Sourcing leaders are increasingly under scrutiny in a world where business leaders are taking on the role of driving IT products and services decisions. With an accelerating pace of digital business change, the traditional approaches to sourcing need to adapt to enable business agility. This track discusses how sourcing leaders can reinvent their approaches to sourcing strategy, identify relevant emerging technologies and support the business balancing speed with acceptable risk.

Hot topics include: Sourcing for emerging technologies and business transformation, Developing a strategy and framework for sourcing decisions, Developing the balance between agility and risk, Sourcing governance and organization, Cost Optimization

As IT procurement evolves into a critical business enablement capability, the role of the procurement executive is at a pivotal stage. Procurement leaders must gain an advisory seat “at the table” with business and IT leaders, and be part of the strategic conversations in their enterprise’s digital transformation. This track discusses how to become the internal commercial advisor, develop strategies and deliver value beyond just IT contract cost reductions.

Hot topics include: Megavendor Negotiation Best Practices, Communicating IT Procurement Value Effectively, Agile Procurement Methodologies, IT Procurement Center of Excellence, Necessary Skills and Competencies, IT procurement tools & Analytics

Vendor management is much more than overseeing contracts and creating scorecards. And a contract alone will never truly articulate your long-term needs and objectives, and how vendors can help you to achieve them. This track will discuss how disciplined vendor management will enable your providers to address broader goals, maximize business outcomes, and address key risks to your business.  

Hot topics in this track include establishing a vendor management discipline, managing risk within your vendor portfolio, and making sure that vendor performance and behaviors reflect your real needs

Digital technology has disrupted business as we know it and created a proliferation of new technology classes. IT asset management leaders must broaden the scope of ITAM to be inclusive of these new asset classes (i.e. OT, IoT, and Cloud Services) and embrace technology asset management (TAM) to stay relevant. This track will offer insights on embracing TAM while offering pragmatic advice on meeting ITAM objectives such as license optimization, and software audit defense.

Hot topics include: Redefining IT Asset Management (ITAM) and Embracing Technology Asset Management (TAM), Software Asset Management (SAM) best practices, software audit defense, asset data management, selecting SAM tools and service providers, managing cloud assets and demonstrating the value of asset management

IT Finance leaders are challenged to deliver effective IT financial management that optimizes cost while delivering value and agility to the business. This track focuses on actionable best practices to consistently lower operating costs, increase speed and agility, and demonstrate transparency to effectively support better business outcomes.

Hot topics include: Maturing IT financial management, Implementing cost optimization strategies, Exposing hidden IT contract costs, Financial management of cloud-based services, Agile adaptive budgeting

Disruptive technologies and continually evolving vendor tactics require shifts in buying strategies to ensure agility, reduce risk and balance cost optimization with a business outcome focus. This track will include sessions for all leaders, presenting insights into the changes to expect from new technologies, new services and delivery models, as well as insight into how these changes influence vendor behavior. 

Hot topics include the impact on IT solutions and services of hyperautomation, the continued shift from project to product thinking with a bizdevops mindset, the need for continuous quality, the growth of low code development environments, the evolution of blockchain, and the use and risk of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA).

This track provides interactive contract negotiation best practice sessions for top strategic vendors and categories of acquisition such as software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This track will provide proven actionable insights, tips and tactics to optimize your upcoming deals with the top strategic vendors and services.

Hot topics include: Negotiation best practices for several IT categories such as SaaS, IaaS, application network and mobile services. It also includes tactics for negotiation with specific vendors such as SAP, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM.