Summit 2010: Strategies for the Road Forward

The annual Cutter Consortium Summit is unlike any other conference you've ever attended. It provides a live venue for IT and business professionals to meet and debate with one another and noted experts in the IT field. The intellectual give-and-take is second to none. Discover why business and technology professionals return each year -- and why you should join them!

Interact with the Experts in IT

Meet the IT luminaries speaking at the Summit

What's Included?

Registration for Summit 2010 includes the 3-day program, breakfast and lunch each day, and dinner at our buzzing Monday night cocktail party. Hotel reservations can be made at the Cutter Group Rate directly at the Royal Sonesta Hotel Boston web site, or by calling +1 617 806 4200. The deadline for discounted room rates is September 10, 2010.

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Agenda

You'll enjoy stimulating keynotes by top experts panel discussions, an interactive Harvard Business School-type case, and hands-on seminars and raucous panel debates; networking at lunches, breaks and entertaining evening events; and getting one-on-one guidance and input from expert presenters who include professors from leading business schools. Check out the recent additions to the agenda.

IT Investment

Case Study: The Cost and Value of IT

Rogelio Oliva

We ask "How much are you spending on IT?", when perhaps the more relevant questions are "What does that question mean?" and "Who is 'you'?" During this Harvard Business School-style case study session, Cutter Senior Consultant Rogelio Oliva will move you to think about the cost of IT in ways you never have before. At what point - if ever - should the dollars you spend on new applications and services outweigh those spent on maintenance? What value do you get from that outpouring of cash? Can you measure it? In this extremely high-energy, interactive session, you'll debate the pros and cons of various value metrics. Plus, Rogelio Oliva will help you think about whether your investment in IT distinguishes your company from its competitors, allowing it to move ahead in the marketplace, or merely enables it to stay in the game.

Agile Management

Keynote: Agile Leadership: What It Takes

Jim Highsmith

Jim Highsmith, Director of Cutter's Agile Product & Project Management practice and a leader of the Agile movement, will explore the activities that make an agile leader or executive successful. Jim won't just present theoretical ideas; in this keynote he'll reveal the results of his year-long study of the roles and practices of Agile leaders.

While in some circles agile executives and leaders are admonished to buy pizza and get out of the way, in others they are only asked to be supportive of self-organizing teams. But being an agile executive involves more, much more. Jim will begin with a look at agile from a business perspective--providing a framework that can help you answer the question, "How agile does our business need to be?" Jim's analysis will help you discern which principles and practices are right for you and your organization. He'll recount the stories of the successful -- and unsuccessful --agile executives he's encountered and provide insight you can apply from these lessons to your enterprise.

Jim's been studying how activities such as performance measurements; facilitating self-organizing teams; developing strategies for operational, portfolio, and strategic agility; assessing just how agile to be; creating guidelines and training programs; facilitating an empowered, collaborative workplace; fostering adaptable IT, product line, and product architectures; and creating a proactive and reactive organizational adaptation processes are incorporated into agile organizations that can weather business turbulence. Discover which practices are "must do", which are "nice to do", and learn what practices might be catastrophic to your role as an agile leader.

Cloud Computing

Keynote: Security, Privacy, and Risk: Shaping Cloud Computing

Lou Mazzucchelli

As a company's data assets are treated more like cash, it is likely that auditors and regulators will demand that the same procedures and controls are applied to those data assets as are applied to cash. This is likely to have a chilling effect on casual data sharing, a hallmark of cloud computing. Why? Because cloud computing, in the main, ignores the issue -- and therefore the cost -- of security and privacy. Yes, there is some data encryption, but, for example, where are the Google contract representations that address, say, correctness of their maps — the Google Map API that powers your fleet-routing application that just put a semitruck into a fountain? Not Google's problem.

... which raises the issue of risk.

In his keynote presentation, Cutter Fellow Lou Mazzucchelli will reveal why he believes that, ultimately, we can expect three things to happen: (1) larger companies will not allow themselves to be placed at a competitive disadvantage and demand that cloud data suppliers provide quality, service-level security and auditability guarantees; (2) cloud providers will realize that they can't supply these services without covering their costs; and (3) the external regulatory environment will demand that all companies play by the same rules.

There is -- and will continue to be -- market pressure for companies and CIOs to put their assets into the cloud. Lou will help you ensure that your enterprise responds responsibly.

Business IT Strategy

Keynote: Shared Services: Transitioning from Efficiency to Effectiveness

Robert Scott

Introduced in the early 1980s, shared services have evolved a long way from purely a cost saving initiative to an efficiency enabler. In today's competitive and flat environment, shared services have become a potent tool for delivering effectiveness in an organization. A Shared Services Organization (SSO) primarily involves bringing together a set of back office or front office services common to multiple business units within a single organization. Today, SSOs have evolved with varying levels of maturity and providing different sets of benefits.

Shared Services 3.0 is a new paradigm of business contribution that focuses on effectiveness and enabling a culture of innovation in the enterprise. In this keynote session, Cutter Fellow Robert Scott will provide an updated view of shared services. You'll discover the journey your organization can take to transform their shared services into an engine for value creation and innovation.

From IT World Canada: Robert Scott on shared services

IT Management

Keynote: What Does it Mean?

Rob Austin

Borrowing from both the Agile practice of retrospectives and the case study teaching method he honed as a professor at Harvard Business School, Cutter Fellow Rob Austin will lead the discussion for this interactive session which will connect the many threads of the previous keynotes and panel debates. Together, we'll synthesize what's been discussed and debated already at the Summit and establish a framework for Wednesday's seminar-style sessions and your ongoing business technology approach.

IT Management

Seminar: CIO and IT Managers Forum

Rob Austin

Pressure continues to be intense for IT executives. Budgets are as tight as ever (if not tighter) and the rate of technology change is increasingly hard to keep up with. You must remain laser-focused on the cost and value of IT. But the distractions are many and potentially threaten to push the cost-value balance in wrong direction. From strategy-related issues, such as moving to the cloud or integrating social networks into the enterprise, to culture-related issues, for example the work-style of digital natives, the decisions CIOs make will have a profound impact on the organization. In this half-day roundtable for CIOs, Cutter Fellow Rob Austin, who is Professor of Managing Creativity and Innovation at the Copenhagen Business School and chair of the Executive Program for Chief Information Officers at the Harvard Business School, will facilitate a discussion that will give you a platform to lead your organization's IT function through this turbulence, proactively manage the risks it presents, and find the opportunities and advantages IT can bring to the enterprise.

Enterprise Architecture

Case Study: How Architecture Has Resulted in Competitive Leadership

Mike Rosen

Have you ever wondered why some organizations are more successful than others? What is it that those companies do to consistently lead in their industry? How do they manage the complexity and change, and balance that with cost control, flexibility and business agility?

This case study session, which ties together many of the topics addressed earlier in the Summit conference, examines the Enterprise Architecture practice at Wells Fargo, a Fortune 100 enterprise. Cutter's Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen will use the Harvard Business School case study method to lead this examination of the competitive advantage EA has enabled and value it has delivered at Wells Fargo. You'll examine the challenges Wells Fargo faced and explore different solutions they considered and which paths they ultimately selected to focus on business value, enterprise culture, organizational structure, governance, and other key areas.

E-Government

Seminar: The Changing Face of Government IT: E-Gov Trends and Opportunities in the Coming Decade

Mitchell Ummel

The face of government is now, more than ever, being transformed by information technology. There’s a digital e-government revolution underway -- across national/federal, state/provincial, and local jurisdictions. New opportunities abound (as well as mandates), cross-cutting government-to-citizen services and citizen-to-government interactions. And there are increasing opportunities for public-private-sector collaboration and partnerships. Transparency and accountability, once optional, have become paramount in this new digital age.

This session, led by Cutter’s Mitchell Ummel, who has supported and advised government agencies for more than 25 years, will focus on key trends and opportunities impacting not only government agencies, but also private-sector companies and citizens in general during the coming decade. Join Mitchell as he explores a number of dimensions (not all of them technical!) of this digital e-government revolution.

Cloud Computing

Seminar: Cloud Computing: Fear, Hype, Reality and Pragmatics

Claude Baudoin

Like an antique light bulb, Cloud Computing still generates more heat than light. People are for or against it on an often emotional basis. IP lawyers are telling you, "it's 10 p.m. - do you know where your data is?" Vendors are telling you about "five nines" Service Level Agreements and at least one is incredibly promising "100% uptime." The case studies are starting to emerge, but will the industry scale? Instead of being locked in to a software vendor, will you become locked in to a cloud provider due to a new form of incompatibility?

The one thing that Cloud Computing is definitely making flourish is the blogosphere. Conference organizers are also successfully riding this wave - thank you for asking - but Cutter Consortium will take a different approach. Instead of a succession of pundits with more or less hidden agendas, Senior Consultant Claude Baudoin will facilitate a working session in which you will put together your individual brains and experiences to think about the opportunities, the risks, and most importantly the pragmatic steps you can take to decide how, where, and when to apply this new technology in a useful and safe manner for your organization. You will leave this workshop with more than the sum of your collective wisdoms. The future may be cloudy, but we will help you determine how to take advantage of this new weather pattern.

Agile Management

Seminar: Technical Debt Assessment: The Science of Software Development Governance

Israel Gat, Jim Highsmith

Do you really govern the software development process in your IT organization or do its uncertainty and unpredictability leave you, your internal customers and your company's customers aghast? Will technical debt play havoc with deployment dates you committed to and keep your development and operations staff from responding quickly and effectively to customer requests? Do you know how much money is required to "pay back" your software's technical debt? Once you take the Cutter Consortium Technical Debt Assessment seminar you will know how to quantify technical debt, rein it in and mitigate its unpleasant consequences.

The primary goals of this seminar are to give you a solid understanding of the nature of technical debt and how it impacts value delivery, and to familiarize you with state of the art tools for measuring technical debt. We'll also introduce you to a corresponding governance framework that ensures your can scientifically manage your software development process. Between the tools and the framework you will be able to meaningfully "x-ray" the software you are developing at the desired granularity at any point time. Moreover, you will be able to reduce a large number of complex technical considerations to a common denominator that is easily understood by your peers and superiors - the $$ amount required to pay back the accrued technical debt.

By the end of the Technical Debt Assessment seminar you will know how to:

• Quantify the amount of technical debt you "owe"
• Assess the severity of your technical debt situation based on breakdown of the technical debt
• Combine development productivity data with quality metrics to determine which projects are worth fixing and which might need to be started afresh
• Drive the "fix-it" process through quantified hard data with special emphasis on readiness (or lack thereof) for deployment and identify error-prone modules, and assessment of future customer support load
• Mitigate development risks through the use of technical debt as an early warning sign
• Pay back technical debt in a highest-bang-for-the-buck manner
• Launch Dev/Ops projects on solid foundations

The seminar combines presentation with group exercises. Throughout, the presenters - Jim Highsmith and Israel Gat - will ask the audience for technical debt situations that they have encountered and additional techniques that they have seen work.

IT Governance

Seminar: IT Governance in Tough Times

Bob Benson

Planning and decision making for IT are a challenge in the best of times. When the pressure is on for simultaneous cost containment and value delivery -- well, it's even more of a challenge. During this lunchtime discussion, Cutter Senior Consultant Bob Benson will explain the ways that governance best practices have evolved over the last two years, emphasizing what Cutter research has discovered about evolving governance practices around the world. Then you'll have considerable opportunity to share your experiences and discuss the commonalities and differences among the governance strategies and experiences of Summit attendees.

Security

Roundtable: Dark Side Agility - How the bad guys will get you fired

Andrew Fried

We've all heard the saying, "I'm not paranoid, even though everyone is out to get me." If you're responsible for protecting your organization's infrastructure and data, you have every reason to be paranoid. The reason is simple - all the basic tenets of computer security are no longer effective at preventing catastrophic intrusions and data losses.

Eight hours every workday, five days a week, you try and keep your systems patched, have the latest anti-virus installed, and protect your network with the finest firewalls. Unfortunately, 24 hours every day, seven days a week, people from the dark reaches of the Internet are devising methods that bypass everything you've put in place. Once they violate your security, they'll target your customers, sell your data, drain your bank accounts, and often use your systems to perpetrate their next round of attacks.

The consequences of a security breech often lead to customer lawsuits, a rapidly dwindling customer base, possible governmental fines, and ultimately your company going out of business. Even if the company survives, if you're a CIO or the person charged with security, you'll be looking for a new job.

This is a scenario that plays itself out day in and day out. You don't have to be "special" to be targeted, just vulnerable.

During this interactive luncheon session, Cutter Senior Consultant Andrew Fried will share many of the current attack strategies being used to target both business and governmental organizations and show you why current technology is failing miserably to both prevent and detect these attacks. Andy will discuss steps you can take to reduce (but not eliminate) the probability that you and your organization will be the next victim, and you can ask the many questions you're sure to have!