Unlocking the business value of innovative strategies to get closer to your customers, employees, suppliers and constituents

In today’s open and increasingly global economy industry boundaries are collapsing. Disruptive new entrants show up seemingly out of nowhere, making leaders’ advantages obsolete. In addition, customers hold tremendous power in the Information Age, challenging companies and governments alike. Is it any wonder that the drivers of efficiency, effectiveness and advantage have changed?

The basis of competition has moved from products and services to business models and the platforms and ecosystems that support them. The keynote will discuss why this change has occurred along with how the role of senior IT leaders must change. Deploying IT to improve productivity and speed remains necessary, but no longer sufficient. Today’s value-creating Chief Information Officers focus on better reaching and serving target markets, competitive differentiation, advancing collaboration and enabling innovative new business models.

As retailer, merchant, marketer, and entrepreneur, join Steve Schlect, CEO Duluth Trading Company for this featured Keynote address. Steve will share his experiences and perspectives and lead a discussion on the challenges and opportunities caused by digital disruption in today’s retail world.

Today, staying competitive means looking ahead. The rise of globalization is shifting the way business works. Emerging technologies combined with industry challenges offer companies new ways to operate. Business leaders need to anticipate how these changes will affect their ways of operating and look to new technological innovations to help them succeed in this new landscape.

The Global Technology Outlook examines in great depth the current trajectories of new technologies in the lab and marketplace, concentrating on trends that could be disruptive or the harbingers of change. It’s proved remarkably prescient and has allowed IBM to make sound decisions and investments in future technology directions. It also has sought to anticipate the effects those technology trends might have on specific industries.

IBM Research has led the Global Technology Outlook for more than a quarter century. It’s IBM‘s vision of the future for information technology, synthesizing enormous insight from academia, partners and clients around the world. And, it’s what drives IBM‘s $6B investment in R&D each year.

The Global Technology Outlook provides one comprehensive overview of advances in technology – but it’s much more than raw technology. It’s a view into how new technologies can be applied in the marketplace, and how they are expected to change and create new industries and businesses in the process.

Moderator will be Chris Murphy, Editor of InformationWeek.

The irreversible shift towards ‘anytime, anywhere’ connectivity means that the first — and maybe the only — opportunity you have to connect with your customers is via their mobile device.

Recent research has shown that you have less than five seconds to provide an engaging mobile experience — if you fail to deliver on this expectation, 74% of your visitors will simply give up and go somewhere else. And remember: Your fiercest competitors, the disruptive ‘ankle biters’ and the social networking grapevine are all just a click away.

In this session, Steve Tack will discuss the critical customer experience elements that should be part of every company’s mobility strategy, and will share the best practices that we have developed in helping thousands of companies around the world to successfully manage their customer’s mobile experience.

CIOs are faced with many challenges, however one that continues to create anxiety is the ability to meet the increasing demands for new solutions and services. Although these demands aren’t new, they are taking on a new twist driven by the “consumerization” of IT. We see this phenomenon unfolding with the proliferation of “anything as a service” (e.g., SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), and the availability of applications to be downloaded to your mobile device within minutes. This leads business leaders feeling more empowered and less dependent on IT for solutions, which results in a perception of technology as a “utility”. When, in fact, the reality is that the integration of disparate services is not a trivial exercise. While CIOs need to embrace the consumerization concept and work closely with their business colleagues to select the right services platform, they should also recognize their critical and continuing role to support the integration of services both up and down the technology stack as well as across the service delivery supply chain.

In lieu of speaker honoriums and gifts, the Fusion Advisory Board and WTN Media make a generous donation to the IT Academy.

Sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT), ITA is an innovative, 4-year pre-college technology access and training program for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison Public Schools. Our mission is to prepare students for technical, academic, and personal excellence in today’s Information Age.

Each year, ITA competitively recruits 30 students in their final semester of 8th grade to participate in the program. Selected students receive four years of intensive training in preparation for high tech, IT related careers; in addition to intensive academic support in preparation for competitive University admissions and study. The Academy’s dual focus on academic excellence and technological literacy prepares promising students for learning and leadership in the 21st century digital age, and continues the University of Wisconsin’s long tradition of excellence and service.

The Cloud is not just about technology. The Cloud will change the way we work, live and play, from economics and commerce to trust and mobility. The Cloud is a phenomenon that impacts almost every aspect of our lives. Listen to Tom talk about what The Cloud is and why it’s so important to the future of business.

Every technology transformation creates a new set of burdens for CIOs. The rapid move to the Social Enterprise will not be an exception. While the ubiquity of social networks/tools, smartphones, iPads, and cloud applications is being aggressively embraced by employees, especially younger ones, this new era will require technology executives to reassess their architectures, security plans, business processes, and budget. In his presentation, Bruce will draw on his 20 years as a top software analyst to tell you what you can expect.

Moderator will be Andy Warzecha, VP of Strategy for Information Management, IBM.

Business leaders realize their organizations are collecting huge volumes of data from enterprise applications, social media, e-commerce transactions, loyalty programs, customer service interactions, and more. Their expectations are increasing relative to the need to quickly analyze this data in order to gain insights into customer trends and biases, product and service improvements, and opportunities to improve operational efficiency.

They might even be familiar with the concept of “Big Data”, but don’t know where and how to start. More and more, they are turning to their CIOs for the answer, but with the caveat that the IT organization can’t break the bank in order to stand-up a comprehensive BI solution.

Hadoop, an open-source analytics platform, delivers quite nicely against the performance and cost guidelines set by business leaders who want an affordable solution that addresses their most challenging BI opportunities. From a technical perspective, Hadoop has also gained broad acceptance, not only amongst the open-source zealots, as well as established database providers like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. It is becoming a trusted business analytics platform capable of operating in mission critical settings and at a price point that fits within most IT budgets.

This session will provide an overview of the Hadoop platform – what it is, how it works and where best to apply it. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in an interactive dialogue to discuss the following:

• What Hadoop is, what it isn’t, how it works and how it differs from other business intelligence and analytical platforms that exist in the market today

• How Hadoop is unlocking the “Big Data” that sits unexploited in most organizations, including unstructured data that doesn’t lend itself easily to analysis

• Introduce the concept of the “Intelligent Archive”, leveraging the unique capabilities of Hadoop

• Where Hadoop is providing business insights across a number of industry sectors

Executive expectations of new technology is outstripping IT capability. Technology savvy executives know to use technology to be different rather than using IT to get better. The definition of technology is broader and externally focused. Knowing how to use mobility, social, cloud and analytics to design new products, services and experiences does not require knowing IT.

Leading CIOs understand this and rather than thinking of IT as the means to automate the business they are finding ways to amplify the enterprise. The distinction between ‘technology’ and ‘IT’ may seem academic, but executives are increasingly more technology savvy than IT savvy. That difference has profound impact on the entire enterprise, its attitudes, approaches and leadership of technology that includes IT.