organizations to build and maintain technological leverage has never been more important. 

Attendees to this session will gain insights into the following: 
  • Learning how the combination of financial and technological leverage can assist companies in managing diversity.
  • Exploring how strategic positioning with manufacturers drives competitive leverage in the marketplace.
  • Demonstrating how technological leverage is achieved through competitive analysis, insights into pricing structure, and knowledge of secondary markets.
  • Highlighting the role of strategic independent partnerships in fostering strategic, cost-effective relationships with top-tier technology vendors.
  • Highlighting the potential savings and synergies resulting from acquiring equipment through channel partner relationships.
11:00 am Leveraging VOIP (Voice Over internet Protocol) Technology in Network Infrastructure:
 
Sponsored by ACS

Scott O'Dell
IT Director - Sourcing and Service Delivery
Hallmark Cards, Inc

Attendees will learn about and be encouraged to share experiences surrounding the implementation of VOIP technologies;   
  • Its value to their company and listen to how Hallmark Cards, Inc leverages the technology for network integration and telecommunication
  • Talk through the key lessons learned of a 5,000+ phone deployment
  • Discuss vendor offerings
  • Discuss IT security components
  • Gain a better understanding for a business case for VOIP & MPLS technology, how its currently being used, and the future direction for
    integrating it into your company's network architecture.
11:00 am Virtualization of Windows Environments
 
Sponsored by Choice Solutions

Joe Blank
Lead Systems Administrator
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City

With the ever increasing demand for server resources, as well as 24X7 availability requirements, BCBSKC needed the ability to efficiently provision hardware, provide a dependable, recoverable environment and to be able to easily restore systems in the event of a disaster. In this break out we will go over the following::

  1. Get more out of your servers
  2. Leverage virtualization to simplify Disaster Recovery
  3. Avoiding the obstacles of virtualization
  4. Justification Strategies
11:45 am Lunch Served: Business Casual Deli Buffet
12:45 pm Disaster Recovery Planning - Options Evolve with Newer Technologies
 

Sponsored by Uptime

Kevin Cohen
Vice President, Corporate IT
Security Benefit Corporation

In this session, you'll share ideas and discuss practices and processes around Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning.  Kevin Cohen will talk about key considerations for Security Benefit Corporation and how emerging capabilities in server virtualization, storage,  IP telephony and enhanced options for wide-area connectivity have made hot-site DR much more than a possibility.
12:45 pm Active Archiving of Unstructured Data: Operations and Compliance
 
Sponsored by Sun Microsystems

Rick Stones
Director, Enterprise Solutions
Kansas City Southern

In this session, participants can share ideas about practices and infrastructures involved in active archiving of email and other unstructured data for both operational and compliance purposes. Stones will begin the session by briefly describing the business problem at Kansas City Southern, and the technology solution currently being implemented there. The remainder of the session will provide an excellent opportunity for participants to share and learn from the experiences of each other.
1:45 pm Effective Change! Rebuilding an Organization from the Ground Up!
 

Dan Jarvis
CIO
Unified Government of Wyandotte County

Three years ago Unified Government was operating with several different platforms within their IT environment. This was very inefficient and created barriers to using the new technologies available. This session will share the journey, from concept to reality, on how the county has gone from several platforms to one and how that has allowed them to leverage new technologies.  Along the way a formal Project Methodology was developed to make sure the vision of one platform became a reality.  Retiring old technologies and replacing it with new technologies usually means the loss of jobs.  Unified Government of Wyandotte County made the commitment to not lay anyone off. Part of the transition included investing in education and training to move the employees to different positions.  With the transition complete the county is now in the process of rolling out new technologies that would have never been a reality with the old platforms (VOIP, Disaster Recovery Strategy, Fiber to the home, Microsoft CRM etc.)
2:45 pm Enterprise Prioritization at American Century Investments
 

Gudrun Neumann
SVP, CTO
American Century Investments

This discussion will highlight the following areas:
  • Challenges to enterprise prioritization
  • What problems did we try to solve
  • A model that aligns IT discretionary resources to company priorities
  • Alternative models considered
  • How do you measure success
2:45pm Enabling Real Time IT
 

Kevin Sparks
VP & CIO
Blue Cross Blue Shield

Scenario: On a hot July evening your family is watching your son play a competitive game of baseball.  Your son hits a thundering shot to right field and rounds the bag for third.  The throw is on the way from the cut off forcing your son to slide head first into third base.  Your son's left arm is accidentally caught under the base during the slide causing a compound fracture.  You rush to help your son while at the same time whipping out your smart phone.  You click on your family page, you hover over your son with the broken arm and click the emergency button.  Your phone notifies Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City (BCBSKC) that an emergency situation has happened to your son.  Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City sends the closest location and directions to a service provider that can help your son back to your phone.  At the same time, the BCBSKC system, fires your son's personal health record to the facility.  In addition, BCBSKC notifies your son's normal Doctor's system that an emergency has happened and that your son is in route to XYZ emergency facility.  Your Doctor's system fires your son's clinical data to be combined with that of BCBSKC.  Meanwhile at XYZ emergency facility, their system is alerted that your son is in route where all demographic information is verified as well as payment type.  Your son arrives at XYZ emergency facility where he is greeted by name and the Doctor knows your son is allergic to certain medication.  There is no paper work in the administration process and your son is well on his way to receiving his first cast his buddies can sign. 

As high bandwidth networks continue to proliferate in combination with smart GPS enabled end user devices, your company will be faced with making the investments necessary to service real time demands. 

In this session, we will briefly cover how BCBSKC is making investments to meet real time consumer demand and then open the floor for a good discussion on how others are coping to meet the changes and survive the blistering pace of technological change. 
1.  Right here right now just in time consumer demands.
2.  The Enterprise Service Bus and application to application communication
3.  Turbo Charged Service Oriented Architecture
4.  Energizing the Supply Chain
2:45 pm Pack Rat or Purger?  Which do Judges Require? - Wrestling with Electronic Information in a Litigious Environment
 

Athelene Gieseman
CIO
Stinson, Morrison, Hecker


Kris Farnen
Partner
Stinson, Morrison, Hecker
  The demise of Arthur Andersen, the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the terrorist acts committed at the World Trade Center have heightened the awareness of companies to the importance of protecting one of their most valuable assets -- their information.  Now there is a new reason to be concerned.  A recent change to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure has forced companies to re-evaluate the management of their electronic information.  Document and information management is the responsibility of all companies.  But how do you get the attention of your company's management to give you the support you need to meet these new requirements?  In this session, we will discuss the reasons that companies should ensure that their document retention guidelines are being followed, or implement guidelines if none exist.  We will also arm you with information to discuss with your executives and legal counsel to ensure that they understand the implications should they chose to ignore the technical complexities of a retention program.  Finally, we will discuss the experiences we have had in an implementation of a unified document management and records management system, and its ability to obtain its employees' buy in.
3:45 pm CIO Panel Presentation
  Join these industry leaders in an interactive discussion moderated by InformationWeek. Hear what issues are facing today's CIO's and learn how they are resolving them. This panel discussion provides a rare opportunity to hear first hand what's on the mind of these local CIO's.


John Soat
Senior Executive Editor
Information Week



Denise Stephens
Vice Provost for IS & CIO
University of Kansas


Denise Moore
CITO, Executive Branch.
State of Kansas


Steve Naylor
VP of IT
Federal Home Loan Bank of Topeka


David H. Robinson
CIO & SVP
Lockton Companies

Kris Paper
CIO
Burns & McDonnell
4:30 pm Closing Remarks, Cocktail Reception with Hors d'oeuvres
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