Captains, Commanders, Controllers, And Chiefs
February 24, 2014 Dan Burger
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Recognizing the potential for innovation. Developing and maintaining a strategic plan. Monitoring major projects. Setting priorities between IT and business processes. Allocating resources. Who handles these jobs and what makes them good or bad at it? Depending on the size of the organization, it could be any of a number of people at the executive level or maybe even the supervisory or managerial levels. But IT innovation and leveraging technology is a high priority with expectations of powering growth and providing competitive advantage. Someone needs to deliver on these promises. For the past eleven years, COMMON has hosted an annual IT Executive Conference alongside its Annual Meeting and Exposition each spring. It brings together up to 40 top shelf business leaders in roles that include CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, and numerous other titles that could all be lumped under one description: decision maker. The three-day conference is designed to look at information technology from a business, not technical, perspective. The focus is on solving business problems, discovering efficiencies, and explaining IT strategies in terms of business value. The format is largely discussion groups prompted by industry experts. Come with questions. Go home with fresh ideas and maybe a different perspective. The IT Executive Conference is produced and directed by Roxanne Reynolds Lair, CIO at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, where she has collected accolades for her innovative leadership in matching IT capabilities with business objectives. The associate producer and co-director of the event is Carl Novit, vice president and owner of FRS, a wholesale company based in Charleston, South Carolina. Novit was an attendee at one of the first IT Executive Conferences and Lair recruited him to help plan and run the event. Both executives are full-time advocates for IBM i running on Power Systems. The conference is designed for executives of IBM i-based organizations. However, that does not rule out the discussion of perspectives that include other platforms. Here’s a glance at the agenda that has been put together for the upcoming conference May 4 through 6 in Orlando, Florida. The opening day is overlapped with the opening of the COMMON Conference. It includes the opening session, the opening of the exposition area, and a reception with the COMMON board of directors and IBM executives. Day two is highlighted by an interactive Q&A session based on four presentations of strategic IBM i-based projects, a session on cyber security presented by IBM‘s Rick Robinson, and a networking dinner with conference attendees. Day three includes two focus sessions on modernization strategies in the morning—one session led by IBM i product manager Alison Butterill will lead into a discussion session and the other session takes a panel discussion round table format. In the afternoon, Ian Jarman, IBM Power Systems analytics marketing manager, will provide the opening to a discussion group on analytics, followed by a State of the CIO discussion group led by Ranga Deshpande, a former CIO who is known in the IBM i community for his work on the annual Top Concerns survey. A complete conference agenda is available here. Details of registration and hotel information can be located at this link. RELATED STORIES Executive Reality: You’re Not The Lone Ranger Speaking of IBM i Innovation . . . COMMON Conference Could Benefit From Modernization Strategy
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