7th Annual Wisconsin IT Symposium
Previous Events
| 7:30 am | Attendee Check-In; Breakfast Buffet |
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| 8:20 am | Welcome Message | |
| 8:30 am |
Bathing! (And Other Recommended Daily Activities!) How to have a Highly Motivated, Productive and Happy Team |
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| Grand Ballroom | ![]() Tammy L. Hermann SVP & CIO Shopko Stores Operating Co., LLC As a leader, one of your greatest responsibilities is to your team. You simply cannot succeed without a dedicated workforce of committed people that are effectively engaged toward the company’s objectives. You spend time and energy in recruiting and training them. However, much is lost when they become unmotivated or worse yet, resign. In this session you will learn of simple, yet highly effective, ways to excite and motivate your team even in the face of economic downturn. |
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| 9:45 am | Aligning IT with the Business: Implementing an IT Strategic Plan |
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| Woodfield A |
Joseph Berte
VP of Information Technology Jacobus Energy The purpose of IT, like any other organization in the company, is to add value. The purpose of the IT strategic planning process is to help the IT organization determine how to add optimum value to the company. In the current business climate (volatile energy prices, economic downturn, etc.), this planning is even more important. Specifically, the ultimate goal of this plan is to assure IT alignment with business goals. Jacobus Energy recently undertook a strategic planning process for IT in order to assure IT alignment with their business goals. This session will include a presentation on the rationale for this planning process as well as the process used to create the strategic plan. Audience participation will be encouraged in order to share best practices that others have followed in their planning efforts. |
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| 9:45 am | ||
| Woodfield B |
Principal Doculabs 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:
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| 9:45 am | Challenges of a Mobile Enterprise – the AccuVal Associates Story | |
| Woodfield D |
Padmini Dhulipala Vice President, Information Technology AccuVal Associates, Inc. Padmini Dhulipala will provide an overview of AccuVal, how they work, office structure, and workflow. She will be discussing the progression from their initial network setup through deployment of an initial scalable approach to application acceleration across their WAN; which allowed end-users to make their applications and collaboration work exactly the same. Becoming a Mobile Enterprise has resulted in significant benefits for end-users, as well as for the business as a whole. |
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| 9:45 am | Why is the System Slow? | |
| Somerset |
Director Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare With the new administration pushing the Electronic Health Record, how do healthcare IT organizations ensure the performance, reliability and availability of these key systems? Healthcare organizations want to provide the best level of patient care possible. Efficient use of medical resources can make a tremendous contribution toward this goal. If hospital information systems are not performing at their best, resources are wasted and patient care suffers. Hospital IT faces incredible pressure to better enable patient care through complex hospital information systems. These systems encompass hundreds of applications that are central to service delivery and therefore effective patient care. In this session you will learn how Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare addressed the issue of slow system performance, especially those systems key to their EHR. As Wheaton was rolling out the EHR, it was imperative that the clinicians, especially the doctors, embraced the new technology. If a doctor experienced slow system performance, for whatever reason, adoption was in jeopardy. Working with key partners, Wheaton combined both the right technology solution and the right processes. Join us as we share how the balanced use of technology, people and processes has contributed to a more stable environment, leading to higher physician adoption and, ultimately, better patient care. |
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| 11:00 am | Trane Virtualizes the Business While Driving Down Cost | |
| Woodfield A |
IT Manager Trane Inc. John Wilson has been the driving force at Trane to virtualize desktops and to drive down the cost of maintenance. He has virtualized over 400 applications, serving 4500 concurrent user per day. He is in the process of virtualizing the data center , provisioning operating systems to reduce maintenance and drive down his cost of ownership. John will explain how this environment transformed his business, increased security and is giving him ultimate flexibility when it comes to helping drive the business. |
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| 11:00 am | Licensing 101 - The 'Do's and Don'ts' of Software Licensing, Including Both Traditional Software and Software as a Service | |
| Woodfield B | ![]() Christopher C. Cain Partner Foley & Lardner LLP
Despite IT’s critical importance to the enterprise, too often too little attention is paid to the agreements with software and related service providers, other than trying to get them done as quickly as possible and for the least amount of money. In this breakout, you will learn how to help avoid that result. The breakout will address the following topics:
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| 11:00 am | Avoiding Potholes on the Road to Empowering End-Users | |
| Woodfield D |
Director of Application Infrastructure and Development MGIC MGIC (www.mgic.com), the principal subsidiary of MGIC Investment Corporation, is the nation's leading provider of private mortgage insurance coverage with $227 billion primary insurance in force covering 1.47 million mortgages as of December 31, 2008. MGIC serves 3,300 lenders with locations across the country and in Puerto Rico, Guam and Australia, helping families achieve homeownership sooner by making affordable low-down-payment mortgages a reality. One of MGIC’s value added services is a customer facing reporting application that allows our customers to view and report on their data. In late 2006 a project was initiated to replace and re-architect the existing application. It was written in older legacy technologies and living on aging hardware. We needed to upgrade hardware, facelift the front end and develop much more robust reporting capabilities with of course more data. Our challenge was to find software that would meet our needs, develop an application that would be flexible, allow business end-users to produce reports and do all of this with limited resources. This session will demonstrate lessons learned from this development effort. In particular how IT partnered with the business end user community to make this work. |
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| 11:00 am | Are We Willing to Take that Risk? | |
| Somerset | ![]() Sponsored by Forsythe Michael CroyAuthor In this tumultuous economy, you will want to be sure that you are maximizing your budget and getting the highest level of protection you need to keep your business functioning in the event of a disaster. Michael Croy, an expert in risk assessment and disaster recovery, and author of Are We Willing to Take that Risk? will explain what is needed to sustain business today. When a company has an effective business continuity plan in place, business disruption can be avoided—even in the event of an unexpected catastrophe. Michael Croy has more than 20 years of experience in building, developing, and implementing disaster recovery and business continuity programs. |
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| 11:45 am | Hot Lunch Buffet Served |
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| 12:45 pm | Global Transformation of the Enterprise |
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| Grand Ballroom |
Mike Jackson VP of IT & CIO Rockwell Automation Many companies are dramatically transforming themselves by redesigning their business process and implementing a enterprise resource planning package. In the process transformation, the organization that transforms the earliest and the most pervasively is the Information Technology organization. This session will discuss the business transformation that is taking place at Rockwell Automation, a 106 year old provider of manufacturing automation technology solutions. Mike Jackson will discuss the reasons for the program, expected benefits and current status. He will share learnings on how to make these risky projects successful. And he will share the four strategies employed to transform IT, the unexpected issues that arose, and how they are being addressed. |
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| 1:45 pm |
Six Strategies for Managing IT in a Tight Economy |
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| Woodfield A |
Director of Strategic Partnerships Delta Dental of Wisconsin Many IT departments have been living with the reality of too much work and not enough resources to get it all done. The recent economic slowdown may be the opportunity many IT departments need to revisit process improvement projects, streamline workflow and improve overall departmental productivity. This session will provide six real world strategies to improve productivity or reduce cost within your IT department. Jeff Lutgen will discuss what Delta Dental of Wisconsin has learned from implementing a formal Quality Assurance Program, implementing telecommuting within IT, streamlining processes with workflow, implementing Project Management, growth through partnerships and reducing costs with video conferencing. |
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| 1:45 pm | ||
| Woodfield B |
Michael Rasmussen
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| 1:45 pm | De-duplication: Changing the Face of IT | |
| Woodfield D |
Nick Cannizzaro
GTS Supervisor/Lead Infrastructure Systems Architect Joy Global Inc. In the not so distant past only large corporations were able to afford fast backup and equally fast restore solutions. Businesses of all sizes saw the need for hot and warm backup sites, but few were able to afford the cost of building them. The tragic Sept 11th events made the need for these solutions become more than just a nice to have in the eyes of most businesses. Those backup sites became a necessity and the costs to implement them can easily spiral out of control. Finally, there was the constant need in all organizations to develop workable remote access and remote office solutions. Two of the greatest barriers that kept these solutions out of reach for small and medium sized businesses were related to the costs for data storage and broadband WAN circuits. Today, we have a new technology that is "Changing the Face of IT". De-duplication is bringing those previously cost prohibitive solutions into the reach of just about everyone in one form or another. |
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| 1:45 pm | Defining the Business Value of Cloud Computing | |
| Somerset | ![]() Tyson Hartman Global CTO Avanade Avanade seeks to bring clarity out of complexity to clearly define what cloud computing enables. To assess the attitudes and views of executives and IT leaders worldwide, Avanade commissioned an independent survey of more than 500 professionals in 17 countries. Tyson will share insight into the research findings and offers insight into who’s adopting cloud and the reasons behind their decisions. He will also explore the business value of cloud computing and discuss how organizations can take action to get started with Cloud in order to realize long and short-term results. |
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| 2:45 pm | Making a Good Thing Out of Bad Times: Building Operational Efficiency in Active Directory and Identity Management |
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| Woodfield A |
Don Jones
Author Times are tough: You're being asked to cope with smaller staffs, smaller budgets, and - doesn't it just figure? - larger workloads. But the silver lining is that now is the perfect time to start really building some operational efficiency into your IT environment, starting with Active Directory and identity management.. IT expert Don Jones, Contributing Editor to Microsoft TechNet Magazine, Microsoft MVP Award recipient, and author of dozens of IT books, helps you figure out where you can use automation, self-service tools, and other capabilities to create a more efficient IT management structure. Through a combination of free and commercial tools, as well as through new skills, you can do more with less. Don also helps highlight areas where increasing your efficiency will also help you meet compliance and other business goals - helping you justify the incremental investment needed to make these improvements a reality. |
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| 2:45 pm | Cost-Effective Measures for a Cost-Conscious IT World: "An Efficient Data Center Model |
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| Woodfield B | ![]() Rick Mattson Team Lead, Distributed Systems Storage Northwestern Mutual |
Sr. Director of IT Infrastructure Brookdale Senior Living |
Please join our panel for an informative discussion covering these key areas:
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| 2:45 pm | Tropical Storm Fay: A Real World Case Study Leveraging Today’s Technologies to Provide a Cost Effective Business Continuity Plan | |
| Woodfield D |
Manager of Data Center Operations Quarles & Brady LLP What does it take to design or define a comprehensive disaster recovery plan? We will discuss how Tropical Storm Fay made us evaluate our business continuity methods and what we learned about our technologies used to protect the business from everyday disasters. How can you prepare yourself for a disaster by developing a tiered system with replication strategies and using those components to maintain business operations? Learning Objectives:
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| 3:45 pm | CIO Panel Presentation |
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| Grand Ballroom | ||
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![]() Matt Peterson VP & CIO Johnson Diversey, Inc. |
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![]() Oskar Anderson CIO, Department of Administration State of Wisconsin |
![]() Peter G. Logothetis Chief Information Officer QBE the Americas |
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![]() Tammy L. Hermann SVP & CIO Shopko Stores Operating Co., LLC |
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| 4:30 pm | Closing Remarks & Cocktail Reception | |
| Grand Ballroom | ||











































