A major part of Symposium/ITxpo’s value is its rich session choices designed to make your total experience stimulating, relevant, and profitable.
Take your pick. Or pick them all.
Symposium Session Types:
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Symposium Essentials
IT Leaders Interactive Workshops
- Gartner for IT Leaders Interactive Workshops
These are 90 minute interactive sessions led by leading Gartner analysts. You will discuss key issues associated to the eight distinct roles within IT and come away with solutions you can apply in your day to day activities to address the issues. Scroll down to learn more about each Role Workshop and to sign up to participate. - IT Infrastructure & Operations: Keys to Success
Monday, April 23rd 10:30am-12:00pm
Led by Gartner Analysts: Jay Pultz, Ed Holub, John Melency, and Charles Smulders
IT Infrastructure & Operations Leaders face enormous challenges - especially in balancing strategic initiatives, day-to-day IT service delivery, and reducing costs. This workshop will help you address these challenges and identify key areas you should be focusing your strategic initiatives. We'll also discuss:- How to Improve IT Service Delivery to the Business
- Review Major Opportunities to Lower I&O Costs
- Sourcing & Vendor Relationships: Managing Your Vendor Relationships for Increased Value
Monday, April 23rd 1:30pm-3:00pm
Led by Gartner Analysts: Chris Ambrose, Bill Maurer, Bill Snyder, Ian Marriott, and Linda Cohen
Organizations are faced with determining how to best manage their vendors. This includes their most strategic as well as commodity providers. Organizations face key decisions on how to organize vendor management, define, performance measures, and drive vendor value. This workshop will identify common issues and propose solutions to vendor relationship management. Key issues discussed include:- Drivers for Increased Focus on Vendor Relationship Management
- Organization of Vendor Management
- Measures of Success for Vendor Relationship Management
- Enterprise Architecture: Understanding the Emerging Trends Disrupting Enterprise Architecture
Monday, April 23rd 4:00pm-5:30pm
Led by Gartner Analysts: Robert Handler and Brian Burke
Tumultuous times are ahead for IT - and especially EA leaders - that is, those executives and senior professionals who plan the future state enterprise, including the IT architecture. Bloated exhaustive enterprise architecture efforts will fail to meet constituent needs in a world that will require more agile approaches. Enterprise architecture efforts that fail to provide fresh insight on real business issues will perish. In this workshop understand:- Which Emerging Trends will be Most Disruptive to Enterprise Architecture
- Strategies, Guidelines, and Actions to Enable EA to Respond to Disruptors
- Applications: Keys to Success
Tuesday, April 24th 8:30am-10:00am
Led by Gartner Analysts: Kathy Harris, Susan Landry, Jeff Comport, and Jeff Woods
Business requirements, sourcing arrangements, technology and platforms are all being 'amplified' by globalization, the Internet and innovation. The full impact is nothing short of transformational and the resulting Applications software, skills, methods and processes differ greatly from predecessor versions. Amplification will also introduce new ways of working with business leaders, employees, customers and vendors. Managing this 'Jekyll and Hyde' environment through the next five years is the single biggest challenge that most Applications managers and leaders will face during their career. In this workshops we'll discuss:- What are the most urgent and long term issues facing applications managers and leaders?
- How will these issues affect the applications organization (skills, methods, technologies, relationship management)?
- What will be the most effective responses to these challenges?
- Business Process Improvement: Agile Business Processes
Tuesday, April 24th 1:30pm-3:00pm
Led by Gartner Analysts: Jim Sinur, Michael Blechar, Simon Hayward, and Yvonne Genovese
Businesses today need more adaptive operational processes, whether it is to meet the pressures of regulatory change or keep up with the pace of competition or meet the accelerating pace of customer demands. Although everyone agrees on the end goal - adaptive processes - there are many ideas on the best approaches. In this workshop we'll discuss:- Factors Influencing Approach to Business Process Improvement Initiatives
- Building a Strong Business Case for Making Operational Processes More Adaptive
- Best Practices for Governance of Adaptive Processes
- Program & Portfolio Management: PPM in the Real World
Tuesday, April 24th 4:00pm-5:30pm
Led by Gartner Analysts: Audrey Apfel, Michael Smith, Matt Light, and Diane Morello
Despite the significant promise of portfolio management as a discipline which can help optimize an IT organization's investment mix and help align resources to business strategy, it's practice has been ad hoc at best in many organizations. This workshop will explore what organizations are doing well and where they might need help. We'll discuss:- Key Challenges for Each Phase of the Program & Portfolio Manager's Activity Cycle
- How to Prioritize Projects and Programs
- How to Determine Your Organization's Ability to be Successful with Program & Portfolio Management
- Business Intelligence & Information Management: Effective Business Intelligence & Information Management
Wednesday, April 25th 9:00am-10:30am
Led by Gartner Analysts: Betsy Burton, Jamie Popkin, Jim Lundy, and Michael Smith
IT Leaders supporting business intelligence and information management enable users to positively affect financial and business performance through actionable use of information. The challenge for BI professionals is to deliver applications and information infrastructure in a way that is intuitive for users and focused on supporting business objectives. To make the challenge more complex, many are seeking to bring together content, data, collaboration, search, BI, analytics, and performance management processes and technologies in order to support their businesses more holistically. In this workshop we'll discuss:- Best Practices for Gaining Corporate Commitment & Defining the Right Organization
- Making the Right Buy and Build Decisions
- Ensuring Data has the Right Level of Quality and Consistency
- Making sure Business Intelligence Initiatives are Effectively Supporting Business Needs
- Security & Risk Management: Security & Risk Program Maturity
Wednesday, April 25th 4:00pm-5:30pm
Led by Gartner Analysts: Paul Proctor, Chris Byrnes, Vic Wheatman, and Arabella Hallawell
Gartner views information security programs as being at one of four maturity levels, but determining your level is not so simple. This workshop will look at the primary inputs to the maturity assessment. We will then break into small groups where an analyst will work through a preliminary assessment with the group so you can see where you stack up. In this workshop we'll also discuss:- The 12 Measures of Security & Risk Program Maturity
- How to Prioritize Program Improvements
- The Benefits and Value of Security & Risk Program Maturity
