9th Annual Minnesota IT Symposium : Agenda

Archived

9th Annual Minnesota IT Symposium

Previous Events

Indiana 2007

Wisconsin 2007

Nebraska 2007

Kansas City 2007

7:30 am	Attendee Check-In; Rise and Shine BreakfastChilled Orange, Grapefruit and Apple Juice, Sliced Fresh Fruit, Three Assorted Cereals with offered with Hazelnut, Coconut Flakes and Raisins, 2% Milk and Skim Milk, Assorted Yogurts, Assorted Bagels, Muffins, Breads, Pastries, Cream Cheese, Butter and Preserves, Scrambled Eggs, Crisp Maple Pepper Bacon, Country Sausage, Breakfast Potatoes with Onions, Freshly Brewed Starbucks Coffee and Tazo Teas
8:20 am	Welcome Message
8:30 am	IT Strategies for Optimizing Value
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom	Holly Morris CIO Thrivent At Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, we are transforming our business to grow and serve our members better today and in the future. Like others in the insurance industry, our existing business model must change to be more customer-focused. We need better ways to interact with our members, new and simpler products, affordable financial advice and an updated value proposition that better leverages our unique qualities. Our approach to transforming our business is fourfold: Maximize the current model in the short term (1-2 years) Pilot new products and distribution ideas and find the ones we want to develop for the medium term (3-5 years) Start a new division that develops the best ideas into a new business model in the medium term (3-5 years) Look for brand new business ventures for the long term (5-20 years) In order to deliver maximum value through this journey, the IT organization is responding with some innovative ways to engage with our business partners. We are supporting the short- and medium-term initiatives while not taking our eyes off long-term goals. We’re also contributing to this year’s bottom line be getting faster and better at what we do. In this presentation, I will review four different ways that IT has been engaging with our business partners: Long-range investment planning Business capability planning Rapid prototyping Improving IT’s effectiveness The key message of the story is this: The IT organization must always be creating and customizing new effective ways to contribute to business transformation and business success. The CIO must juggle multiple roles (operations manager, strategic thinker, execution specialist) to deliver on all fronts simultaneously.
9:15 am	Networking Break
9:45 am	Delivering Longitudinal Student Data
Lake of the Isles 1	Sponsored by Information Builders John Paulson Chief Information Officer Minnesota Department of Education The Minnesota Department of Education has developed a Longitudinal Data Warehouse Data System funded by a grant from the National Center for Educational Statistics. This system allows educators the ability to view student information in a more timely and accurate fashion, which helps them structure student and class centered educational plans more accurately. In addition, the system allows researchers access to aggregate student data for the evaluation of programs, demographic factors and other information to monitor and forecast trends. All of these uses are expected to improve educational outcomes for students in Minnesota. Using business intelligence technology, MDE is able to securely deliver data driven decision making into the hands of appropriate educational professionals. At the breakout session I will demonstrate some of the capability of using business intelligence to deliver slice and dice capability on student data. I will present some examples of the use and power of the system. Then I will discuss the technical issues and hurdles that we needed to master. Finally a discussion of policy and other issues related to the use of the analytic processing of student data. Some time will be reserved for Q & A. The attendee should be to take away an understanding of benefits, technical hurdles and issues, policy implications, associated with using business intelligence technology to deliver a solution.
9:45 am	How Do Genome Sequencing Centers Handle the Petabyte and Performance Challenge?
Lake of the Isles 2	Sponsored by Net Direct Kelly Carpenter Genetic Engineer and Computer Scientist How DNA sequencing labs handle the challenge of provisioning storage for millions to billions of files, scaling capacity to petabytes of data being accesses by hundreds of bladeservers. This topic covers extreme scalability, load balancing, network bandwidth, client failover, snapshot management and other issues business should be aware of when scaling up.
9:45 am	Implementing New Infrastructure Strategies that Align Better With the Business
Lake of the Isles 3	Sponsored by Nexus Information Systems Lisa Ward Network Manager Upsher-Smith Laboratories, Inc. In this session attendees will learn about the process, decisions, and experiences from Upsher-Smith Laboratories, Inc.'s IT organizational approach to adopting a totally new IT infrastructure, nicknamed “Infrastructure 2.0”. Specifically, you’ll hear about the business drivers to adopt a new model, existing “Infrastructure 1.0” challenges, and the process used in assessing a roadmap from old to new. You also hear about Upsher-Smith’s experience in evaluating and ultimately implementing virtualization, dedupe, SAN, networking, security, and other technologies/vendors to help execute on the new vision of “Infrastructure 2.0”. All of this within an organization desiring to provide a 21 CFR Part 11 compliant infrastructure.
9:45 am	Designing the Truly Automated Invoicing Workflow Product
Cedar Lake 4	Sponsored by Magenic Nathen Hall VP of IS Logistics Planning Services Business partnerships should be about the long-term journey ahead. But sometimes, through no fault of our own, we can be left at the side of the road without any clear direction forward. Crossroads like these can break a company or make a business stronger. Here's our story: Some time ago, our company, LPS outsourced critical freight invoice processing and then learned our service provider was backing out of the service and would not be providing any further enhancements or support at the end of the contract. It was a true turning point for our business: either bring the service-in-house or start the time-consuming search all over again for a new partner. Critical crossroads like this create new directions in business. Management weighed the options and determined that if we truly wanted a ‘World Class’ service, then we needed to control our own destiny. Learn how LPS blended our own internal (LPS) and consultant's resources to design, develop and implement a creative workflow system that is cutting costs by 70% and delivering that ‘World Class’ freight invoice processing system that put us and our customers in full control.
10:30 am	Networking Break
11:00 am	Reducing IT Costs Intelligently and Aligning IT Services with Business Needs with IT Cost Transparency
Lake of the Isles 1	Sponsored by Apptio Ravi Balwada CIO SumTotal While other business departments have the benefit of sophisticated financial management, budgeting and forecasting and data analytics systems, IT has been left woefully behind. IT Cost Transparency software, also referred to as IT Financial Management, is helping CIOs and IT managers get a deeper understanding of the fully loaded cost of IT services and infrastructure, make better decisions based on financial data and better communicate the value of IT throughout the organization. In this session we will showcase on one Fortune 1000 company applied IT Cost Transparency to reduce cost, improve efficiency and drive better alignment between business units and IT.
11:00 am	Using Business Intelligence to Gain Business Insights
Lake of the Isles 2	Sponsored by Avanade Paul Kay CIO Univita Health As the national focus and debate on healthcare increases, there are significant opportunities where technology can improve how healthcare is provided. Business Intelligence (BI) technologies and extensible reporting can provide insight into healthcare trends and have significant impact on treatment plans and the costs associated with care management. In this session, we will explore how Long Term Care Group implemented BI technologies for the Clinical Data Mart to better understand the healthcare needs of discreet groups of older Americans. We will also discuss best practices regarding resource allocation, requirements definition, improving project delivery, and overcoming unforeseen technical hurdles and how to mitigate the challenges that every large scale project encounters during implementation.
11:00 am	Managing Rapid Growth with Real User Performance Visibility
Lake of the Isles 3	Sponsored by Compuware Mr. Cris Ross Executive VP Product and Information Services MinuteClinic MinuteClinic, a rapidly-growing provider of healthcare services, needs to manage growth and IT service levels to hundreds of clinics in 25 states. In this highly distributed environment, MinuteClinic's challenges includes providing real-time and historical visibility into IT service quality with related business service impact orientation. In this presentation, we will outline how MinuteClinic implemented a real-user monitoring solution that provided end-to-end application performance visibility for all users, all transactions, on a 24x7 basis. The result was significantly improved service levels for the many MinuteClinic users and clinics across the nation.
11:00 am	Backup and Restore – It’s Not Just for DR Anymore - Part II
Cedar Lake 4	Sponsored by CommVault Robin Smith IS Director, Process and Resource Management Gander Mountain In last year’s breakout session we discussed Gander Mountain’s decision process when selecting a vendor to upgrade and/or replace their legacy environment. Beyond the standard requirement of a backup system to restore data (admittedly a lot more can be said on that topic), additional focus was placed on requests from user communities to learn how everyone’s life could be made easier by the right backup software. The ability to utilize key words to search and restore based on a context indexing scheme was floated by one group. From the compliance, audit and legal corners came a request to aid with audit and e-discovery responses. Ease of tape management and the ability for second level support staff to assist with restore requests came from the administrative side of the house. And the privacy and security folks had a set of data retention guidelines that begged for a tool that would provide robust data classification schemas based on role, department or user. Time has passed, an upgrade has occurred, remote sites have been added and additional de dupe capabilities have been purchased. Where does this all leave Gander Mountain one year later? Please join us for an update and frank discussion of lessons learned, opportunities discovered and current initiatives.
11:45 am	Mid West Buffet: Bread and Butter, Red Skin Potato Salad, Cole Slaw Salad, Roasted Eggplant Orzo Salad, Iceberg Lettuce with Bleu Cheese, Dressing and Bacon, Minnesota Wild Rice Soup, Grilled Chicken Breast with Northwood, Mushroom Ragout, Meat Loaf with Gravy, Green Beans, Yukon Gold Mashed Potato, Midnight Layer Cake, Cheese Cake, Selection of Red and Green Apples
12:45 pm	Leadership in Supply Chain and IT: The Unexpected Career Path Parallels
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom	Mike Martiny CIO General Mills As the role of IT has changed from transaction automation to business process optimization, the skills to be CIO have shifted from senior technologist to business strategist. Future IT leaders must demonstrate the ability to manage up, build relationships, and understand business strategy across functions and geographies - skills that could built outside of the traditional IT career path. Mike will talk about how his career experiences in Supply Chain Operations became the development path for his new role as VP, Information Systems at General Mills.
1:30 pm	Networking Break
1:45 pm	Application Integration Made Quick and Easy
Lake of the Isles 1	Sponsored by Cast Iron Systems Leon Thomas Vice President of Technology Professional Veterinary Products, Ltd. According to industry research, application integration is one of the most time consuming, complex, and expensive projects IT will undertake. How can IT organizations leverage technology to dramatically reduce costs while increasing the speed and reliability of application integration? Come to this session to learn how Professional Veterinary Products (PVP), one of the nation’s largest animal health products distributors, leveraged a “configuration, not coding” approach to integrate disparate applications in days – not weeks or months compared to traditional approaches. Topics will include business and technical challenges, solutions evaluated, results and lessons learned.
1:45 pm	Cost-Effective Measures for a Cost-Conscious IT World: "An Efficient Data Center Model"
Lake of the Isles 2	Tom Grahek Sr. Director of Technology Delivery FICO	Sponsored by Hitachi Richard Binger Director, Data Center Services Securian Financial Group
	Lauri Petersen Manager, Infrastructure Services Great River Energy
	Data centers are being challenged from both ends: on one side, demand for more storage capacity is growing; on the other, costs for increased power, cooling and facilities are escalating. Customers are demanding innovative, environmentally friendly solutions to streamline IT operations and control costs. At no time in recent memory is enterprise cost-containment a bigger factor, given our uncertain economic climate. Please join our panel for an informative discussion covering these key areas: Present and Future Data Center challenges Implementing more environmentally- friendly data centers Complying with environmental and compliance directives Driving down data center power, cooling and facilities costs Tiered Storage and Virtualization Technology Case Studies
1:45 pm	Ten Steps to Role Based Access Control
Lake of the Isles 3	Steve Jensen Senior Director and CISO Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota Role based access control (RBAC) has been viewed as the panacea for effective identity and access management for several years now. However, effective solutions have represented a significant challenge to organizations for many years as well, and the industry is littered with projects that have failed to meet expectations. Too often, the emphasis or blame is put on the technology, forgetting the most important aspects of successfully implementation -- process and people. Everyone expects it, but CISOs and security professionals struggle to deliver it. This session will address some of the reasons for program failure, and discuss a proven 10-step methodology to implement role-based access control.
2:30 pm	Networking Break
2:45 pm	Managing Risk While Moving into the Cloud
Lake of the Isles 1	Sponsored by IS Leaders Ben Leonard Senior Director Carlson Marketing “The only person who never makes mistakes is the person who never does anything.” – Dennis Waitley If you are an IT leader finding yourself under presssure to dramatically reduce your costs for infrastructure, but you need to balance this with managing the risks to your organization, your clients, and your carreer in a fragile economy, you are not alone. For Carlson Marketing, we provide Brand Loyalty, Channel Loyalty, Events, and Engagement solutions for 60 Carlson clients in the automotive, airline, pharmaceutical, agricultural, technology, and finanical industries. From a infrastructure perspective, venturing into cloud computing has many levels of risk for us and our clients. These risks include financial, security, privacy, support capabilities, client satisfaction, and solution complexity. In this discussion, we will review our experiences over the last year in successfully mitigating these risks with four different client solutions and how we decided the timing and which systems to migrate to a cloud enviroment first.
2:45 pm	Managing Information for Litigation, Audit, and Regulation
Lake of the Isles 2	Sponsored by IBM Joseph Shepley Principal Consultant Doculabs, Inc. Effective management of content has become increasingly critical for organizations facing litigation, as they seek to manage potentially discoverable information. Additionally, organizations face heightened oversight from both internal audit and external regulatory bodies. The technology to manage content has become a key part of how an organization approaches its ability to capture, store, manage and produce information. Today, an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the content created within an organization now exists electronically. Business operations are generating vast volumes of unstructured data – ranging from the content created in desktop applications to the web content and digital assets that are created and used in the course of business. Add to this the growing volume of digital communications – email, as well as the increasing use of instant messaging, PDAs, and voicemail – and it’s clear that today’s organization has many more sources of information to manage than the organization of even just five years ago. This presentation will share best practices and recommendations for how your organization can leverage investments in ECM to manage information for compliance, specifically: Where does Records Management fit into the discovery process for litigation, audit, and regulation? How does technology serve as the foundation for discovery initiatives? Why do we need a program to address discovery issues? What does it take to develop and implement a compliance program? What is the business case for these programs in the absence of large scale litigations
2:45 pm	Transforming Healthcare: The Role of Innovation in Fairview’s Care Redesign and Reform
Lake of the Isles 3	Sponsored by Midwave Maureen Ward Senior Director, Care Model Innovation Fairview Health Services Imagine suspending your business’ predictable revenue flow in order to redesign your products or services, including your customers as part of the work team and learning to fail. Even though failure is equated with death in medicine, those counter-intuitive steps are exactly what Fairview did this year to promote innovation and design as a core competencies. By doing so, Fairview answered the questions: Is there a better way to provide primary care services for patients? Could patients play a more active role in their care? Does every patient need to see a doctor for every problem? Could we deliver better care for less cost? Fairview believes the answer to all those questions is “Yes.” To prove it, Fairview has launched a fast-paced process to fundamentally change primary care. The breakout session will cover the roles that engagement and design play in innovation, the people and infrastructure interactions that are required and the complementary relationship between innovation and standardization, which must coexist.
3:30 pm	Networking Break
3:45 pm	CIO Panel Presentation
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom	Join these industry leaders in an interactive discussion and 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 whats on the mind of these local executives.
	Jeff Kubacki VP & CIO Kroll, Inc.	Doug Mills VP & CIO Mosaic
	Mike Thyken VP IT Merrill Corporation	Michael Connly CTO UnitedHealth Group IT
	Malcolm McRoberts SVP & CIO The Deluxe Corporation
4:30 pm	Closing Remarks & Cocktail Reception
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom	Enjoy this complimentary cocktail reception featuring an open bar, hors d’oeuvres and conversation. Make this an important element of your attendance to the IT Symposium. The ability to network and collaborate with your peers in an open and no-hype environment will prove to provide long lasting value to your key business initiatives moving forward.

Efm Events

Agenda

Thursday October 29, 2009

Minneapolis Marriott Southwest Hotel

Sponsors

9th Annual Minnesota IT Symposium

Previous Events