Your many successes are invisible, yet your few mistakes are highly visible. Your business peers are getting smarter about technology, but your job is getting harder. Those are just two examples of the CIO Paradox, which Martha Heller explores every month in her CIO magazine column. Now this fascinating set of contradictions that underlie the CIO role will be examined in her forthcoming book, The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership. In this lively, revealing keynote, Martha will talk about how to break out of the CIO paradox and establish yourself as a strategic, business-focused CIO. She will discuss the many practical approaches CIOs can take to establish a platform of credibility and are seen across the enterprise as outstanding leaders who make their companies stronger.

 

For the past 99 years, Clorox has been a pioneering Bay Area company and a brand recognized across North America. Fostering a spirit of innovation is one of the keys to this $5.4 billion company's longevity, says CIO Ralph Loura, who champions a model of "connected thinking" that helps IT deepen and strengthen its links to the business. In this presentation, Ralph will talk about the business results from the "Innovent" SharePoint platform of collaboration tools. This idea-generating internal website operates on the American Idol voting model (minus the singing and dancing), with hundreds of ideas for new products and services aggregated from Clorox's 8,100 employees.

 

Until recently, enterprise IT leaders have been cautiously adopting social media tools and consumer technologies, but in a piecemeal approach that has created disparate, siloed processes and inefficiencies. There are also concerns about wide-scale corporate adoption due to worries about security risks, architecture provisioning, “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) requirements and unrealistic user expectations. Yet the potential business benefits of IT consumerization can improve the customer experience, boost user productivity and collaboration, and drive revenue growth. In this session, you’ll about how IT leaders can conquer the challenges of social and consumer technology adoption in the enterprise.

 

In order for IT to become a business influencer and game changer, the technology organization must transcend its “service provider” relationship with stakeholders and become a trusted business peer and partner. The task of guiding that relationship journey falls to the CIO and the senior IT leadership team. In this combination panel discussion and hands-on workshop session run by our CIO Executive Council, you'll take a short quiz to assess your own IT group's relationship with business leaders (see the link to our Stakeholder Relationship Journey Assessment below). Then with your own assessment in hand, you'll hear directly from a panel of San Francisco IT leaders about their own challenges, roadblocks and successes. Finally, the audience will take over the discussion in small groups to explore the panel’s ideas and identify further best practices.

 

 

 

For many CIOs today, the “short list” of approved devices gets longer by the day, as "BYOD" policies spring up to accommodate the myriad of devices employees are now bringing to work. Corporate IT must secure sensitive data without becoming a roadblock to business growth. That means CIOs have to quickly figure out how emerging technologies and mobile security fit into the broader picture of IT strategy. As one of Visa's senior business leaders in strategic planning, Jamil Farschi will talk about how Visa is closing the security alignment gap. He'll also offer practical suggestions, tips and tools for managing risk in your overall IT strategy.

 

CEOs are compensated for building value, so they know they must drive a mandate for change. CIOs should be a natural resource for business transformation enabled by technology. But what's wrong with this picture? A broken model for funding and governance, says Fred Matteson, a business turnaround expert and longtime IT leader. In this thought-provoking closing keynote, Fred will detail the practical, proven steps that CIOs can take to build stronger alliances with business peers, refocus governance and funding on value delivery and develop a "product culture" that challenges conventional approaches to innovation.

 

Sponsored by: Liaison Technologies