Technology
& Innovation
North America

Join us for a pre-conference reception where you can network with Forester experts and industry peers who will be part of the ELE program throughout the event.

By Invite Only

Start the day with a nourishing meal, the company of your fellow ELE participants, and an overview of the day ahead. 

By invite only.

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.

AI is nothing new to the enterprise, but this past year it has taken over the zeitgeist and shot up the enterprise priority list. Join this session to learn how enterprises are taking advantage of technologies like generative AI and AI/ML platforms to deliver valuable experiences today and make their business fit for the challenges of the future.

In this session, we will share:

• How enterprises are integrating generative AI into their businesses and starting to see the benefits.
• What businesses can do to get started with a strategy to leverage generative AI into their applications and processes.

Join us for a conversation with one of the thought leaders in the domain of fair and explainable AI and explore the multi-faceted opportunity to design AI-enabled products and services that benefit not only our organizations but society itself. 

By invite only.

Leaders are sitting at the edge of a transition from the leaders-as-heroes that got our organizations through the tough times of the pandemic — where confidence in executive leadership nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021 — to now, where many leaders are left unsure what their role in leading their team to high performance should be. Is their job to call people back to the old habits of in-office work supported by reactive leadership with a goal of incremental growth? Or is it to embrace the ongoing dynamism of whatever turbulence comes next and learn to steer a creative and innovative team to bold, new outcomes? In this session, clients will learn:

• The role that they have as leaders in setting the stabilizing vision of their teams.
• How leaders can increase the energy of the “local culture” that their team experiences.
• The role that technology — including expanding AI tools — will play in making them “better, stronger, faster” as leaders.

The continued development of artificial intelligence promises to transform the business environment as we know it. As we attempt to make decisions in an environment characterized by change and uncertainty, a view of AI’s impact rooted in traditional economic concepts of labor, productivity, and capital can help anchor our strategies and decision-making. Join us for a fascinating perspective on how to apply timeless economic principles and make better sense of the new.  

By invite only.

Our employees are our greatest advantage and yet one of our most challenging risks. With shortening employee tenures, rollbacks on remote work, the great exodus, tech layoffs, skill gaps, etc., organizations increasingly see their workforce as a major risk factor. Organizations must ensure that their workers can be productive regardless of location, that tasks can be executed by multiple individuals, that knowledge doesn’t solely live with an individual, and that human error is eliminated as much as possible. To address personnel risks, companies are investing in employee experience, modernizing knowledge management, embracing automation and robotics, and transforming admin roles to become site reliability engineers.

This panel will talk through the latest resilience innovations in the workforce, such as chatbots, robots working alongside humans, SRE, knowledge management as part of agile, storytelling, TuringBots, and more.

Tech leaders are facing a talent crunch; it is harder, takes longer, and costs more to attract the talent they need. The most successful leaders create an adaptive organization that continuously develops and applies knowledge and skills to drive resilience, creativity, and innovation — and, in doing so, outperform their peers. This session will provide tech executives with a skills-based strategy that will address the evolving complexity of today’s talent crunch in preparation for whatever uncertainty that tomorrow’s talent issues will bring. This session will help clients:

• Realign the end-to-end recruitment process to identify and capture skills.
• Expand learning opportunities to drive the continuous development of skills.
• Build performance objectives that encourage skill development.

Hear perspectives from female panelists on how they have driven and managed change in their workplace.

Historically, resilience meant tried-and-true approaches and a hard-line stance against change to ensure the greater good of the business. But that model is dated. In 2023, resilience takes creativity, not conservative resistance, whether that be powering your supply chain with smart technology, minimizing human error with automation, or fighting attrition with employee experience and better knowledge management. Coincidentally, innovative companies have found that creativity without resilience stagnates. Platform-driven innovation, software-defined infrastructure, and technology standards are essential to scaling your agile practice. As such, leading organizations aren’t turning away innovation or isolating their creative teams from governance; they are embracing controlled chaos, failing fast, leading with platform-driven innovation, and approving minimal viable products.

In this session, you will:

• Be inspired by other companies blending creativity and resilience.
• Learn about the seven pillars of modern business resilience.
• Walk away with a plan to mitigate risk and supercharge agile at scale.

Welcome to the highly anticipated Forrester Awards, the only assessment dedicated to recognizing excellence in technology strategy that drives an obsession with customer success and business growth.

In this session, we will announce the winner of this year’s award. The winner will embody the six principles of outcome-driven enterprise architecture: valuable, influential, continuous, agile, accountable, and pragmatic.

Welcome to the highly anticipated Forrester Awards, the only assessment dedicated to recognizing excellence in technology strategy that drives an obsession with customer success and business growth.

In this session, we will reward enterprises for their technology capabilities, including their ability to enable their business to be more adaptive, creative, and resilient with the help of platforms, partnerships, and practices that accelerate growth.

Enjoy this opportunity to further engage with peers met during the ELE program.

By invite only.

Join one of the networking tables during this informal discussion on topics such as presenting to the board, or what generative AI mean for you as leaders. Engage with experts, share insights, and forge meaningful connections. 

By invite only.

Communicating With The Board: Discuss how to communicate more effectively with Board Members.
Yvonne Wassenaar, Board Member and Advisor

Future of the CIO Role: Given the rise of the Chief Digital Officer, the resurgence of the Chief Technology Officer role, and business leaders who are increasingly tech-savvy, discuss how the role of the Chief Information Officer is changing and what this means for those in the CIO role and those who aspire to it.
Rockwell Scott, Forrester

Planning for 2024: Navigating Uncertain Economic Times: While uncertainty is always with us, firms have been facing a heightened level of financial, geopolitical, and operational (supply chain) unknowns. Discuss how leaders are planning for 2024 with a focus on risks, investment plans, and talent/sourcing strategies.
Alan Hanson, Forrester

Practical (Generative) AI: Generative AI and automation will have been themes running throughout the T&I conference. Share reactions to what you’ve heard and discuss the practical next steps that could be taken to advance AI in 2024.
Greg Willrich, Forrester

Emerging technologies always sparkle with promising new opportunities, but they often come fraught with myths. GenAI, in particular, seems almost magical so who can’t be allured by the early results we see? However, if you jump in too soon or too late, or if you have a false understanding of the risks and rewards, you could get burned. But with its momentum and inevitable impact on our work and society, it’s crucial to know what’s real and what’s not. Join VP and Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri while he shares Forrester’s look behind the curtain to dispel the major myths of GenAI, as well as provide a framework to help you harness this power and achieve new growth and superior operational capabilities.

Yes, everyone is talking about generative AI. And for good reason. It promises to disrupt how companies operate. But while technology leaders wade through AI hype cycles and determine what it really means for business models, marketers are already adopting and integrating AI into campaign development, production, and activation even though innovation in AI far outpaces any regulations.

In this session, you’ll hear:

• How brands are already using AI to bolster production, media, and commerce
• Why Tech leaders need to leverage the learnings from these Gen AI pioneers.
• How companies can ensure their AI initiatives are responsible by design.

Many organizations have treated their employees like disposable assets from which they need to extract value. Research has shown that when workers report high levels of cultural alignment, belonging, and well-being within their employee experience, they have more capacity and higher engagement, making the path to sustained excellence substantially more attainable. Together, these conditions create workforce actualization whereby the organization benefits from each employee’s willingness and ability to sustain excellence.

This session will help clients:

• Understand what happens at the intersection of culture energy, employee well-being, and belonging.
• Situate workforce actualization in the context of business success to enhance both.

Hear the “behind the scenes” story of the Forrester Technology Strategy Impact Award Winner and ask your questions about the journey that led to the award and the winner’s perspective on the road ahead.  

By invite only.

Generative AI, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are important tools to enable, create, and amplify your growth and differentiation. Most companies will want to develop the skills that they need to gain the benefits of AI as a differentiator. Most will also work with co-innovation partners to tap their expertise and data and onboard those skills while delivering the value that artificial intelligence can bring to every project. But which partners? And with what structures for success in achieving outcomes?

In this session, we will:

• Highlight best practices in getting the most from artificial intelligence and from the role of partners in fulfilling its potential.
• Create the structure for managing AI-fueled projects and engagements to achieve the outcomes and consistent success that you deserve.

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.

Out with the pandemic and in with a banking crisis as we head straight into a talent-constrained recession. What was last year’s metaverse is this year’s ChatGPT — though generative AI is exponentially gaining practical momentum within the future of work, editorial, education, customer experience, mathematics, and writing code. The stage is being set for 2024. Come listen to our top technology analysts discuss the next frontier of innovation threats, advantages, and opportunities.

Join us for refreshments and light appetizers as we end Technology & Innovation North America and welcome attendees for Data Strategy & Insights. All registered attendees are welcome.

Join us for refreshments and light appetizers. All registered attendees are welcome.

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.

AI is nothing new to the enterprise, but this past year it has taken over the zeitgeist and shot up the enterprise priority list. Join this session to learn how enterprises are taking advantage of technologies like generative AI and AI/ML platforms to deliver valuable experiences today and make their business fit for the challenges of the future.

In this session, we will share:

• How enterprises are integrating generative AI into their businesses and starting to see the benefits.
• What businesses can do to get started with a strategy to leverage generative AI into their applications and processes.

Emerging technologies always sparkle with promising new opportunities, but they often come fraught with myths. GenAI, in particular, seems almost magical so who can’t be allured by the early results we see? However, if you jump in too soon or too late, or if you have a false understanding of the risks and rewards, you could get burned. But with its momentum and inevitable impact on our work and society, it’s crucial to know what’s real and what’s not. Join VP and Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri while he shares Forrester’s look behind the curtain to dispel the major myths of GenAI, as well as provide a framework to help you harness this power and achieve new growth and superior operational capabilities.

Yes, everyone is talking about generative AI. And for good reason. It promises to disrupt how companies operate. But while technology leaders wade through AI hype cycles and determine what it really means for business models, marketers are already adopting and integrating AI into campaign development, production, and activation even though innovation in AI far outpaces any regulations.

In this session, you’ll hear:

• How brands are already using AI to bolster production, media, and commerce
• Why Tech leaders need to leverage the learnings from these Gen AI pioneers.
• How companies can ensure their AI initiatives are responsible by design.

Out with the pandemic and in with a banking crisis as we head straight into a talent-constrained recession. What was last year’s metaverse is this year’s ChatGPT — though generative AI is exponentially gaining practical momentum within the future of work, editorial, education, customer experience, mathematics, and writing code. The stage is being set for 2024. Come listen to our top technology analysts discuss the next frontier of innovation threats, advantages, and opportunities.

In today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, delivering exceptional customer, end user, 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’, end users’, and partners’ desired outcomes. By applying user-centered design, journey and experience analysis, and agile development, IT organizations can create solutions that exceed expectations, enhance 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, end users, and partners at the forefront.
• Learn best practices on how IT organizations can adopt human-centered design, customer journey mapping, and agile development to enhance experiences and outcomes for all stakeholders.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

Business leaders prioritize both innovation and security, but security cannot stifle innovation. Minimum viable security (MVS) bridges the two by aligning security requirements with the product’s context and the development team’s agility. MVS helps product leaders ensure that the early-stage products that drive hypergrowth don’t lose momentum due to critical security issues or unwieldy security processes.

During this session, we will:

• Explain how an MVS approach adds the right level of security into early-stage products and positions them for security success later, without stymieing innovation today.
• Provide a framework and best practices to help product leaders collaborate with their security counterparts and understand what security issues to prioritize during early-stage product development.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

Economic factors, empowered consumers, and evolving technology forces marketers to update their data and marketing technology capabilities. To deliver experiences that drive business value and meet customer expectations, marketers must adopt new approaches to identifying consumers, managing and distributing data, and orchestrating experiences. This session will explore the changing landscape of customer data and marketing technology and discuss how brands can innovate based on these trends to meet the requirements for marketing in 2023 and beyond: 

• Implement a platform-oriented approach to marketing technology. 
• Leverage identity resolution as the foundation for customer engagement. 
• Deploy new technical approaches such as customer data platforms and journey orchestration. 

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

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.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

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.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

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. 

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

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.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

Compliance and avoiding lawsuits are no longer the primary driver behind enterprise accessibility statements. This panel will discuss the shift of firms citing that “attracting and retaining talent” as the top driver behind their accessibility commitments.

During this session, we will discuss:
• The myths of providing accommodations, and how to manage an increasing number of requests from employees
• How companies are personalizing their employee value proposition at scale
• Why a “one size fits all” approach no longer works and how having a strong, accessible culture can be the difference between a productive employee base vs. an unsatisfied one.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

New and emerging technologies in data management (such as translytical data platforms, data pipelines, data fabrics, data mesh, cloud data warehouses, lake houses, knowledge graphs, and distributed platforms) are enabling organizations to support the next generation of insights, real-time analytics, customer intelligence, and other emerging use cases. Join this session to learn about:

• The top data management trends.
• How organizations can navigate through new and emerging technologies and architectures to support their data and analytics strategy.

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY

Only 62% of senior executives say that they can put themselves in the shoes of their customers. This is a big problem, because empathy makes you a better problem-solver and a better innovator. Empathy is a muscle we need to build within our organizations. In this keynote session, you will learn: 

• How to do the work to connect with the human intentionally, contextually, and persistently. 
• How to spark empathy within your organization. 
• How to reach the “right point of empathy.” 
• How to socialize and activate empathy at scale to drive innovation. 

DIGITAL SESSION ONLY