Like a member of any healthy ecosystem, the IT organization must not only benefit end users, customers, business stakeholders, IT staff, and suppliers, it must draw contributions and value from all of them as well.

The past five years have not been kind to IT organizations. They've been downsized, outsourced, and offshored, and their spending has been micro-scrutinized. At the same time, technology is ever more pervasive, enabling everybody in the organization to be self-proclaimed experts on how IT should do a better job. Today's IT executives need doses of both realism and optimism about the future. They must acknowledge the changed world order of business expectations, map themselves to the type of IT organization they are today, and reflect on what type of organization they will manage in the future.

This keynote will answer the following three questions:

• What outside forces are causing IT to change what and how it manages?
• What are the three archetypes for successful IT organizations?
• How must IT organizations change to succeed in their ecosystem?

Consolidation in the software industry is not a threat to innovation but a natural part of an evolving industry. A focus on business process, plus modularity enabled by SOA, will lower barriers to entry in this market and keep it intensely competitive.

Getting Value From Information Overload

IT departments handle exponentially more data today than ever before. Unfortunately, the difficulty with retrieving and interpreting sheer volumes of increased data create many operational challenges. Our workshop will explain how you can manage by exception and be more efficient than you ever thought possible — allowing you to identify challenges and opportunities many times faster than you can today. Topics include:

• Identifying opportunities faster.
• Transitioning your work-mix from reactive (putting out fires)to proactive.
• Increasing your productivity and your companies¿ profitability through "Data Visualization" and "Data Density."

Crossing Over: Bridging the Gap between Business And IT In The New IT Ecosystem

The IT organization has become a technology vendor and — as is required of all vendors — it must take steps to effectively market and sell its products and services to its customers. Key to success is delivering what business users want, the way they want it.

In this presentation, Laurence Shaw will discuss the changing needs, requirements, and demands of business buyers in the new ecosystem. He will provide an example, in the transport ticketing arena, of the different roles IT must play to meet these needs and ensure successful business outcomes. He'll also explore the increasing competition facing IT as business buyers entertain multiple vendors and a widening array of application service providers. Woven throughout the presentation will be a discussion of the impact of global delivery on the IT ecosystem. Takeaways include:

• Business users and management are in the driver's seat, and their control of IT is increasing.
• Building an IT/business bridge is imperative — and achievable.
• Software as a service is already here and is likely here to stay.
• It is now possible to make bite-sized investments to match business spending initiatives (BSI = BSI).

Apps Modernization: Impact On Government And Their Citizens

Transformation intiatives have numerous IT implications. Join Suparno Banerje, EDS Vice President of Global Government Industry, to learn how applications modernization impact governments and the ecosystems of governments, citizens, and vendors/partners.

With business increasingly at the helm of technology and major shifts like the Google effect and Social Computing taking place, the IT organization and the IT industry as a whole need a new act — and a new name.

This member of the Time 100 does not want to sell you an offshore story. Instead, he'll share his own experience of building a global company on the backbone of IT and what his CEO clients expect from technology in support of their global agendas.

The future of enterprise apps will be unlike any previous generation. SAP's efforts to capitalize on demand for SOA and business process management hinge on an extensive ecosystem of partners who offer vertical and domain-specific functionality.

SOAs are the darlings of the industry press, offering tangible deliverables: services. However, facilitating the transformation of an enterprise requires careful IT planning and architecture that is the hallmark of enterprise architecture. Rather than simply embracing SOA at the expense of EA, Peter Salvitti, national architecture services practice director at Collaborative Consulting, will discuss the key elements, architectural patterns, controls, and practices that enable effective adoption of SOA concepts and technologies.

Themes that will be covered include:

• Governance.
• Rationalization and standards.
• Importance of business sponsorship and collaboration.
• Implementation of an incremental approach.

The Services Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) framework illustrates how enterprises can use a fully converged, intelligent network and unique interactive services to close application and resource gaps and enable more efficient applications and business processes across the entire enterprise — data center, campus, branch, and teleworker offices. During his speech, Rick Hutley will share Cisco's perspective on the power of the network by addressing:

• How the network's role will continue to expand, delivering ever-increasing business value and a more effective business process.
• How the network, and in particular SONA ,can be a bottleneck or asset.
• How SONA has helped with CIO pain points.

Jeff Davey will explain the benefits obtained by working with Softtek's Near Shore® model. Softtek provides application maintenance and support services for the organization, including 24x7 break fix, user support, job monitoring, minor maintenance, and enhancements for more than 300 applications.

IT touches every aspect of business and personal lives and gives employees and consumers a platform for creativity — not just for business efficiency but for quality of life. Technology leaders play a role in developing this new model of innovation.

Join us for a picture-perfect Western evening!

Experience firsthand the beauty of a desert sunset and panoramic views of Camelback Mountain while enjoying an authentic Western cookout. The Jokake Inn is conveniently located at the main entrance of the Pheonician.

All attendees, speakers, and exhibitors are invited to attend.

Alignment is an old, never-ending problem in IT. Organizations employ a number of approaches in order to "close the gap" between business and IT, but they don't go far enough. Gaps remain especially between the business's desire for more innovation and IT's ability to deliver, and between the business's need for speed and the perception that IT still moves too slowly. Neither IT nor business will win if the solution is one of a "fast reaction."

Instead, firms need a business-focused architecture for their IT ecosystem based on proactive alignment. This keynote will discuss how IT can align with business outcomes, not just "the business," and the steps to create a business-focused architecture that guides where IT places its bets.

How do you flip the perception of IT from a barrier to an enabler? Put the IT organization ahead of the business, and make IT an agent for process change. In this case, technology, supply chain, and international operations blur together.

An outward-in view of IT begins with the end customer. The best-run firms align their ecosystems with customer needs and priorities and market the role of IT both internally and externally.

Xcel Energy's IT unit put into practice what Forrester calls Innovation Networks, launching more than 20 high-return pilot projects with its ecosystem of business partners. As a result, IT blurs even more with the customer care and HR functions.

The supply side of the IT ecosystem is changing. The time is finally right for a sustained shift from IT as a product to IT as a service. Why? The "-zation" triplets of commoditization, industrialization, and globalization. Plus, CIOs and their colleagues have told us they're finally ready. They demand best-of-breed offerings, but they want to deal with fewer vendors. They want the advantages of a component-based, SOA world, but they're less interested in having their own strapped organizations self-integrate disparate technologies.

These issues point to an IT ecosystem where technology is increasingly procured as a service — one in which "hubs" of the vendor ecosystem begin to switch seats. This keynote will outline the major shifts to the supply side of our industry and advise technology buyers on how to benefit from and manage these changes.