Technology & Innovation APAC

Join us for a snappy pre-event overview of what you can expect from the sessions, how to best connect with the right resources, the exclusive ELE program elements, and network with industry peers who will be part of the ELE program throughout the event. 

Customers and growth are the raison d’être of companies and a powerful motivation for the missions of nonprofits and government agencies. Technology is an essential component — the power — of the growth engine. Technology enables growth with secure, rock-solid operations and scale. Technology creates growth with new products, platforms, and market channels. And technology amplifies growth with continuous improvement from insights and AI. The big key for technology-powered growth is collaboration within the technology organization between technology leaders and marketing, digital, sales, product, and customer experience colleagues.   

In this session, you will:   

• Onboard a simple framework to shape your technology-powered growth engine.   
• Establish the connections you need to succeed.   
• Learn how to develop a career in technology with a growth mindset.  

For the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has evolved from a futuristic promise pursued by early adopters with mature technology teams to a legitimate and rapidly growing priority shared by business and technology leaders alike. Australia, like many countries, has a rapidly transforming AI ecosystem, where businesses are generating significant new revenue streams and efficiencies using AI technology. As the pace of AI-driven change accelerates through the convergence of natural language processing, large language models, and transfer learning, it is important that business and technology leaders understand how best to develop and deploy responsible AI solutions to maximize opportunities while mitigating the risks of unintended consequences. 

The world is witnessing a significant shift in the way businesses operate, and technological investments are at the forefront of this change. The rise of modern technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and automation has opened new opportunities for businesses to invest in productivity that drives the top and bottom line. This presentation brings a simple model linking technology investment and growth.  

Session takeaways:   

• Learn how technology investments impact productivity over time.  
• Identify the opportunities and challenges that come with investing in technology capabilities.  
• Apply key factors driving productivity to funnel your technology investment strategy.  

Join our invitation-only lunch with other ELE participants and engage in an open discussion with peers, analysts, and other key-note presenters. Bring your tough and curly questions for exploration during this exclusive and intimate lunch event.   

Technical debt’s definition has expanded over the years; organizations now recognize its many forms. Forrester customers manage debt in software, vendor product, security, knowledge, hardware, and more. Based on best practices reported by Forrester clients, we will discuss an integrated data capture and reporting approach that closes the loop with investment and planning and frees up much-needed capital for investment in future tech.   

Attend this session to understand:  

• The importance of robust asset management and application portfolio management and their linkage to tech debt.  
• How to calculate tech debt by identifying all the relevant components that contribute to it.  
• What best practices to build for continuous monitoring and management of tech debt.  
• How to effectively free up resources using tech debt management and reinvest in future technologies.  

In today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, delivering exceptional customer, employee, and partner experiences has become a company’s critical differentiator. To achieve this, IT organizations must adopt a human-centered approach that aligns technology capabilities with customers’, employees’, and partners’ outcomes. By applying user-centered design, journey and experience analysis, and empathy tools, IT organizations can create solutions that exceed expectations, enhance their experiences, and deliver a strategic advantage.     

Join this session to:    

• Gain insights into the benefits that come when an IT organization takes a human-centered approach that places the needs of customers, employees, and partners at the forefront.    
• Learn best practices on how IT organizations can adopt human-centered design, customer journey mapping, and empathy tools to enhance the experiences and outcomes for all stakeholders.  

Coffee Chats are informal discussions on trending topics. Feel free to bring your questions and help spark the conversation. 

Generative AI has triggered a hype cycle the likes of which we have not seen since Apple launched the iPhone. Every LinkedIn article, conversation, conference, and report from every company is here to tell you what you should know, and why you should drop everything right now and pay attention to it. But in this session, we’re not going to talk about “it”. Why? Because this is not the first, nor will it be the last, innovative technology you’ll see in your career. If as leaders we are doing our jobs well, then our teams and organizations will have the tools and resources to evaluate new innovations. We won’t be subsumed by the hype but rather ready to put new technology into practice when the time is right. Join Sam Higgins, Principal Analyst, as he sits down with two exceptional technology leaders to find out what it takes to foster a learning culture that creates space and psychological safety to test and learn with new tools. And how good leaders stick to a human-centered vision that empowers individuals to decide for themselves what value the shiny thing of the day has for them and their work. 

This session will see the announcement of the winners of this year’s Technology Awards in two categories: Technology Strategy Impact and Enterprise Architecture. 

In the last two decades, a significant amount of money and time has been spent in efforts to diversify the tech and security workforces. While progress is happening, it seems to move at a glacial pace. Women are still significantly underrepresented in tech and security as a whole, and dramatically underrepresented in tech and security leadership. The women who do succeed make it by beating the odds and overcoming significant obstacles in their path to success. This problem represents a risk, not just for women, but for the industry as a whole. Join this panel to discuss how women can move beyond surviving despite the odds, to thriving in an ecosystem of opportunity. 

Each day, IT and security teams face major risks and concerns globally; unfortunately, teams are often working against each other by not presenting a unified front and, at times, exhibiting outward hostility. Yet technology and security executives have a multitude of benefits to reap by having a unified and consolidated security vision and sound relationships and working together to enable the business.    

Attend this keynote to:  

• Explore the root causes of the divide and tensions between IT and security.  
• Discover the surprising commonalities between technology and security leaders and teams.  
• Build humanity in the interactions and behaviors with infosec leaders and teams.   
• Learn how to operationalize the collaboration required to build trust between teams.   
• Exercise empathy to build trust across teams.  

Generative AI is the creative side of AI. You’ve heard of and perhaps even tried ChatGPT. But generative AI technology also includes image generation, novel data generation for scientific exploration, and TuringBots that generate code. Forrester coined the term TuringBot in 2020, when we saw the potential for machine learning algorithms to supplement parts of the software development lifecycle. This applied AI is one of the hottest but least well-known emerging technologies that could accelerate your firm’s tech delivery by orders of magnitude. But many technologies Forrester covers come with a “buyer beware” label.    

The Forrester experts on this panel will attempt to answer what generative AI means for the tech organization itself and how far and fast it will go. 

We’ll provide strategies, frameworks, standards, and insights to help navigate AI regulations, de-risk AI, and attain valuable business outcomes.   

Cyclical changes to the talent market have always been an issue, but today we are facing key structural changes in our talent, from skills deficits to demographic changes. Despite 2023’s high-profile layoffs, there are still millions more job openings than there are unemployed people to fill them. Improving your ability to access talent is a top priority for your growth strategy, especially by using alternative pools of talent. But this workforce planning must be done strategically. Hyperscaling your talent engine in the face of these challenges means that you will have to draw on every available talent resource.   

In this session, you will learn how to:  

• Develop a future fit culture and management approach that delivers flexible growth potential.  
• Build, buy, borrow, and bot your way to a hyperscalable talent engine.  
• Adopt a skills-based approach to guiding the talent you already have to the future you need.  
• Anticipate and resolve barriers that other companies have faced in their journey to future fit talent strategies.  

With an inflation crisis and the looming threat of economic recession, all organizations, regardless of industry size or scope, will face even greater pressure in 2024 to harness technology-led innovation to deliver business value. The pace of technology-driven change has never been greater. What was last year’s metaverse is this year’s ChatGPT. What emerging opportunities should you focus on and why? When your organisation is working with limited budgets, competing priorities, a need for talent transformation, and the ever-rising expectations from customers, partners and regulators, choosing the right technology investment path has never been so critical. How do you decide when and what to invest in? This session will provide a “sneak peak” into some of Forrester’s insights and predictions for 2024 and beyond. 

For the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has evolved from a futuristic promise pursued by early adopters with mature technology teams to a legitimate and rapidly growing priority shared by business and technology leaders alike. Australia, like many countries, has a rapidly transforming AI ecosystem, where businesses are generating significant new revenue streams and efficiencies using AI technology. As the pace of AI-driven change accelerates through the convergence of natural language processing, large language models, and transfer learning, it is important that business and technology leaders understand how best to develop and deploy responsible AI solutions to maximize opportunities while mitigating the risks of unintended consequences. 

Coffee Chats are informal discussions on trending topics. Feel free to bring your questions and help spark the conversation.

Generative AI has triggered a hype cycle the likes of which we have not seen since Apple launched the iPhone. Every LinkedIn article, conversation, conference, and report from every company is here to tell you what you should know, and why you should drop everything right now and pay attention to it. But in this session, we’re not going to talk about “it”. Why? Because this is not the first, nor will it be the last, innovative technology you’ll see in your career. If as leaders we are doing our jobs well, then our teams and organizations will have the tools and resources to evaluate new innovations. We won’t be subsumed by the hype but rather ready to put new technology into practice when the time is right. Join Sam Higgins, Principal Analyst, as he sits down with two exceptional technology leaders to find out what it takes to foster a learning culture that creates space and psychological safety to test and learn with new tools. And how good leaders stick to a human-centered vision that empowers individuals to decide for themselves what value the shiny thing of the day has for them and their work.

With an inflation crisis and the looming threat of economic recession, all organizations, regardless of industry size or scope, will face even greater pressure in 2024 to harness technology-led innovation to deliver business value. The pace of technology-driven change has never been greater. What was last year’s metaverse is this year’s ChatGPT. What emerging opportunities should you focus on and why? When your organisation is working with limited budgets, competing priorities, a need for talent transformation, and the ever-rising expectations from customers, partners and regulators, choosing the right technology investment path has never been so critical. How do you decide when and what to invest in? This session will provide a “sneak peak” into some of Forrester’s insights and predictions for 2024 and beyond.

Cyclical changes to the talent market have always been an issue, but today we are facing key structural changes in our talent, from skills deficits to demographic changes. Despite 2023’s high-profile layoffs, there are still millions more job openings than there are unemployed people to fill them. Improving your ability to access talent is a top priority for your growth strategy, especially by using alternative pools of talent. But this workforce planning must be done strategically. Hyperscaling your talent engine in the face of these challenges means that you will have to draw on every available talent resource.

In this session, you will learn how to:
• Develop a future fit culture and management approach that delivers flexible growth potential.
• Build, buy, borrow, and bot your way to a hyperscalable talent engine.
• Adopt a skills-based approach to guiding the talent you already have to the future you need.
• Anticipate and resolve barriers that other companies have faced in their journey to future fit talent strategies.

Technology differentiates your business when it’s focused on business outcomes — the value that tech initiatives bring to your customers and to your business. Bring this focus to value delivery using business leaders’ language and adopting shared accountability for those results.

This session will help you:
• Use business capabilities to plan, deliver, and communicate the impact of technology on business outcomes.
• Link tech investments with what business leaders care about using the language of the business.
• Identify the work needed to achieve strategic outcomes through value stream planning — spanning capabilities across the enterprise and partners’ ecosystems.
• Navigate dynamic backlogs using KPIs — cascading them across business capabilities and the organization’s OKRs.

If it is true that modern technologies are tomorrow’s technical debt, how can enterprises modernize without sowing the seeds for future deficits? Enterprises must structure IT third-party relationships to maximize agility and transformation value. By reviewing current third-party IT product and service engagement models, optimizing vendor selection processes, and building effective relationship management strategies, enterprises can increase the efficiency with which partners can deliver the right capabilities while managing the pace of change.

This session will help clients:
• Minimize risk when engaging with service providers for modernization.
• Structure vendor contracts to avoid accumulation of future tech debt.

Your systems are going down. Where do you begin to diagnose the issue and get back up and running? Your customers are frustrated with their experience. How do you engage with real-time data to address it? This has been the reality for enterprises for too long and must change. Downtime and, more broadly, bad experiences put your brand at risk with customers. Companies are bringing two-way symptom diagnosis and AI insights into their operations to better understand issues in real time and even prevent them before they occur. Using modern monitoring observability and AIOps, companies are revolutionizing the way that they address application and system health.

This session will give real examples of these technologies in action and help your organization think about the larger processes and skills needed to take advantage of these technologies.

Dependable technology is essential to business resilience. Historically, this meant infrastructure that never failed, minimal change, and stifled innovation. In the modern world, this means leveraging bundles services and platforms to enable fast innovation with the right guardrails. To help their business innovate without exposing the organization to risk, companies are embracing platform-driven innovation.

This session will cover:
• The latest technology practices, including chaos engineering, active-active deployment, scale-out architectures, etc.
• Key technologies such as infrastructure as code, infrastructure automation, Kubernetes, and public cloud.

The use cases for low-code have reached a tipping point. As low-code platforms are used for more critical business challenges — including creating significant portions of commercial software products — technology leaders must ensure that best practices are followed, such as automated testing, governance, and compliance, without compromising development speed or alienating low-code developers. To meet these challenges, organizations must learn how to properly apply the principles of DevOps to low-code.

During this session, we will:
• Introduce the audience to the practices and tools of low-code plus DevOps.
• Explain how it’s both the same and different from DevOps for traditional coding.
• Review the benefits of this approach and some compelling use case examples.

Energy and engagement are finite resources that are essential to achieving business results. One of the challenges that organizations and leaders face is that these resources have been depleted for many of their employees due to a lack of strategies to refresh and sustain that energy. In this session, we will:

Define “tired rock stars” — high-engagement contributors who are at risk of burning out.

Guide leaders to see the tired rock stars in their ranks (including, possibly, themselves) and understand them more clearly.

Share how leaders can sustainably earn excellence from their talent.

Gone are the days when leaders stood in front of their followers and told them what matters. Modern leaders engage their teams to learn from them, and with them, what matters in business and for customers. But that can only happen with a more purposeful listening strategy. In this session, attendees will learn:

• What listening is and why it plays the largest role in an organization’s approach to employee input.
• How listening is a productive, rather than merely reactive, tool for improving the business.
• Why successful leaders will be known as much for what they learned as what they said.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”) are key concepts at the forefront of many corporations’ agendas today. The need for a more inclusive workspace is not new, but corporations are now recognizing trends in the correlation between a diverse/inclusive workspace and greater staff retention and productivity. This session provides an easy-to-follow pathway that helps get any company past the initial step (of what is often viewed unfavorably as ‘requisite diversity training’) and around the most common traps that stop companies from maintaining best practices.

• How to ‘jump right in’ and identify specific areas for program enhancement. Don’t get lost in the too-big picture!
• Learn the three key components of the employee lifecycle for DEI incorporation.
• Discover how a stronger DEI program can lead to team and company maturity.
• Recognize the most common traps: where attempts to be inclusive go wrong with most corporations.
• Act upon two things you can do to improve immediately/today.

Environmental sustainability is neither just a risk nor just a business opportunity but a revolution that will force CMOs to rethink their marketing. In this session, you will learn how to:

• Differentiate your approach to sustainability by embracing the green market revolution.
• Understand consumers’ behaviours and attitudes toward environmental sustainability.
• Learn from sustainable leaders on how to best engage your green customers.

Compliance and avoiding lawsuits are no longer the primary drivers behind enterprise accessibility commitments. In this panel session we will discuss why firms increasingly cite “attracting and retaining talent” as a top driver behind accessibility commitments and the best practices to deliver on those commitments.

You will learn:

• The myths of providing accommodations and how to manage an increasing number of requests from employees
• How companies personalize their employee value proposition at scale
• Why a “one size fits all” approach to accessibility doesn’t work and why having a strong, accessible, culture can be the difference between a productive employee base versus and unsatisfied one

A personal & professional journey that has seen this Product Leader succeed across multiple industries, geographies and at the intersection of technological & business disruption. In this fireside chat, Ash Mukherjee will discuss with Monica Carlesso how she has grown as leader by embracing curiosity and displayed grit to open to be constantly out of the comfort zone yet has learnt how self-care is key to leadership and a sustainable growth. Modern leadership is about embracing change and dichotomies, both as strategic business levers but also to lead compassionately through massive societal changes and Monica will share her story with Ash.

During this session, we will discuss:
• A product leader’s journey across different industries and geographies, exploring challenges and implications
• How to overcome the bumps of a growth journey with curiosity, grit and self-care.

Hitendra’s mission is to discover, codify, and explore the laws of success in life and leadership. With an MBA and Ph.D. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Wadhwa brings a mathematician’s rigor and a truth-seeker’s spirit to some of today’s most vexing questions about authenticity, success, leadership, and human potential. In this conversation, we’ll explore with Hitendra his personal journey of discovery, his insights, and his recommendations for defining, and then achieving purpose, and how you can be a better leader with Cultural Intelligence.