Agenda

Thursday October 30, 2008

Minneapolis Marriott Southwest Hotel

8th Annual Minnesota IT Symposium

Knowledge & Networking

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 "Going Global" Journey
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom

Sponsored by Davenport Group

Mary Lynne Perushek
VP & CIO
Donaldson Company, Inc.

Mary Lynne Perushek is the CIO at Donaldson, a leading provider of filtration systems with sales offices and operations around the world.  In this session, Mary Lynne will provide an even-handed account of the goals and benefits of “going global” with IT, as well as some of the challenges and pitfalls.  The session will include specific strategies adopted at Donaldson and a recap of how standardizing, centralizing, consolidating, and developing strategic vendor partnerships has helped align IT with corporate strategies and allowed IT to run more like a business.  Like most organization and cultural changes, “going global” is a continuous journey, and the session will conclude with where Donaldson is today and where they are headed.
9:45 am
Meeting Expectations: Staying Quick and Nimble in a Fast Moving World
Lake of the Isles 1

Amin Kassem
EVP & CIO
SHPS

Sponsored by St. Croix Solutions

Jeffery Buelt
VP & CIO
Global Ethanol
 
Join Amin Kassem as he discusses how SHPS (a leading, independent provider of integrated health solutions), has consolidated servers, storage and create flexibility in data center operations.  SHPS was able to reduce the number of physical servers in the enterprise, and hence reduce the need for more square feet of data center space.   This has allowed them to go down from 4 data centers to 2 data centers, reduce the power consumption and more importantly reduce the cooling needs.  At the same time they have been able to create a more flexible environment for computing on demand, by creating a more effective ways of using VMware and blade technology for rapidly provisioning servers and address multiple streams of demands, with seasonal needs and addresses peak periods by creating multiple web server farms, re-appropriate the use and re-provision these servers for different functions and scale down to few servers during the off peak periods.  The capacity would be provisioned for other activities. 

Join Jeffery Buelt as he discusses how Global Ethanol was able to utilize virtualization, low cost storage, and data de-duplication appliances to increase reliability, performance, and response to the organizations fast changing business needs around information technology (IT) resources. Along with the overview of organizational and technology changes implemented, we will discuss ways in which the audience is addressing the ever increasing demand for IT resources along with rising expectations around reliability and uptime.
9:45 am A Practical Enterprise Service Bus Implementation
Lake of the Isles 2

Sponsored by Oracle

Jay Drayton
Sr. Director of IS
Lifetouch, Inc.

Lifetouch has multiple business units supported by disparate, tightly coupled legacy systems.  We needed to migrate all of these businesses to a common order management and fulfillment platform, with each business migrating on its own schedule.  A flash cutover was not feasible.  To accomplish this, we replaced different subsystems over time, while allowing the whole system to continue to function.   A key component of this ongoing effort is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)  in support of a service-oriented architecture.  We will discuss the architecture of the ESB, issues identified and overcome, and results of the effort.
9:45 am Building a Truly Virtual Recovery Environment
Lake of the Isles 3

Sponsored by Davenport Group

Perry Mulcrone
Deputy CIO
Scott County

As Minnesota’s fastest growing county and the twenty-ninth fastest growing county in the entire USA, Scott County takes great pride in providing state of the art services to its rapidly expanding community.  To keep pace with this brisk growth and continue to offer world-class services, Scott County had to totally redesign their IT infrastructure. The new infrastructure also had to encompass a robust and truly workable offsite disaster recovery solution.  To that end, Scott County now has in place a scalable and extremely adaptable IT infrastructure with a real disaster recovery solution. This IT infrastructure not only gives them more capabilities but has also lowered the total cost structure.  Scott County was able to achieve a 20 percent reduction in equipment and personnel costs for infrastructure support services, while exceeding the project goals. 

Perry Mulcrone, Deputy CIO, will discuss the problems and issues that Scott County faced, as well as, the solutions they implemented.  Perry will describe the process, discuss the pros and cons, and share his reflections on what he learned along the way.  Listen to this experienced IT executive describe how he achieved his vision for virtualizing the data center and building a truly virtual recovery environment.  Hear first hand how Scott County cut the recovery time from one day to five minutes.
9:45 am Implementing Enterprise Content Management – Gaining the Benefits While Avoiding the Headaches
Cedar Lake 4

Sponsored by IBM

Monica Crocker
ECM Business Expert

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a set of solutions that include many popular technologies such as document management, scanning, electronic forms, collaboration tools, web content management, email management, workflow and electronic records management.  While ECM implementations can have a dramatically positive impact on an organization’s ability to share information, collaborate, stay compliant, respond to legal actions, make full use of IT investments, and, most importantly, get work done, they can also consume an endless amount of money and effort with very little gain if not properly managed.  
 
In this session, Monica will summarize what worked and didn’t work throughout her experiences implementing ECM in the State of Minnesota as well as other large organizations.  This session will walk through a “best practices” approach to implementing ECM, incorporating both project management and records management principals; will review the menu of ECM technology options and highlight business applications where they fit;  will discuss how information management standards, such as XML, have finally removed some of the risk from ECM implementations and will explain why it’s critical to have meaningful metadata to tie the content together across your organization’s assortment of ECM tools.
11:00 am Building the Foundations of the IT Infrastructure Through Storage.
Lake of the Isles 1

Sponsored by Dell

Steve Cromer
Director, IT
KGP Telecommunications

When I came to KGP we had a small business infrastructure. We had many aging servers that were over 4 years old and some were over 8 years old, with small disk storage. My challenge was to get KGP up to date with a current lifecycle program on the server hardware. While examining the infrastructure a lot more than just servers needed to be upgraded within the infrastructure, so immediately and quickly we built a strong medium sized enterprise infrastructure. The start to building this infrastructure was to acquire storage.

I’d like to share the experiences that we had when choosing the storage for our environment. While implementing our storage, other aspects of our infrastructure were enhanced and easy implementations were put into place to strengthen and grow our infrastructure. Then finally share the KGP success story about growing from a small business infrastructure to a medium sized enterprise in less than 3 years.

The session should give some prospective on implementing storage, no matter how small or large your infrastructure is. This session will last 25 minutes, then we will go into a break out for the remaining 20 minutes and I will moderate the discussion on this subject.
11:00 am Providing Business Value through Information Security - Is it possible?
Lake of the Isles 2

Sponsored by Midwave

Steve Jensen
Senior Director - Information Security, Compliance, and Business Continuity Management
BCBS of Minnesota

Oftentimes, when designing IT solutions to meet business demands, information security is viewed as a necessary evil.   The customer demands to ensure the protection of sensitive information may seem on the surface to conflict directly with requirements for seamless accessibility, transparency and integration.    In analyzing our customer demands, it became apparent that a strategy that balances controls and customer enablement is essential.   This presentation addresses the story of how we implemented solutions that accomplish both objectives.   I will discuss security integration and data protection techniques that have provided Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota direct business value.
11:00 am "Eating the Competition", A Single Data Repository Enables Lund Food Holdings to Level the Playing Field
Lake of the Isles 3

Sponsored by Teradata

Kevin Baartman
VP of Information Services
Lund Food Holdings

This breakout will discuss how Lund Food Holdings has been able to work with technology partners to develop “big company” solutions.  Kevin Baartman, VP of Information Services for Lund Food Holdings, will share how moving Lund to a single, inte-grated data repository, intertwined with BI, and creating a [data] warehouse that had a single source for all information and knowledge areas has enabled the Lund analysts to be more than report writers.  Lund is now able to do quick implementation and turn around with an eye toward future business and IT needs.  This in turn allows them to select the right Business Intelligence partners to enable the business quickly.   
11:00 am Backup and Restore – It’s Not Just for DR Anymore!
Cedar Lake 4
Sponsored by CommVault
Robin Smith
IS Director, Process and Resource Management
Gander Mountain

Faced with a ‘forklift’ upgrade to their existing backup environment Gander Mountain seized the opportunity to step back and develop a ‘wish list’ of all the things a robust backup solution could be.  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 various 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.  Oh, and it had to work for IBM AIX and Windows. 

We will walk through Gander’s selection process, the decision made and review how it is all going some months later. 
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 Sherman, Set the Wayback: Today’s Adventure is Virtualization and the Year is 2008
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom

Sponsored by Sun Microsystems

Karl D. Schubert, Ph.D
CTO & Corporate VP of R& D
Lifetouch Inc.

While virtualization seems like it is a “topic du jour,” the fact is that virtualization is a technology and approach whose time has come yet again.  In this presentation, Dr. Schubert will look at virtualization from an historical perspective and will address its re-emergence of virtualization using real-life examples of approaches and benefits and will examine potential pitfall s.  Areas will be covered include server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization, and the evolution from distributed resource management back to centralized resource management.
1:45 pm Lessons for the Enterprise in Search of Data Center Space
Lake of the Isles 1

Tom Grahek
Director of Technology Delivery
Fair Isaac

Sponsored by XO Communications

Joe Molitor
VP Network Services
United Healthcare
 
When deciding whether to rent or build, you need to consider your short term and long term IT infrastructure needs, your company's financial objectives and the market. When searching for Co-Location space, we learned to look beyond the traditional options or "Co-Lo Providers". There are many more options out there. Lead-time is longer than just creating power and cooling. There are many other items that will add to the lead-time between signing a contract and having a data center in production. Some lessons we learned via building and renting were unique to each experience, surprisingly many lessons applied to both.
1:45 pm Coming Back From Managed Backup
Lake of the Isles 2

Sponsored by Nexus

Brad Beagle
IT Director
TURCK Inc.

In this session you will learn about Turck’s experience bring backup back in house from a managed backup service.  Brad will discuss the business drivers at play for moving to managed backup, the appeal, some disappointments, and requirements/curiosity around bringing it back in-house.  The discussion will also expand on:
  • Data Protection of SharePoint
  • Archiving
  • DR
  • Using dedupe to reduce tape
  • VMware backups
  • Ease of Use requirements
1:45 pm Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line
Lake of the Isles 3

Sponsored by Avanade

Toby Velte
Author

 Companies are making lots of noise about Green IT, but very few actually define quantitative goals and measure the positive impact Green IT has made in their organizations.  How does a Fortune 500 company actually measure the time, money and resources saved by implementing Green IT projects such as virtualization? There are cost / ROI modeling tools available, but the majority of them only look at a handful of variables.  Join Toby as he presents an overview of a tool that uses more than 120 variables and real-world customer data to measure the concrete impact of virtualization projects on costs and energy use.  Sometimes the results are surprising.  Discover actionable steps you can take to reduce the environmental and budgetary impact of your IT infrastructure.

About the Book: Green IT: Reduce Your Information System's Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom
2:45 pm If You Can Manage Your Finances Online, Why not Health Care?  The Health IT Revolution
 

Sponsored by Magenic

Matthew Porett
CIO
Avenet Web Solutions

Storing personal health information online could make consumers feel vulnerable.  As a provider of web site creation and content management systems, Avenet needed a way to safely and securely store personal health data in a consumer-owned, portable, and interoperable system.  This session will discuss the trend of storing personal information online, the architecture involved to make it a win win for employers and consumers, as well as the challenges of bringing it all together.
2:45 pm IT Procurement: Reduce Costs by 30%- 40%, and Get What you Want Every Time
Lake of the Isles 1

Sponsored by Corporate Contracts

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...
2:45 pm Save Money and Improve SLA’s: Partnering for your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance Needs
Lake of the Isles 2

Sponsored by Pillar Data

Russell Berg
Director - Product Development
Airstream Communications

Of the three triple-play services being offered today by various telecommunications providers (voice, TV, and internet), internet access and associated services are the most critical in terms of demand, growth, and 24x7x365 availability for providers. Russell Berg, Director of Product Development for Airstream Communications, will lead a discussion on the data storage strategy his company developed to save money, improve performance and avoid interruption of services to its customers.

Airstream Communications offers a wide range of services to over 100,000 subscribers with more than 200,000 e-mail accounts primarily sold through thirty member telephone companies around the state of Wisconsin.  Some offerings to mention include internet services and hosted disaster recovery & business continuance services. Starting in 2005, a strategy was put into place to increase the resiliency of Airstream’s internet infrastructure to create a networked dual redundant data center architecture. Data storage capacity and performance scalability, redundancy, multi-service capabilities, virtualization and managing costs were major considerations that had to be factored into their overall strategy.

This session will include a presentation on Airstream’s evolution and decision making process that resulted in implementing mirrored, redundant, cost effective, and versatile consolidated SAN & NAS Pillar Data storage platforms and their measured benefits and results. With application aware storage management and scalable architecture, these systems assist Airstream in addressing its operational needs and in providing reliable and cost effective remote data backup and compliance services for consumer and business customers in the Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois regions.
2:45pm Removing the “Width” from Bandwidth
Lake of the Isles 3
Sponsored by Net Direct
Peter Fitch
IT Strategic Planning and Infrastructure Manager
Rudolph Technologies, Inc

This session will discuss an affordable solution for replicating large amounts of data without the need for costly data circuits or dedicated point to point solutions.  In this case, there were three areas of focus that needed to be addressed, Bandwidth, De-duplication and WAN optimization.  Strategies, findings and overall experiences of putting together this project will be shared in detail followed by a Q&A session and knowledge sharing session to help IT personnel discover budget friendly ways to replicate data to redundant sites just as larger IT departments with larger budgets might do.    Individuals attending this session will leave with an understanding of the pieces that make up a data continuity plan and how one company was able to implement such a solution on a tight budget.
3:45 pm CIO Panel Presentation
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom Join these industry leaders in an interactive discussion moderated by InformationWeek. 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 CIO's.
 

Chris Murphy
Mangement Editor
InformationWeek

Kate Bass
CIO
Valspar


Jim Jones
CIO
Great River Energy


Mark Vaupel
CIO
Hormel Foods


Lynn Willenbring
CIO
City of Minneapolis


Lisa Schlosser
VP & Chief Technology Officer, GSI
Thomson Reuters
4:30 pm Closing Remarks, Cocktail Reception
Lake Minnetonka Ballroom Enjoy this complimentary cocktail reception hosted by Minnesota IT Leadership Forum 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.
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