Efm Events

Ken Shaffer
Director of IT
FBL Financial Group

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...

Tom Mrotek
Director, Corporate IT
Jefferson Wells

This session will highlight Jefferson Wells re-engineering initiatives to link and empower a geographically diverse professional services organization using Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS07) and associated technologies. Jefferson Wells has a highly mobile workforce that delivers consulting services at client locations across the globe. There is an essential requirement to remain “connected” while on the road. The presentation will provide an overview of our business requirements and our strategy for delivering a full-range of information services to a mobile workforce in a consistent and reliable manner. Attendees are encouraged to participate in an interactive Q&A dialogue.

Gary Kilvinger
Senior Vice President
Metavante

When asked to accept a new management role for the company's UNIX systems application support group, Gary ran across many departmental issues and organizational concerns.  He will share some of the experiences he encountered which included a new found appreciation for some old friends - those tried and true techniques to gain control, stop downward spiral and morale issues, gather momentum and deliver on execution while increasing respect for and value of the team.   With little specific UNIX knowledge, he developed a working understanding of the environment, uncovering many issues and items driving some the of problems.  Using small incremental changes, he worked to improve service, increase staff size, morale and communications, create systems stability and improve departmental credibility.

Sean McCormack
Senior Manager
Miller Brewing Company

Would you like to deliver business value to your customers sooner, while at the same time improving quality, teamwork and communication?  Learn how Miller has used agile processes to successfully deliver some of its largest and most critical projects in record time with outstanding feedback.  Sean McCormack will discuss the agile approach and its benefits, how it differs from traditional project management and delivery, and lessons learned in the trenches.  If you’re interested in transforming your organization and improving speed of delivery, this session shouldn’t be missed!

Alan McNab
Director of IT Finance
Merrill Lynch

Many companies see IT as a black box that generates significant costs. Few business managers know exactly what they are paying for and why their outlays keep rising.

By making these costs transparent, the IT organization can fundamentally change the way business units consume IT resources, help drive down total enterprise IT costs (face it – cost take out is an issue we all face now), and focus on IT spending that delivers real value. The IT Executive who leads this change can usher in a new era of strategic IT management--and true partnership with the business.

Russell Berg
Director - Product Development
Airstream Communications

Of the three (voice, TV, and Internet) triple-play services being offered today by various telecommunications providers, Internet access and associated services are the most critical in terms of demand, growth, and redundancy for providers. Russell Berg, Director of Product Development for Airstream Communications, will lead a discussion on the data storage strategy his company developed to avoid the interruption of Internet services to its customers.

Airstream Communications offers a wide range of Internet services to over 100,000 Internet subscribers with more than 200,000 e-mail accounts through thirty telephone company members around the state of Wisconsin. Starting in 2005, a strategy was put into place to increase the resiliency of Airstream’s Internet infrastructure to create a dual serving center architecture. Data storage capacity, redundancy, multi-service capabilities, and costs were major considerations that had to be factored into the overall strategy.

This session will include a presentation on Airstream’s evolution and decision making process that resulted in a redundant, cost effective, and versatile data storage platform. With its application aware storage architecture, this system will assist Airstream in addressing its operational needs and in providing data backup services for consumer and business customers in the Wisconsin region.

Jack Wilson
Assistant Vice President
Amerisure Mutual Insurance Company

Amerisure Insurance found itself in the same position many companies are in.  They are a 40 plus year old company with a Legacy IT infrastructure with layers of technology growing ever less manageable.  The insurance market like many other markets is changing rapidly, becoming even more competitive, and overridden by security issues.  In order to be competitive, they needed to move quickly with market information at hand.  The old Amerisure Insurance could not do this.  

This session will demonstrate, via the Amerisure Insurance case study, how our organization made a major metamorphosis and is now reaping the benefits in reality and not theory.  The IT Organization felt the company needed to create an Adaptive Virtual Enterprise.  The best way to accomplish this was to introduce Business Virtualization as a broad strategic approach to transform the enterprise to increase competitiveness and look at this as a business; not exclusively from a technical perspective.  Throughout this session Jack Wilson will share the multiple benefits, both direct and indirect, of Strategic Business Virtualization.  Come prepared to share in the discussion.