Agenda

Tuesday October 30, 2007

Minneapolis Marriott Southwest Hotel

7th Annual Minnesota IT Symposium

Knowledge & Networking
8:00 am Attendee Check-In; Early Bird Breakfast Buffet:
Chilled Juices to Include Orange, Grapefruit, Cranberry, Assorted Breakfast Breads to Include Bagels, Muffins, Breads, Pastries, Cream Cheese, Butter and Preserves, Sliced Fresh Fruit, Three Assorted Cereals with Condiments for Hazelnut, Coconut Flakes and Raisins, 2% Milk and Skim Milk, Fluffy Scrambled Eggs, Crisp Maple Pepper Bacon, Pancakes with Maple Syrup and Whipped Cream, Cheese Blintzes with Strawberry Sauce, Freshly Brewed 100% Columbian Gourmet Bean Regular and Decaffeinated Coffee and Premium Tea
8:50 am Welcome Message
9:00 am Requirements Are Everything
 


Mike Connly
CIO
UnitedHealth Technologies

Everyone talks about requirements and their importance to system development and delivery, but do we know the difference between good requirements and poor requirements?   Who is responsible for requirements quality, IT or the business?  How can you measure and control the quality of requirements?  And why is it so important, anyway? 

This session will discuss how United HealthGroup is experimenting with and deploying exiting new methods of managing projects from the very inception.
10:15 am IT Governance: Aligning IT with Business Objectives
 


William J. McGarry
VP of IT & CIO
Saint Jude Medical 

Every company has competing priorities for investment dollars.  No matter what the company leadership culture is, each company is made up of a distinct set of functions with their own constituencies and priorities.

This session is an open discussion on how the participants use governance mechanisms to ensure the IT investments are aligned with the strategic objectives of the company while meeting the various constituent’s needs.  St. Jude Medical has been named by FORTUNE Magazine as one of "
America's Most Admired Companies" for 2007 and ranked St. Jude Medical No. 1 in Medical Products.  St. Jude Medical has embarked on an IT Governance journey and will share the experience, lessons learned and thoughts on where the governance journey will go next.
10:15 am Developing an IT Innovation Strategy
 

Sponsored by Sun Microsystems

Alfred Essa
Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy CIO
Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

In a dynamic and global market, innovation will increasingly become the core determinant of the success or failure of firms. Two questions underlie the development of an innovation strategy within a firm or organization. The first concerns the sources of innovation. The second concerns the sustainability of innovation over time.

Our discussion will focus on developing an IT innovation strategy. In particular, we will consider the processes that must be place in an organization to stimulate and sustain innovation. We will also consider the unique challenges facing IT in enabling organizational innovation. The framework for the discussion will draw upon the latest research on innovation from MIT.
10:15 am Achieving PCI Compliance Worldwide
 
Sponsored by Citrix

Daniel Cherkas
Sr. Director Enterprise Architecture
Carlson Companies, Inc.

Customer credit card data that is being sent across the Internet is at some risk for being hi-jacked. This same data has the potential of being misused from businesses that accept our credit cards if they do not protect it adequately. The theft of ‘millions of credit card numbers’ as well as other sensitive customer information has been breached not only from outside of companies, but also from within.

In order to protect US citizen’s credit card data, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) developed Data Security Standard (DSS) policies so businesses can understand the what’s and how’s of becoming PCI compliant. PCI requirements are used as a set of auditable guidelines to identify risks within a business as well as being used to determine what things must be done to become PCI complaint.

The question of PCI compliance has been propagated straight to the uppermost echelons of many businesses as Executives are trying to determine “how to guard and protect customer’s credit card data and other valuable data assets”. It is important to understand what types of processes and systems need to be compliant, what technologies can be used or leveraged, and how all of this is accomplished without breaking the financial aspects of the business.

Executives could use clear directions on solving PCI compliance issues that are currently exposed within their business environment. Since enforcement is looming over the shoulders of many businesses, companies that are not PCI compliant could face massive fines and they could find that they have to pay for longer and bigger auditing resources. Depending upon the severity of audit issues found that are PCI violations, a business could lose the ability to process credit card transactions for their customers.

This session will discuss some of the critically important aspects of PCI, how does this affect an ‘example business environment’, and how can credit card data be used within the company when it is needed by the business. This session is not intended to be a technology discussion, but rather to illustrate specific tasks that a business can do to become PCI compliant, and how it can use and maintain customer’s credit card data while protecting their customer’s information all at the same time.
11:30 am Building a Strong Foundation to Meet Your Data Lifecycle and Backup Requirements
 
Sponsored by CommVault

Eric Ganske
Manager of Technical Architecture
Kroll Ontrack
You will hear from Eric Ganske of Kroll Ontrack around their struggles with data lifecycle, and backups.  In the first 25 minutes Eric will share the problem that was identified and the solutions they implemented to solve it.  He will also share how they purposed the solution to the business and what new bottlenecks were uncovered afterwards.  The remaining 20 minutes of this session will be for open discussion where others can share their problems and how they solved them, intend to solve them, or ask questions.
11:30 am Best Practices in Grid Storage
 

Sponsored by NEC

Jeff Edwards
Vice President
Advanced Storage Products Group

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?  If so, attend this session focused on Grid Storage, where we will host an interactive discussion on:
  • storage issues facing today’s IT organizations,
  • where storage products have failed in the past,
  • the business value of grid storage architecture, and 
  • the latest storage technologies to future-proof your environment. 
Grid storage represents a big advance in enterprise class storage, find out what this next evolution in storage is all about.
11:30 am Moving Your Data Center
 
Sponsored by Midwave

Jim Jones
VP & CIO
Great River Energy

Moving your data center is a great opportunity, right?  Sure, there is a lot of preparation required to move your datacenter.  And you probably don’t have the time or skills to pull it off and it will feel like a major distraction to your portfolio of existing and new business projects.  On the other hand, it's an opportunity you can't afford to miss.  You can accomplish many great things by moving your data center.  Part of our preparation is to fit the move so it complements and enables our roadmaps, leading to improvement and transformation across our technologies, services, people and culture.
12:15 pm Lunch Served: Build Your Own Deli Sandwich Buffet
Soup of Tomorrow, Waldorf Salad, Tuna and Vegetable Salad, Carrot Citrus Salad, Fresh Garden Salad, Assorted Dressing, Deli Tray – Roast Beef, Turkey Breast, Cooked Ham, Mortadella, Swiss Cheese, Monterey Jack Cheese, Cheddar Cheese, Lettuce Julienne, Sliced Tomato, Red Onion and Traditional Kosher Pickles, Mustard, Mayonnaise, Butter and Horseradish, Herb Focaccia, Kaiser Roll, Whole Wheat Bread and Chiabatta, Individual Bag of Potato Chips, Selection of Red and Green Apples, Chef’s Selection of Assorted Desserts
1:15 pm Improving Channel Effectiveness with CRM 
 

Sponsored by Avanade

David Hemler
President
Best Buy for Business

 The most valuable resource in any organization is its people.  Enabling workforces to better understand the customer and effectively communicate and share information can accelerate the achievement of near term and far reaching business objectives.  Technologies such as CRM and dashboards have become mission critical and enable employee collaboration and improve customer service and the customer experience. 

Best Buy for Business has implemented a CRM and Dashboard solution that provides transparent data to Outside Sales Associates and their leaders in an interactive and predictive system.  This system enables quality performance management regarding how Outside Sales Associates perform against pre-set sales process, standards metrics.  These standards and metrics measure and improve business visibility, channel effectiveness and multi channel collaboration.

This first portion of this session describes how the CRM and Dashboard project supports the Best Buy for Business information technology and business vision.  The remainder of the session will be an interactive discussion sharing the experiences of attendees.
1:15 pm Honeywell ACS Best Practices:  Global SAP Data Migration and Data Quality Initiative
 

Sponsored by Informatica

Trevor A. Croteau
VP of Business Systems for (ACS) Information Technology
Honeywell 
1:15 pm IT Vendor Management – What Are The Benefits?
 

Mike Rhodes
Sr. Director Vendor Management
SUPERVALU Inc.

Attendees can expect to learn about a typical structure of an IT Vendor Management team and the tremendous business value in developing a mature Vendor Management process within your organization.
2:15 pm Leadership Intelligence: Developing the Next Generation of IT Leaders
 

Sponsored by SIM

Phil Zwieg
Former VP of IS
Northwestern Mutual

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.
3:15 pm One Code Base, Multiple E-Commerce Sites
 

Sponsored by Magenic

Steve Craig
VP & CTO
ShopNBC.com

Join Steve Craig, CTO at ShopNBC.com, as he shares how ShopNBC is growing their business through the use of specialty ecommerce sites. Steve will discuss how ShopNBC.com is leveraging a multi-tier architecture to host multiple E-Commerce sites on one code base.
3:15 pm Improving Performance in a Global Delivery Environment
 


Dan Polkow
Business Information Officer
GMAC-RFC

 Negotiating an outsource agreement for an onshore/offshore delivery model is no longer a significant advantage because your competitor can match that capability just as easily. The opportunities that need further exploration focus on the benefits that are achievable beyond rate arbitrage. We will discuss the hurdles a customer faces in a global delivery model in order to achieve the maximum benefit possible from this relationship? During this discussion, we will review:
  • The need for process changes
  • Management challenges in a global environment
  • Where mentors can help existing staff
  • How do implementation strategies differ
  • Key objectives beyond rate arbitrage
Working towards the maximum effectiveness of a global delivery model will bring numerous benefits to an organization beyond cost savings. There will be plenty of time to interact with your colleagues regarding the issues and solutions in use today.
4:15 pm CIO Panel Presentation
  Join these industry leaders in an interactive discussion moderated by Forrester. 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.


Ray Bender
CIO Research Advisor
Author

Paula Winkler
VP & CIO
Carlson Hotels Worldwide


Alan V. Abramson, Ph.D.
SVP of IS & CIO
HealthPartners

Gopal Khanna
CIO
State of Minnesota


Terry Brown
VP, Information Systems
General Mills


Jeff Kubacki
VP & CIO
Kroll, Inc.
5:00 pm Closing Remarks, Cocktail Reception with Hors d'oeuvres

 

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