Technology
& Innovation

North America

September 10 – 12, 2023  |  Austin & Digital

Bold Starts: Sunday

Sep 10
  • 2:00 pm – 5:30 pm CDTSpecial Programs
  • 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm CDTWelcome Reception

Monday

Sep 11
  • 8:00 am – 9:00 am CDTGeneral Breakfast
  • 9:00 am – 10:30 am CDTOpening Remarks & Keynote Sessions
  • 10:35 am – 11:20 am CDTMarketplace Break & Networking
  • 11:20 am – 12:30 pm CDTBreakouts & Case Study Sessions
  • 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CDTLunch & Marketplace Break
  • 1:30 pm – 3:20 pm CDTBreakouts & Case Study Sessions
  • 3:20 pm – 4:05 pm CDTMarketplace Break & Networking
  • 4:05 pm – 5:30 pm CDTKeynote Sessions & Technology Awards
  • 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CDTReception

Tuesday

Sep 12
  • 8:00 am – 9:00 am CDTGeneral Breakfast
  • 9:00 am – 10:15 am CDTWelcome Back & Keynote Sessions
  • 10:15 am – 11:00 am CDTMarketplace Break & Networking
  • 11:00 am – 12:10 pm CDTBreakouts & Case Study Sessions
  • 12:10 pm – 1:10 pm CDTLunch & Networking
  • 1:10 pm – 2:30 pm CDTBreakout & Case Study Sessions
  • 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm CDTKeynote Sessions & Closing Remarks
  • 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm CDTSpecial Sessions

Bold Starts: Sunday Sep 10

2:00 pm – 5:30 pm CDT

Bold Starts: Special Programs (In-Person Only)

Join us for a range of Special Programs including ForrWomen, Analyst Relations Exchange, and other ways to connect with your peers before the main program.

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CDT

Welcome Reception (In-Person Only)

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

Monday Sep 11

8:00 am – 9:00 am CDT

General Breakfast

9:00 am – 9:30 am CDT

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Speakers:
Matthew Guarini, VP, Research Director, Forrester

9:30 am – 10:00 am CDT

Keynote: Technology’s Vital Role In The Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine

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

Speakers:
Ted Schadler, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

10:00 am – 10:30 am CDT

Keynote: Why Generative AI Matters For Enterprises

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.

Speakers:
Rowan Curran, Analyst, Forrester
Naj Uddin, Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, AARP

10:35 am – 11:20 am CDT

Marketplace Coffee Break & Networking (In-Person Only)

Marketplace breaks are your chance to connect with sponsors and catch up with colleagues on the show floor.

11:20 am – 11:50 am CDT

Breakout Sessions

Make Technology A Strategic Differentiator
Push Down Your Cost Curve While Raising Productivity By Putting Your Technology Investments In Motion

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 takes a look at a simple model linking technology investment and growth.

Takeaways:

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

Speakers:
Christopher Gilchrist, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Lead A High-Performing Team
Be A Stable Leader In Turbulent Times

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.

Speakers:
James L. McQuivey, PhD, VP, Research Director, Forrester

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Turn Tech Debt Into High Yields Now And In The Future
Fast-Track Value And Minimize Tech Debt With These Key Technologies

The ideal state for the modern enterprise is direct alignment between the technology stack and the business strategy. Achieving that state is difficult to do, however. Most enterprise tech stacks are a jumbled mix of legacy and modern technology. These companies acquire new technologies without identifying business value.

This session will focus on:

  • How enterprises can achieve a tech stack that minimizes technical debt and brings maximum value.
  • Identifying key technologies (cloud, platforms, automation) to invest in and the best ways to organize (embedded teams, crowdsourcing).

Speakers:
Manuel Geitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Tracy Woo, Senior Analyst, Forrester

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Fostering Resilience To Enable Creativity
Embrace “Resilient By Design” To Enable Innovation

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.

Speakers:
Naveen Chhabra, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Power Your Business With Awesome Software
The Intersection Of Low-Code And DevOps

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.

Speakers:
John Bratincevic, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Innovate New Value With Emerging Technology
Investing For The Future Of Digital Experience

Tomorrow’s digital experiences will involve a number of emerging technologies from generative AI and extended reality to virtual worlds, super apps, and possibly the metaverse. How do you prioritize what to invest in today and what to leave for later?

During this session, we will discuss:

  • The expected evolution of consumer digital experiences over the next 10 years.
  • The role of emerging technologies in enabling those experiences.
  • Methodologies that companies can use to prioritize their investments.

Speakers:
Julie Ask, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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12:00 pm – 12:30 pm CDT

Case Study Sessions (In-Person Only)

Hear real world case studies showcasing the value of partnering with the right technology provider.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CDT

Lunch & Marketplace

Marketplace breaks are your chance to connect with sponsors and catch up with colleagues on the show floor.

1:30 pm – 2:00 pm CDT

Breakout Sessions

Make Technology A Strategic Differentiator
Accelerate Tech’s Impact On Business Outcomes By Focusing On Business Capabilities

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.

Speakers:
Bobby Cameron, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Lead A High-Performing Team
Managing Change As A Modern Leader

Whatever change you are leading your team through, one thing will emerge as true: The ability to successfully execute on change depends on a holistic approach to designing, measuring, and executing a change strategy. That holistic approach is within the control of leaders, not individual contributors, and most leaders do this poorly. Drawing on Forrester’s latest surveys of thousands of leaders and workers across eight countries, this session will help leaders understand the following key insights:

  • There are individual characteristics that make change management easier — and ones that make it more challenging.
  • The way that your team perceives change can differ based on how you lead them.
  • Transparent, empathetic processes can lead to more change engagement from your team.

Speakers:
Katy Tynan, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Turn Tech Debt Into High Yields Now And In The Future
Make Great Technology Decisions That Minimize The Impacts Of Tech Debt

Lay out a framework to address the issue of identifying, measuring, and managing the business impact of your technology decisions. By extending technical debt into a framework that includes the impact on risk, compliance, governance, legal implications, organizational structure, processes, infrastructure, maturity, and personnel, Forrester’s research can help you comprehensively address what and how technology choices should be made.

In this session, we will:

  • Visualize the impact of technical debt across different dimensions (financial, personnel, process, legal, organizational, risk, et al.).
  • Develop a comprehensive understanding of the impact of technology choices so that optimal decisions can be made.

Speakers:
Alvin Nguyen, Senior Analyst, Forrester

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Fostering Resilience To Enable Creativity
Panel: Amp Up Your Workforce With Modern Tech And Processes

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.

Speakers:
Julie Mohr, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Brent Ellis, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Lauren Nelson, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

READ MORE +READ LESS -
Power Your Business With Awesome Software
How To Best Leverage Kubernetes For Innovation

Whether they know it or not, enterprise development shops have become the centerpoint of business innovation and competitive advantage. Many of today’s customers of even the most conservative industries such as financial institutions only interact with a business via a technology product or service. Cloud and cloud-native patterns brought global scale to the everyday enterprise, but cloud-native standards like Kubernetes can impose complexities on development teams that stifle their ability to focus on delivering innovative, world-class experiences for their customers. Enterprises must find the sweet spot between performant, resilient platforms and the right amount of development complexity that they can take on to drive growth and innovation in their software and for the business.

During this session, we will:

  • Discuss how application development enterprises should approach leveraging Kubernetes without stifling developer experience, innovation, and productivity.
  • Uncover cloud-native development best practices for enterprises to get the most out of their platform investments.

Speakers:
Devin Dickerson, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Innovate New Value With Emerging Technology
Balancing Emerging-Tech Risk And Reward

Investing in emerging technology is fundamentally a risk-reward decision. Our data shows that better risk-takers reap bigger rewards, but they also fail more often. In this session, we will present Forrester’s emerging technology risk framework and discuss how you use it to accelerate your innovation strategy.

During this session, we will discuss:

  • Using cybersecurity to accelerate innovation and increase emerging tech adoption.
  • Allowing cybersecurity to find the unintended consequences of your initiatives.
  • Building an enduring competitive advantage through trust.

Speakers:
Jeff Pollard, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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2:10 pm – 2:40 pm CDT

Case Study Sessions (In-Person Only)

Hear real world case studies showcasing the value of partnering with the right technology provider.

2:50 pm – 3:20 pm CDT

Breakout Sessions

Make Technology A Strategic Differentiator
The Best Way To Differentiate And Grow Your Business With Technology

This session brings technology leadership for differentiation and growth to life through the impact and effectiveness of a technology organization, where a leader will provide wisdom and guidance to give every technology leader the inspiration and power to bring technology-driven growth and differentiation to their companies. will provide his wisdom and guidance to give every technology leader the inspiration and power to bring technology-driven growth and differentiation to their companies. In this session, you will:

  • Learn how technology is a growth driver with the right approach and collaboration.
  • Take insights from success stories, and the lessons learned along the way, back to your own work.

 

 

READ MORE +READ LESS -
Lead A High-Performing Team
Getting Your Team’s Skills Ready For The Future

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.

Speakers:
Fiona Mark, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Turn Tech Debt Into High Yields Now And In The Future
From Chaos To Continuous: A Sustainable, Integrated Approach For Managing Technical Debt

Technical debt weighs down organizational agility, hinders creativity, and erodes resilience. Its definition has expanded over the years: Organizations now recognize it in many forms, such as application, software, vendor product, security, knowledge, asset, and others. A systematic approach to measuring and acting on it is essential.

In this session, we will discuss:

  • Current best practices for managing technical debt as reported by Forrester clients.
  • An integrated data capture and reporting approach that closes the loop with planning, investment, and delivery to achieve a continuous, virtuous cycle of debt optimization.

Speakers:
Charles Betz, Research Director, Forrester

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Fostering Resilience To Enable Creativity
Panel: Innovative Resilience: A Panel Of Stories

Technology resilience is more than a fast return to operations and high availability metrics. A good resilience strategy supports a business’s ability to adapt in the face of crisis and provides a foundation for innovation and creativity. Mature organizations are using resilience strategies that focus on understanding and leveraging risk for innovation. Instead of putting all technology under lock and key, they learn from controlled chaos and encourage experimentation with the right guardrails in place. To pivot your organization to this new way of thinking, start by gaining insight into the innovation coming from your peers. This panel highlights the innovative resilience of enterprises like yours.

Key takeaways:

  • Leaders plan for technology resilience by architecting systems and enacting processes that promote resilience goals aligned with business strategy.
  • Organizations that build a flexible technology resilience strategy can innovate safely both in pre-production and production.
  • Technology resilience is a key competency for businesses looking to increase their ability to use technology creatively and have the ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Speakers:
Brent Ellis, Senior Analyst, Forrester

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Power Your Business With Awesome Software
Composable Architecture: Modern Enterprise Architecture And Design For the Adaptable Enterprise

In this session, we present how to use design thinking, modern composable and distributed hybrid architectures for sustainable, extensible, and secure enterprises supporting large-scale initiatives. We will discuss design patterns and principles to create a seamless, hybrid, hyper-scaled, and globally distributed computing organization, and detail automation of regulatory processes for evolving industry requirements. By applying these architectures and design patterns, organizations can transform their operations, making composable Enterprise Architecture a key driver of digital landscape modernization and team success.

During this session, we will discuss:

  • Design thinking and how to measure value in design, as well as interconnectivity and interoperability standards
  • How to apply pragmatic vendor management and how to solve the skills gap
  • How to create a clear roadmap to modern composable architecture

Speakers:
Christopher Lundy, Principal Enterprise Architect, Seagen

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Innovate New Value With Emerging Technology
Augmented Coding: Will TuringBots Take Over Writing Software?

Forrester coined the term TuringBot in 2020, when we saw the potential for machine-learning algorithms supplementing 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 code development by an order of magnitude. The question is: How far will they go, and how fast?

During this session, we will discuss:

  • TuringBot fundamentals — why and how they work.
  • Developer productivity and team productivity.
  • The future of software development — where TuringBots will go.

Speakers:
Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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3:20 pm – 4:05 pm CDT

Marketplace Coffee Break & Networking (In-Person Only)

Marketplace breaks are your chance to connect with sponsors and catch up with colleagues on the show floor.

4:05 pm – 4:35 pm CDT

Keynote: Turn Tech Debt Into High Yields Now And In The Future

Organizations continue to debate the scrupulous semantics of the term “technical debt,” but the impacts and manifestation of it throughout an organization are clear and much less disputable. Technical debt makes organizations less agile — it distracts from future fit investments and impedes the productivity and empowerment of managers, developers, and engineers. Even when high-growth, leading organizations accrue high technical-debt margins, they understand the implications and employ strategies to mitigate the increased risks.

This discussion is organized to help you transform anxiety into the following actions:

  • Shape the tech portfolio toward technology investments that drive continuous growth and innovation.
  • Initiate diagnostic activities that target specific areas for maximum returns.
  • Establish ongoing budget forecasting and lifecycle management practices across the organization.

Speakers:
Linda Ivy-Rosser, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Tom Peck, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Sysco

4:35 pm – 4:50 pm CDT

Keynote: Forrester Technology Awards 2023: Enterprise Architecture Award

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 will embody the six principles of outcome-driven enterprise architecture: valuable, influential, continuous, agile, accountable, and pragmatic.

 

Speakers:
Charles Betz, Research Director, Forrester

4:50 pm – 5:15 pm CDT

Keynote: Forrester Technology Awards 2023: Technology Strategy Impact Award

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.

Speakers:
Sharyn Leaver, Chief Research Officer, Forrester

5:15 pm – 5:20 pm CDT

Closing Remarks

Speakers:
Matthew Guarini, VP, Research Director, Forrester

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CDT

Reception

Join us for a reception full of networking, fun, food, and refreshments.

Tuesday Sep 12

8:00 am – 9:00 am CDT

General Breakfast

9:00 am – 9:35 am CDT

Welcome Back & Keynote: Creative Resilience: An Oxymoron

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.

Speakers:
Lauren Nelson, VP, Research Director, Forrester

9:35 am – 10:05 am CDT

Guest Keynote

10:15 am – 11:00 am CDT

Marketplace Coffee Break & Networking (In-Person Only)

Marketplace breaks are your chance to connect with sponsors and catch up with colleagues on the show floor.

11:00 am – 11:30 am CDT

Breakout Sessions

Make Technology A Strategic Differentiator
Adopt Human-Centered IT Practices That Drive Better Experiences And Strategic Advantage

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.

Speakers:
Gordon Barnett, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Lead A High-Performing Team
Leading The Actualized Workforce: Earning Excellence From Individuals And Teams

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.

Speakers:
Angelina Gennis, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Jonathan Roberts, Senior Analyst, Forrester

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Turn Tech Debt Into High Yields Now And In The Future
Minimizing Tomorrow’s Technical Debt With Modern Sourcing Strategies

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 attendees:

  • Minimize risk when engaging with service providers for modernization.
  • Structure vendor contracts to avoid accumulation of future tech debt.

Speakers:
Akshara Naik Lopez, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Fostering Resilience To Enable Creativity
Get Proactive With Observability And AIOps

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.

Speakers:
Carlos Casanova, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Power Your Business With Awesome Software
Secure Early-Stage Innovation With Minimum Viable Security

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.

Speakers:
Sandy Carielli, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Innovate New Value With Emerging Technology
Unlocking The Value Of AI In Customer Service

Generative AI and large language models are having their “moment” in customer service (and, well … everywhere). Conversation intelligence vendors are infusing their solutions with large language models and offering generative AI features that are driving tangible value for enterprises today, improving both operational efficiency and the customer experience. Join this session to learn about use cases, leveraging generative AI, and how to buy or assemble solutions to meet your needs.

During this session, we will:

  • What use cases are in-market today (and which are still cooking)?
  • What value can be unlocked by leveraging generative AI in the contact center?
  • What can you buy off the shelf, and how would you assemble the pieces to build your own?

Speakers:
Christina McAllister, Senior Analyst, Forrester

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11:40 am – 12:10 pm CDT

Case Study Sessions (In-Person Only)

Hear real world case studies showcasing the value of partnering with the right technology provider.

12:10 pm – 1:10 pm CDT

Lunch & Marketplace

Marketplace breaks are your chance to connect with sponsors and catch up with colleagues on the show floor.

1:10 pm – 1:40 pm CDT

Breakout Sessions

Make Technology A Strategic Differentiator
Amplify Your Strategic Advantage With Artificial Intelligence Through Co-Innovation Partnerships

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.

Speakers:
Ted Schadler, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Lead A High-Performing Team
Panel: Bringing IT And HR Together

Tech organizations have struggled to keep up with tech talent challenges, with crucial contributors in high demand across industries. In many organizations, IT has struggled to know how to bring HR into the conversation, with their HR counterparts already overwhelmed with monitoring compliance and managing high talent turnover in general. This has led some IT departments to take on HR-like tasks such as procuring talent and managing onboarding and career development. In this session, we’ll invite tech and HR leaders to share how they manage to work together in today’s difficult talent environment, more tightly coupling their efforts.

You’ll hear:

  • How tech and HR leaders understand each other’s needs more effectively.
  • What tech can do to support HR’s stressful dynamics.
  • How HR can guide talent-sensitive tech leaders to greater success.

Speakers:
Katy Tynan, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Turn Tech Debt Into High Yields Now And In The Future
Panel: Capitalize On AI Without Technical Debt In Your Enterprise Stack

Future fit companies aggressively adopt AI in the enterprise tech stack but risk creating bad technical debt if they do not follow a structured approach. This session will focus on best practices for successfully implementing AI capabilities without accumulating negative technical debt in digital experience and digital operations systems.

In this session, leaders will walk away with:

  • The key risks and challenges of adopting AI without considering technical debt implications.
  • An understanding of how to create a governance and risk approach that supports clean adoption of AI.

Speakers:
Liz Herbert, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Alla Valente, Senior Analyst, Forrester

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Fostering Resilience To Enable Creativity
Anticipate And Adapt With IoT-Powered Smart Supply Chain

The global health pandemic and the associated supply chain disruptions made organizations hyperaware of supply chain vulnerabilities. Similarly new hybrid experiences increased expectations for inventory accuracy across the omnichannel. Leading organizations are transforming supply chain and logistics to ensure timeliness, efficiency, quality of resources, and increasingly – sustainability. For example, robotics at the edge can offload labor intensive tasks; IoT solutions can capture insight and data to execute quality checks; and complex data processing can analyze video to ensure workplace safety. And that’s just the beginning. This session will address emerging opportunities to help transform your supply chain with smart technology.

Key Takeaways:

  • Evaluate opportunities to deploy IoT use cases to optimize supply chain processes.
  • Identify practices to successfully power supply chain solutions with IoT solutions and smart technology.
  • Prepare to address key challenges as your firm deploys IoT-enabled supply chain solutions.

Speakers:
Michele Pelino, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Power Your Business With Awesome Software
Panel: When To Build Vs. Buy, Customize Vs. Compose

The simple build-vs.-buy framing is handy but usually based on outdated assumptions and wishful thinking about software and digital business. It underestimates the complexity and cost of packaged solutions as well as the value of platforms and their ecosystems. And it overestimates the cost and complexity of modern custom development as well as the similarities between firms in a truly adaptive digital environment. For an effective digital enterprise, pure buy doesn’t exist, and pure build is often impractical. The real question for any given software decision is: Shall we customize a packaged app or compose software components to obtain the custom solution we need?

During this session, we will:

  • Explain how to create an adaptable software culture.
  • Give you three specific strategies for how to get started no matter where you are today.

Speakers:
Joe Cicman, Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation, Forrester
Manuel Geitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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Innovate New Value With Emerging Technology
Panel: “Buyer Beware” Technologies — Quantum Computing And Web3

Several technologies that Forrester covers should come with a “buyer beware” label. This panel will discuss why the audience needs to approach quantum computing and Web3 with more than a single grain of salt and will attempt to answer the question of if, and when, either one of these will live up to its full potential.

During this session, we will discuss:

  • The state and future of quantum computing, including the security implications.
  • The state and future of Web3 as it relates to enterprise use cases.
  • The myths and pitfalls of these technologies, and why both will need five or more years to yield significant benefits for most firms.

Speakers:
Brian Hopkins, VP, Emerging Tech Portfolio, Forrester
David Mooter, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

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1:50 pm – 2:20 pm CDT

Case Study Sessions (In-Person Only)

Hear real world case studies showcasing the value of partnering with the right technology provider.

2:30 pm – 3:00 pm CDT

Keynote: Hyperscale Your Talent Engine

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.

Speakers:
Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Forrester

3:00 pm – 3:30 pm CDT

Keynote: Predictions 2024

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.

Speakers:
Keith Johnston, VP, Group Director, Forrester
Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Forrester

3:30 pm – 3:45 pm CDT

Closing Remarks

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm CDT

Special Programs

Join us for additional content ahead of our Data Strategy & Insights 2023 which kicks off on September 13.

Technology & Innovation North America · September 10 – 12, 2023 · Austin & Digital