Efm Events

Market Style Cubed Seasonal Fruit, Individual Low Fat Yogurts, Cold Cereals with 2% Milk, Variety of Freshly Baked Breakfast Breads, Fruit Preserves & Butter, Fluffy Scrambled Eggs, Breakfast Potatoes, Pork Sausage & Bacon, Starbucks Coffee, Decaffeinated Coffee & Tazo Tea, Assorted Chilled Juices

Joe DuCharme
VP Information Technology
Lockton Companies

Robert Tipton
Author and CEO
R S Tipton, Incorporated

The “Status Quo Bias” is a deadly condition... Do you or your organization suffer from it? No question today’s business and IT-related climates are fraught with peril, and the status quo is infecting groups in epidemic proportions. Worse yet, fear is rampant and judgment is skewed — is an event a crisis or an opportunity? Answering this question depends completely on your point of view and state of mind — after all, we see what we’re ready to see... Based upon Robert Tipton’s new book, JUMP! - Get Unstuck, this timely and powerful presentation unlocks the extraordinary power of innovative change. He’ll give you immediate takeaways related to driving higher levels of relevance and sustainability for you and your organization, and will arm you with the details of the JUMP! Innovative Change Model™ toolkit so you’ll be ready to begin creating your own breakthroughs and accelerated performance. Thrive, don’t just survive! For more information about JUMP!, visit http://www.OurJUMP.com and http://www.Facebook.com/OurJUMP

LEARNING POINTS:

1. Understand the Vital Role of Innovation and Creative Process In Business and IT Management Today
2. Detailed Knowledge Related to JUMP! and The Four Stages of Innovative Change:
   1. Get Ready
   2. Incubate
   3. Aha!
   4. Make it Real
3. Specific Tools and Behaviors Needed to Remain Highly Relevant and Marketable
4. An Entirely New Approach to the Status Quo

George Kather
VP, Infrastructure & Shared Technology Services
YRC Worldwide, Inc.

“What’s next and how will you adapt?” In this discussion George Kather with YRC Worldwide will discuss many of the top IT trends YRC Worldwide has identified for the next decade. The discussion will include a global perspective not only on the technology trends for IT but also the human element of the next generation of workers and leaders. Innovation and technology continue to drive change in the business for all organizations and to glimpse into the future and plan for “what’s next” and how it will affect processes and our overall environments proves to be a productive and proactive approach. Join this discussion to share your thoughts and perceptions of “what’s next” and how you will adapt.

Gary Mullen
IT Director
Madison County Memorial Hospital

You have virtualized the data center the results have been tremendous. Now you want to take the same principles of server virtualization and apply them to your desktop environment. Windows 7 migrations are looming and IT organizations are looking for a better way to handle the process. Desktop virtualization from VMware is all the buzz, but few organizations have deployed a proof of concept or seen the technology live.

In this session, Gary will discuss the benefits his organization has seen from their desktop virtualization rollout, the hardware and software components required for a successful implementation and how IT organizations can build the business case to gain executive support. There will also be a live demo of desktop virtualization so attendees can see the technology first hand.

Zachary Wilson
Networks & Operations Manager
FHLBank Topeka

Becoming compliant and staying compliant with regulatory and industry rules and standards is a challenge whether its PCI DSS, FFIEC/GLBA/FDIC/NCUA, HIPAA/Hitech/HITRUST, SOX, ISO/CobiT/NIST. Learn how to leveraging cloud-based technology services to meet the regulatory demand requirements without purchase of expensive on-premise equipment and internal resource utilization.

Jason Buck
Strategic Portfolio Manager
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City

Developing an effective SharePoint solution requires solid up-front planning and design. While SharePoint 2010 offers a wide robust range of capabilities; Understanding how those fit with your business needs and matching them to SharePoint’s offering is essential. That can be tough to do without an experienced partner who has the SharePoint expertise to help guide you.

Recently, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City partnered with Trabon Solutions to evaluate how SharePoint 2010 could support their business objectives through a facilitated planning and design engagement. In this presentation, Jason Buck of BCBS KC will walk you through the business case of how SharePoint 2010 could be leveraged to meet Blue’s business needs.

Kevin Dohrmann
VP & CTO
CoSentry

Today most organizations dedicate over 70% of total IT spend to maintaining their existing infrastructure. Executives are constrained from delivering IT as a strategic business enabler by complex and inflexible silos of infrastructure. Cloud computing promises to deliver infrastructure on demand; the key to transforming IT from a cost center to a business innovator. But what does it look like? Has the delivery matched the promise? What pain and risk does this introduce and can business actually do anything today?

This case study will explore how one organization has built a safe, secure, high performance infrastructure cloud on an industry standard virtualization platform. If you are supporting virtual machines today, you can get out of the infrastructure business and into the innovation business right now. This session will explain how the business has evolved from a physical infrastructure business to a virtual one, and what that has delivered for their customers.

Greg Backhus
Director, Data Warehousing & Decision Support Systems
Helzberg Diamonds

Helzberg Diamonds was an early adopter of business intelligence and has been leveraging their information assets for over 12 years. With major movement in the BI tools arena, it was time to re-evaluate the way we delivered information to the enterprise and unlock information by creating more in-depth on-line analytics functionality and flexible delivery options. This session will outline Helzberg’s facelift of their BI layer leveraging a new enterprise business intelligence reporting engine. The Helzberg Diamonds environment requires information to be presented from several source data platforms, and this session will outline key decision points when making their tool selection.

Carl Harrison
Vice President & Chief Information Officer
Kansas City Southern Railway Company

Mainframe environments have historically been the natural choice to run mission-critical business applications. However, as many mainframes carry very high operating costs, running all business transactions on the mainframe often does not make business sense. Organizations are increasingly reviewing the business benefits of migrating applications off the mainframe and onto lower cost, more flexible platforms.

Kansas City Southern Railway Company discovered that the largest portion of its data center operating costs were tied to the mainframe and the related software licensing expense. Carl Harrison, CIO will share his experiences with how after a great deal of due diligence in 2009, the business initiated a phased migration off of the mainframe in 2010.

Sam Passer
VP, Program Services
CommunityAmerica Credit Union

Glenn Carney
Vice President, Data and Technical Services
CommunityAmerica Credit Union

“Flawed requirements trigger 70% of project failures. Gaps or errors in technical requirements are responsible for 70% to 85% of rework.” These statistics from Gartner and other sources provide an insight into why traditional waterfall projects are setting our organizations up for failure – or at least start them off at a disadvantage. This session explores how agile methodology can transform your organization and provide delivery that more closely aligns with business objectives, reduces time to deliver, and shines a spotlight on the delivery cycle to increase accountability on every facet of the delivery process. Glenn Carney and Sam Passer will discuss CommunityAmerica’s experience with implementing Scrum, their lessons learned, and how CommunityAmerica has benefited from being an Agile environment. Most importantly, an interactive discussion will occur to explore how agile can be leveraged (or leveraged more effectively) in your organization

Garden Salad w/ assorted dressings, Focaccia/Ciabatta Breads, Heirloom Tomato & Mozzarella Salad, Char-Grilled Chicken Thyme-Rosemary Sauce, Oven Roasted Cod Fillet, Lemon Oil Rigatoni Pasta w/ Italian Sausage, Tomato and Garlic Sauce, Sautéed Vegetables, Tiramisu & Cannolis

Mike Brozek
Sr. Director IT & Telecom
Westar Energy

Ron Thieme, Ph.D.
Vice President & CIO
AIT Laboratories

Would your CEO characterize your company as an information company?  Does your company see IT as a cost center or a strategic asset?  Do you have the same voice as leaders of other functional units?  Do you shape and enable business strategy, or do you react to it? As leaders of technology organizations, our key challenge can be to find relevance in the world of executive management, operations, and business strategy.  And as a leader, only you can define your relevance.  In this talk we will examine ideas and approaches that make IT executives effective—and keep them that way.

Timothy Johnson
Chief Accomplishment Officer
Carpe Factum, Inc.

As IT professionals, we spend a lot of time focused on the deadlines and compatibility and projects and requirements, but do we know what real ACCOMPLISHMENT looks like? Do our IT initiatives resemble “to do” or “TA-DAH!”? How can we inject a higher probability of success at the beginning, while holding the buzzards of Six Sigma and Lean at bay? This workshop takes a holistic look at accomplishment through the lens systems thinking. Using examples from his experience as a tactical law enforcement photographer, Timothy Johnson will demonstrate how “Systems Working All Together” really are the best “Special Weapons and Tactics” available to IT professionals. In this session, you will learn

• how to identify the components of the system as they apply to your accomplishments
• how to align your system’s outputs with your organizational objectives
• how to dissect the behavior of the inputs to predict the outputs
• when to put your foot down and demand consistency and when to back off and let people do things the way they want
• how to recognize what is adding true value
• how to interpret what is going on “out there” in the environment and change our plans accordingly
• what happens when your system interacts with other systems

Dan Forster, Jr.
Director of Information Technology
Kansys, Inc.

We all know that speed and stability in our data centers remains as one of the top priorities to manage. Learn how Dan Forster, Jr., Director of Information Technology of Kansys, Inc., (a full service technology company who has been focused on the communications industry services since 1997) solved this for his Data Center. Dan will show how, with little effort and a little help, his company selected the 10GB Ethernet and Continuous Data Protection solutions, and why these worked out well for Kansys.

Sean Buffum
Assistant Vice President, Information Technology
Douglas County Bank

This session will be a discussion about the issues and concerns of implementing Cloud services and in particular Google Apps for Business and SecureAuth IEP. The session will focus on a case study comparison of internal vs. external hosting of e-mail and related services, security of these environments, meeting requirements for regulatory compliance, extending internal authentication mechanisms to external services, migration from an existing environment, and selection of possible implementation partners. If time permits we may look more in depth at SAML authentication and integration of Postini services, such as encryption, and archival and discovery, with Google Apps e-mail.

Cindy Berry
Manager, Digital Infrastructure
Hallmark

Cindy will overview how Hallmark Digital has significantly improved consumer metrics and site performance over the last couple of years by implementing a new hosting platform, a new application platform and additional support and services. These changes have positioned us to flexibly respond to future requirements more efficiently and have created a platform for success. Considerations for using a hosting vendor will be discussed, as well as what has worked well for Hallmark Digital.

Allen Hosack
Sr. Manager Architecture & Technology
YRC Worldwide Inc.

Zachary Wilson
Networks & Operations Manager
FHLBank Topeka

Jane Hamerle
VP & Chief Information Officer
Kansas City Blue Cross Blue Shield

This panel discussion will focus on the current and future challenges, trends and successes of mobile computing in our environments. Understanding that it is predicted that by 2013 there will be more web access derived from mobile devices than from PC’s. In fact, a comprehensive study completed in 2007 (BCC Research) predicted the following trend; “The global market for mobile computing was almost $55.6 billion in 2005 and $63.5 billion in 2006. At an average annual growth rate (AAGR) of 7.0%, this market will reach more than $88.9 billion by 2011.”

Here we are in 2011. Our panelists will share and discuss the impact (both positive and negative) of mobile computing on their business and workforce and share what their teams are doing to utilize and adapt to the continuing rise of mobile computing.

Rich Whyrick
Network Security Manager
CommunityAmerica Credit Union

In this presentation, Rich Whyrick, Network Security Manager at CommunityAmerica Credit Union, will give an up-close and personal perspective of why a company can implement every form of Information Security technology in the industry and still fail to keep their data safe. Users, who despite the very best intentions, can only apply what they know, and even with the proper knowledge they can still manage to make the wrong decision.

Ed Link
Vice President of Information Technology
Garmin International

Maggie Ratliff
VP, Chief Information Officer
Carondelet Health

Noel Strong
CTO, VP of Research & Development
Mediware

Vicki Schluter
VP, Information Solutions
YRC Worldwide Inc.