Efm Events

Rise and Shine Breakfast: Chilled 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

Richard Binger
Director, Data Center Services
Securian Financial

Debe Gash
VP and CIO
Saint Luke’s Health Systems

IT cost transparency has enabled Saint Luke's Health System to systematically find new opportunities to maximize IT investment, reduce cost, improve IT ROI and provide visibility into the total cost of IT.

Objectives:

• Analyze methods to allocate IT costs to all departments within an organization for accurate IT costs
• Calculate an accurate ROI of proposed IT projects
• Implement IT cost transparency solutions to benchmark IT performance and unit-cost competitiveness
• Explain the value of IT to business leaders

Dan Pinault
Director of Client Services
Power Systems Research

Making the transition from a ‘data’ company to a hybrid products/services company.

Organizations that deliver software, data or some other form of intellectual capital must continuously contend with the triple threat of commoditization, market saturation and economic recession. To remain competitive the delivery mechanism needs to stay ‘fresh’ even if the underlying product has not changed significantly. This requires a good working relationship between product development/subject matter experts, marketing and sales, vendors/partners and, of course, the Information Technology (IT) department.

For over thirty years Power Systems Research has been the leading provider of market intelligence to the medium and heavy combustion engine powered industry. How have they maintained their position in the market for so long? By doing the hard work of detailed research other companies will not do and, by never letting the delivery mechanism become stale. Starting with hand written index cards and moving through punch cards, green-bar reports, printed binders, Data Flex, FoxPro and on to Microsoft SQL Server; Power Systems Research has continued to create innovative solutions that keep stride with the changes in customer IT environments.

Recently, Power Systems Research completed the transition from a home-grown .NET delivery solution to using the Information Builders WebFOCUS tools. This gives them the ability to do more than just deliver data and content. Customers have the ability to analyze the data, create “what-if” scenarios and answer the question, “what does this mean to my business?” Additionally, Power Systems Research can now merge its data with customer-specific data in a very secure and timely manner, thus giving the customer a more robust picture of their place in the industry. Advances like these are why Power Systems Research is not just a vendor but a trusted strategic partner that offers Business Intelligence as a Service.

Lelanie Moll
Senior Manager, Database Operations
FICO

FICO is a well-known credit score company and also provides a host of data analytics. The company was an early adopter of virtualization technologies supporting a well developed infrastructure cloud strategy. During this session you will get an understanding of the two opposing Database Virtualization strategies deployed at FICO and how both delivers Business Value in totally different ways.

Mike White
Senior Technical Analyst
Cargill

The presentation will cover Cargill’s effort to move from the multiple backup tools we had 2005 to our current state with a single enterprise-wide tool with meaningful backup success metrics in 2010.

John Mc Devitt
Consultant, Operating and Storage Systems
Securian Financial Group

Eric Ganske
Manager of Storage Services
Kroll Ontrack

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.

Steve Thein
IS Manager
Federated Insurance

Desktop and server virtualization within the data center promises large business and operational benefits, but there are unique challenges as it pertains to storage. While virtualization platforms can easily integrate with storage resources within its environment, the rapid build-out of virtual machines, the urban-sprawl of applications, and the unpredictable usage levels require a new storage infrastructure that is as flexible as the virtual compute infrastructure.

For Federated Insurance, a drastic change from the traditional storage approach was required. Predictable storage performance, high availability, reduction in serviceability requirements, and greater storage utilization to support datacenter consolidation goals were key to the company’s enterprise virtualization strategy. In this session, discover how Federated Insurance has scaled and achieved predictable performance.

Steven John
CIO
H.B. Fuller

Steven John will discuss the principles by which a CIO must live and lead in order to build credibility based on functional accomplishments, gain influence through transformational work, and ultimately position IT as a strategic business peer. The dialogue will focus on the enduring need for business acumen, trust based relationships, and providing comprehensive business value. John will draw on his experience as a CIO and his work with the CIO Executive Council to shape research on the future state of the CIO, as well as his participation in the Leadership Forums of the Society for Information Management.

Midwest 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

PG Narayanan
Assistant Commissioner, Technology Management
Minnesota Office of Enterprise Technology

Bill Clark
Research VP
Gartner Research

In 2010 the mobile market will enter a new phase of competition and evolution. Network technologies such as LTE will start to roll out, operator, handset vendor and ecosystem battles will become more intense, and new types of mobile device and application will emerge. This scenario discusses the trends that will define mobility through 2015 and their impact on individuals and corporations. Context-aware computing will build on mobile, location and social platforms to reshape how end users interact with computing

Key Issues:

• What will be the key mobile and wireless technology and market trends through 2015?
• How will corporations choose and use mobile technology, services and tools to support customers and employees?
• What is context aware computing, and what impact will it user experience and enterprises?

Jon Mortrud
Director, IT Global Services & Enterprise Architecture
Kroll, Inc.

It may come as a surprise but many businesses today continue to be ill-prepared to deal with a catastrophic event relating to their business and network operations. Given the number of disasters that have come our way over the years, disaster recovery is no longer an option – it’s a priority! During this session Jon Mortrud will discuss the process in which Kroll Ontrack went through in choosing a partner to address their Disaster Recovery needs. Items that will be discussed include:

• Pragmatic business issues that became the driving force behind needing a plan
• Challenges faced during the selection and implementation process
• Goals and requirements of a vendor
• The impact on the organization
• How the plan has saved the organization money and increased productivity

Kenneth Brown
IS Manager, Information Solutions
ELCA Board of Pensions

Kenneth will discuss their transition and the benefits they experienced by moving from a tape based data backup solution to a tapeless backup technology. Kenneth will share why their move to this new technology was beneficial for the ELCA Board of Pensions. He will demonstrate de-duplication and how this reduced their backup footprint and allowed his organization to increase their retention period. Kenneth will also share what their installation was like, how they eliminated off-site tape storage, and how they provide backups at their Disaster Recovery site.

Bruce Drake
IT Director, Technical Operations
The Valspar Corporation

This presentation will outline how Valspar – through the use of WAN optimization technology – increased application performance, improved network utilization, enabled centralization of data storage, enabled voice traffic transport, and decreased monthly network cost.

Paul Steger
Section Head – Enterprise Computing Services – DCIS
Mayo Clinic

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 Mayo Clinic is working toward a private, internal cloud – a pool of virtualized resources within a datacenter – and positioning IT as a Service within the business. Paul Steger, Section Chief of Enterprise Computing Services, will share Mayo Clinic’s journey toward this transformation, including lessons learned and key benefits achieved.

Robert G. Beauchamp
CIO
UCare

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) challenges the traditional desktop paradigm of administration and deployment as organizations like UCare move forward with migrating to Windows 7 and associated applications. With advancements in this technology to virtualize desktops and applications, organizations like UCare are currently assessing and redesigning their infrastructure, and creating business cases for moving forward. With operational, political, and financial requirements challenging the pure technical requirements, UCare is on the journey to “Desktop as a Service.”

Attend this session and learn how UCare is working through this implementation process and what they’ve learned by looking at multiple technologies and using an assessment to lead their discovery and design process. Robert G. Beauchamp, UCare’s CIO, will guide you through the strategic vision, lessons learned, and challenges of VDI as they’ve experienced them.

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.

Alan Abramson
SVP of IS and CIO
HealthPartners

Jeff Kubacki
VP & CIO
Kroll, Inc.

Paul Zyla
VP of IT
AgStar Financial Services

Gopal Khanna
CIO
State of Minnesota

David Harkness
VP & CIO
Xcel Energy

Rob Tabb
CIO
Ecolab

Mike Matheis
Director of Applications
TCF Financial