Summit 2008, 5-7 May 2008 in Boston, revealed new ways to think about how IT can be a differentiator for your organization and help it soar through this economically challenging time. The first two days of the Summit featured three keynote/panel debates, one Harvard Business School Case Study, and luncheon sessions. The third day included breakfast roundtables and your choice of longer, hands-on working sessions. Keynoters and panelists, including Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants and industry practitioners, provided multiple perspectives on the topics at hand, and offer answers to your questions -- advice you can implement today.

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  Clip from Paul Robertson's keynote
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Summit 2008 Keynotes

Each keynote presentation is designed to make you question the status quo. And the follow-up panel sessions are a forum for debate and opinion around the ideas presented in the preceding keynote.

Overcoming the Dysfunction that Inhibits Enterprise Agility

Keynote: Lou Mazzucchelli and Tim Lister, Fellows, Cutter Consortium
Panel Debate: Lou Mazzucchelli, Tim Lister, Mike Rosen, V. Sambamurthy

In this keynote presentation, Lou Mazzucchelli and Tim Lister will uncover why so many organizations unwittingly fight enterprise agility -- replete with examples of companies that have constructed this roadblock -- and they'll illustrate the paths several organizations have taken to overcome resistance to change, risk taking, and innovation to become agile once again.

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Monetizing the Net: Creating Profits Through Anything but Advertising

Keynote: Eric K. Clemons, Fellow, Cutter Consortium
Panel Debate: Eric K. Clemons, Tammy Johns, Paul Lambert, Gary Spangler

IT will be called upon not only to determine, implement, and maintain the available mechanisms for monetizing websites, but also to help determine whether acquisitions of, investments in, or partnerships with MySpace, Facebook, and other more specialized social networking sites represent a return to the irrational exuberance of the dot.com era, a hedging bet, or wise investments unlocking hidden synergies.

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Mission to Mars: A Harvard Business School Case Study

Keynote: Alan MacCormack

In this highly-participatory session, Harvard Business School Associate Prof. Alan MacCormack asks you to evaluate the reasons for the failure of two successive missions to Mars that were launched under NASA's "Faster, Better, Cheaper" program -- and why the program didn't work. This case, which MacCormack co-wrote with Jay Wynn, will help you better understand the relationships between risk, budget, and schedule in the development of complex technology-based projects. Mission to Mars examines changes the space agency made that followed a faster, simpler approach to program design.

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Uncovering the Hidden Meaning of Things: Why Design-Driven Innovation Is Central in Technology-Intensive Organizations

Keynote: Roberto Verganti
Panel Debate: Roberto Verganti, Jim Euchner, Peter Hanke, Richard Harris, Borys Stokalski

Roberto Verganti's keynote will focus in particular on the role that new technologies have in redefining the meaning of products and services, and consequently on the role of design-driven innovation in technology-intensive firms and technology suppliers.

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Where Do We Go From Here?

Keynote: Tom DeMarco, Fellow, Cutter Consortium

The thing about lessons learned is that they are usually discovered at the end, when they're not easily applied to the project at-hand. In this session, we borrow the Agile Retrospective practice: Tom DeMarco reviews what's been discussed and debated, and reveals his insight into the strategies, themes, and ah-has that have emerged from the previous sessions -- establishing a framework for approaching Wednesday's sessions and applying those lessons.

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Roundtables

Passion Inventories and Learning Plans

Roundtable: Vince Kellen

Many IT employees are deeply passionate about their work. For some, the challenge in getting the machine to do what was intended is a deeply gratifying, self-rewarding activity. But for many in IT, the organization doesn't seem to be able to align this passion with the work that needs to get done. To close this gap, in Vince Kellen's shop, they engage in yearly planning for IT skill development. They expect each employee to develop his or her own learning plan that flows from his or her own passions; these are then aligned to the operational goals. Discover how DePaul chooses which learning plans to fund, why they don't call them training plans, and how the organization celebrates employees' passions -- even those that might lead an employee up and out of the organization. In this informal discussion, Vince will demonstrate how encouraging your teams to share their passions with their managers can result in decreased turnover and how well-aligned employee passions can set your place on fire.

Ten Things an Architect Does

Roundtable: Mike Rosen

One of the questions Mike Rosen, Director of Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture Practice, often gets asked is "What does an architect do?" In this interactive discussion, Mike will go beyond the day-to-day activities like attending too many meetings, and get to the heart of how architects bring value to their organization.

Service Mashups: A Visual Introduction

Roundtable: John Tibbetts

It's a fundamental promise of service-orientation that small, elemental software services can beget larger, more comprehensive services without a corresponding increase in complexity. The vehicles for creating these complex service mashups include Business Process Management (BPM), service orchestration, and choreography. In this talk, John Tibbetts will provide a brief, illustrated overview of the high points and low points of each, cutting through today's SOA jingoism and suggesting a pragmatic path to using services for both simple and complex tasks.

Semantically Aware Systems in the Real World

Roundtable: Ken Orr

Semantics is increasingly appearing in computer software journals. Terms like ontology and taxonomy are increasing in frequency. Tim Berners-Lee has popularized the idea of the "Semantic Web." Some of these discussions are overblown like some early discussions of AI were, however, even low-level semantic awareness can produce much more sophisticated, easier to adapt, easier to use application systems. This roundtable will discuss where semantics-aware systems are today and where they're going.

Seminars

How to Collect and Use Metrics in Agile Software Development Environments

Seminar: Michael Mah

If you're implementing or considering agile methods in your organization, how do compare productivity and quality against waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to understand both agile and waterfall metrics, and how to communicate differences in the ways they behave to key decision makers.

Master Data Management: Critical Success Factors

Seminar: Larissa Moss

Spend this morning with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Larissa Moss to gain insight into what you need to do to play a strategic leadership role in overseeing enterprise-wide data integration programs such as MDM, CDI, CRM, data warehousing, business intelligence, and so on and help direct your organization to commit to business integration (not just technology) to successfully manage its data assets.

CIO/CTO Forum

Seminar: Warren McFarlan

With the economy in a downward slide, and technology moving at an ever faster pace, CIOs and CTOs face an increasingly challenging world. They must keep systems running, introduce architectural changes that will allow the business to be more agile and to operate at greater velocity, foster and fuel innovation, and help business adapt to the emergence of new market influences such as social networking. And all this needs to be done faster, cheaper, better. These are exactly the topics that the 2008 Cutter Summit keynotes will focus on, culminating in this CIO- and CTO-only half-day roundtable that will drill down on exactly how to succeed with this daunting mission. Facilitated by Harvard Business School Professor, Warren McFarlan, who is not only an internationally recognized authority but also an unparalleled master at this type of interactive session, this forum promises to be as entertaining as it is enlightening!

Aligning Business and IT

Seminar: Jim Watson

Business Architecture is more than just models and diagrams; it provides the broad starting point for the Enterprise Architecture (EA) process, and contains the whys, whens, and whats of the business strategy and its impact on IT. One of EA's most important goals is to "align business and IT." However, this often proves elusive because it is too "fuzzy" or too difficult. This workshop demystifies Business-IT Alignment by looking at how alignment can be practically measured in IT Systems and the EA Program.

The Road to Stronger IT Governance: Paved with Effective IT Financial Management

Seminar: Bob Benson

Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Bob Benson will provide you with - and teach you how to use -- a framework for IT financial management and budgeting that will not only improve the financial impact of IT in your organization, but will also enable you to gain the support of your CFO and strengthen your relationships with business unit management. This workshop is not a discussion of "chargeback" -- it is a discussion of how IT budgets and costs are central to effective governance. You will discover the impact of your organization's choice of budget structure; categories of costs that should be included in your IT budgets; business support costs for IT, such as HR and accounting; payment options for business units; and how these relate to your enterprise's basis for evaluating and valuing IT investment.