10th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
Previous Events
- 9th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
- 8th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
- 7th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
- 6th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
- 5th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
- 4th Annual Kansas City IT Symposium
Nebraska 2007
Kansas City Panelists
Indiana 2007
Wisconsin 2007
| 7:30 am | Attendee Check-In; Breakfast Buffet |
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| Market Style Cubed Seasonal Fruit, Individual Flavored Yogurt, Cold Cereals with 2% Milk, Variety of Freshly Baked Breakfast Breads, Chef’s Choice of Breakfast Bread, Fruit Preserves & Butter, Fluffy Scrambled Eggs, Breakfast Potatoes, Pork Sausage & Bacon, Starbucks Coffee, Decaffeinated Coffee & Tazo Tea, Assorted Chilled Juices, Assorted Soft Drinks & Bottled Water | ||
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| 8:20 am | Welcome Message | |
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| 8:30 am | Long live the CIO - Ambition, identity crisis, and nirvana | |
| Grand Ballroom |
Today's CIOs are expected to play a quintessential “strategic” role that goes beyond aligning IT with business and executing technology initiatives that enable short and long-term business objectives. CIOs are expected to cut cost, run a lean IT function, plan for business continuity, protect the company from security threats, manage an efficient IT infrastructure, improve business processes, increase productivity, drive organizational change initiatives, foster innovation, enable profitable business growth, enhance customer experience, and at the same time help the executive team make better business decisions on areas that have nothing to do with technology. This expectation though it sounds "strategic" lacks clarity and is designed to create a fertile environment for identity crisis and CIO burnout. Many of us now report to CEOs; we are members of the executive teams; we are involved in all major business decisions and strategic initiatives including M&A activities. We are the drivers of change. Our role has finally matured to a business leadership role. But we still want more. Is it because we are overly ambitious? Or is it because we continue to play the enabler role and not the driver role even when we are members of the “C” suite? Are we still playing the role of a glorified IT leader who happened to have a seat at the executive table? Are we still members of the administrative function, and our job is to support and enable the players in line-functions that are actually running the business? Is that the reason we suffer from a nagging identity crisis? The answer lies in doing the things that CEOs most care about while transforming our roles from enablers to business drivers. In this session, Partha Biswas, CIO for Joerns Healthcare, will share his journey from an enabler of business strategy to a business driver with responsibility for revenue growth and customer relationship management. He will also offer some practical suggestions for addressing the CIO identity crisis and earning peer respect, as well as gaining a meaningful seat at the executive table. |
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| 9:45 am | Storage Asset Optimization: A Model for Improved Business Efficiency and Bottom Line |
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| Salon G |  Andrew J. Collier Director of Information Technology Polsinelli Shughart PC |
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 Keith Kreeger Manager, Mainframe & Storage Systems YRC Enterprise Services, Inc. |
 Rodney Burt Director of Infrastructure BATS Trading |
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| There are many ways to measure how efficiently you are using your storage capacity. Cost per raw TB, per usable TB, percent allocated, active vs inactive, structured vs unstructured are some common ways to look at storage capacity. Is the way you "use" your storage capacity on auto-pilot? Do you wonder if there are any wasted resources yet you keep buying more? What about the data itself -- do you have any idea what percentage of your total capacity footprint is actually active and "in-use?” Would you be shocked if that number was 20% or lower? If you are purchasing physical capacity on a regular basis, does that growth rate concern you? There are many reasons why most IT environments would be considered "inefficient" when it comes to storage resources. This session is going to discuss what capacity efficiency problems exist today and what can be done to improve them. | ||
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| 9:45 am | Building a Complete and Cost-Effective Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solution | |
| Salon I |
Harry Wheeler Vice President First State Bank In this session Mr. Wheeler will explain the process and the resulting benefits of First State Bank’s business continuity and disaster recovery plan from the executive non-technical perspective. Among the many technologies and implementations utilized to build the complete and cost-effective BC/DR overall plan for First State Bank are the use of Virtualization, SAN Storage, Thin Desktops, Data Replication Software and Remote Site Office Location. |
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| 9:45 am | Pitching In: Working Alongside Your IT Staff | |
| Quail 1 |
Chris Leon
IT Manager – Software Development Performance Contracting Group |
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| 11:00 am | ||
Salon G |
Andrew J. Collier
Director of Information Technology Polsinelli Shughart PC With the multitude of Smartphone devices available, how does an IT department ensure the quality and availability of services to its users, while ensuring the security of the device itself and the information on it? This discussion will focus on the benefits of centralization and standardization of equipment and platforms, along with the challenges of pleasing the gadget minded end-users. |
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| 11:00 am | ||
| Salon I |
Ed Youngwirth
IT Director Cosentino’s Food Stores In this session Mr. Youngwirth will be discussing the key decision points that led Cosentino’s to move to Google Apps from MS Exchange/Outlook. For Cosentino’s the move to Google Apps. provided some key benefits to the organization - and with any transition - it also proved to bring on some new challenges. This breakout will provide an overview on how Cosentino’s partnered with a key vendor in executing the implementation of Google Apps successfully, and how collectively they worked together through the challenges posed by the move. The discussion will conclude with an overview of the recognized and tangible benefits to Cosentino’s in furthering its business initiatives. |
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| 11:00 am | Managing Information for Litigation, Audit, and Regulatio |
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| Quail 1 |  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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| 11:45 am | Tuscany Lunch Buffet Served | |
| Grand Ballroom | 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, Focaccia/Ciabatta Breads, Tiramisu & Cannolis, Starbucks Coffee, Decaffeinated, Tazo Teas , Soft Drinks and Bottled water | |
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| 12:45 am | Quantum Leap IT Strategic Planning | |
| Grand Ballroom |  Karlos Bledsoe Service Business Unit Leader Edward Jones IT Strategic Planning is one of the highest impact activities IT leaders can undertake; it can also be one of the most challenging. Effective IT strategic planning provides both direction and focus, allowing your IT functions to perform at extremely high levels. In this session participants will learn the three levels of strategic planning, including "Quantum Leap Strategic Planning", the steps of effective strategic planning, how to overcome the 4 IT strategic planning myths identified in CIO magazine, and most importantly, what strategic planning is not. In our fast moving business environment the pace of change is ever accelerating, the direction of change seems to be a moving target, and the economic landscape seems to change weekly. There has never been a time when "Quantum Leap Strategic Planning" was needed more. |
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| 1:45 am | Consolidation & Simplification |
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| Salon G |  James Gibson Director of Technology YRC Worldwide |
Mark Cooper |
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| Salon I |
Dr. Allan Engle
Director of Technology Buhler Unified School District |
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| 1:45 am | IT Business Alignment - Methods, Strategies, Successes & Obstacles | |
| Quail 1 |
Chief Information Officer Terracon IT’s alignment with the business has always been an important topic for the senior leaders of most organizations. In order to ensure the organization is maximizing its investment in technology, the senior leaders want to ensure that the business leaders and IT leaders are in alignment. In this breakout we will discuss what techniques and strategies have been leveraged to foster good business alignment? For those organizations with solid IT Business alignment, what have been the key success factors? For those without good alignment, what seems to be the largest hurdle to overcome and does cost continue to be a contentious topic? |
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| 2:45 pm | Achieving Strategic Initiatives Utilizing WAN Optimization |
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| Salon G | 
Sponsored by Net Direct Manager of Infrastructure Services HNTB Engineering From enabling firm wide collaboration to eliminating tape back-ups this presentation will be a review of best practices in utilizing WAN Optimization as the enabler for achieving a multitude of strategic initiatives. Wes Owen from HNTB will speak to the role of WAN Optimization from allowing for global project teams - to the complete elimination of tape back-ups. |
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| 2:45 pm | ||
| Salon I |
Richard Perkins
Sr. Mgr., Knowledge Management & Data Integration Services Black & Veatch Information technology (IT) is an important part of many organizations competitive advantage and directly effects business process performance and organizational success. It is essential to evolve IT capabilities alongside business objectives and priorities, and work toward the optimization of global IT resources. The effective measurement and regular reporting of IT performance is essential to optimization. This session will present a better practices approach to IT effectiveness reporting and will discuss case study examples of IT performance based reports. |
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| 2:45 pm | Private Cloud: Transforming IT Resources to Benefit Your Business | |
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Cloud computing is changing the way IT resources are utilized. Users want the ability to access infrastructure resources how and when they choose. IT teams are asked to accommodate this shift in the consumption model, but still deal with the security, compatibility, and compliance issues associated with delivering that convenience to application business owners and developers. Attend this session and learn how to transform your datacenter into a private cloud – a pool of virtualized resources within a datacenter – and how your company can leverage external cloud providers within your private cloud. IT Leaders from local companies will share their experiences about their journey toward this transformation, including lessons learned and key benefits achieved. |
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| 3:45 pm | CIO Panel Presentation |
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| Grand 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. | |
 Steven Naylor FVP & Director of IT Federal Home Loan Bank of Topeka |
 Steve Tesdahl Chief Information Officer American Italian Pasta Company |
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 John Blakeney EVP & CIO Commerce Bancshares, Inc. |
 Jeff Lewis Chief Information Officer State of Kansas Department of SRS |
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 Denise Mathews Director of IS NAIC |
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| 4:30 pm | Closing Remarks & Networking Reception | |
| Grand Ballroom | ||
