E-MailProgram/Schedule
Monday, 2 April 2012
9:00am-12:00pm
Keynote & Panel Session
Harder than I Thought: Adventures of a 21st-Century CEO
Richard L. Nolan, Cutter Fellow; Chair in Business Administration, University of Washington's School of Business
More and more CIOs are being promoted into CEO leadership positions. In his keynote, Cutter Fellow Dick Nolan will introduce you to one of them: Jim Barton,* the new CEO of Santa Monica Aerospace. Jim's job won't be easy. His company is bleeding cash, struggling to regain investors' trust after an accounting scandal, and striving to transform its culture to become a global aerospace integrator.
Jim isn't real. But his experiences are. Dick Nolan, coauthor of the novel also titled Harder Than I Thought, will impart his insight, drawn from years of consulting work with seasoned, flesh-and-blood CEOs. He'll share the crucial lessons that all sitting and aspiring chief executives must understand. Whether CEO is the next title you seek, or delivering value to your CEO is your goal, you'll get the perspective you need on how great CEOs interact with the managers and key players surrounding them.
This 90-minute keynote is followed by a 90-minute panel debate.
Panelists
*If you attended Summit 2009, you'll remember Jim. Then, he was the newly-appointed CIO of IVK Corporation, a midsize financial services firm in the midst of attempting a turnaround following a period of slowing business performance.
1:30pm-3:30pm
Keynote
Case Study on Executive Leadership Strategies
Michael Roberto, Cutter Fellow; Trustee Professor of Management, Bryant University
In this classic Business School-style case study session, Professor Michael Roberto will lead a discussion about the steps and missteps taken by leaders in a high pressure situation. Regardless of the industry or role within your organization, the lessons you’ll extrapolate from the analysis of the situation will have lasting positive impact on your own leadership style and decisionmaking.
4:00pm-5:15pm
Interactive Work Session
IT Operations: Making Your Excellence Known
Bill Keyworth, Cutter Senior Consultant
In this work session, Cutter Senior Consultant Bill Keyworth begins by offering insight into the concrete take-aways of IT Operations Excellence: ITIL Service Strategy essentials; how to identify the IT Operations value proposition through Service Portfolio; and how to package that value within the Service Catalog. Then he’ll deliver a great deal more. It’s not enough to achieve Operational Excellence. Your Service Organization needs to be recognized for the value of the services it provides. Bill will push the discussion beyond achieving excellence to promoting the achievement – regardless of which excellence maturity stage you’ve actually attained. Through an exercise tailored just for IT executives, you’ll discover how to review your vision, target markets, positioning, packaging and execution to better communicate what uniquely differentiates your Service Organization from external service providers and earns it the recognition it deserves.
6:30pm-9:30pm
Evening Cocktail Party
Unwind and socialize with the speakers and your fellow attendees while enjoying some of Boston's tastiest regional specialties.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
8:30am-9:30am
Roundtable
21st Century IT Personnel: Tooling Up or Tooling Down?
Robert Scott, Cutter Fellow
Of the many challenges facings today's IT organization, perhaps none is more daunting than developing the IT staff. Join the conversation at this roundtable, led by Cutter Fellow Robert D. Scott, a former VP and CIO for several Procter & Gamble units, to discuss the opportunities and challenges in recruiting, retaining and developing the skills and competencies of the 21st century IT staff. What are the key skills and competencies required today? How can they be developed in today's organization given the need to balance business and technical breadth and depth? What is the impact of demographic changes, such as in influx of Millenials with different expectations of work, rewards and leisure? Is the age of the "deep IT technologist" behind us? How can a CIO develop an organization that possesses deep technical expertise? Come debate these -- and your -- questions.
Roundtable
Roundtable Discussion: When Technical Debt Meets "Life"
Israel Gat, Director, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice
A technical debt assessment is often relegated to the "strictly for geeks" category. Supposedly, no sober executive wants to hear about metrics like Afferent Coupling or Distance from the Main Sequence, let alone learn and track them. Right? Wrong! In this round table discussion, Israel Gat will lead a discussion about the "life-view" that technical debt assessments reveal. Time and time again, we find technical debt readings reflect a broader truth than just the way software is produced. Here, we'll discuss the measures that you could, and perhaps should, apply to tie process, code and outcome together to create a sustainable operational equilibrium between development, operations and the business.
Roundtable
It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Converging KM, Collaboration and Social Media
Claude Baudoin, Cutter Senior Consultant
Knowledge management, collaboration, and social media are at different stages of maturity, but they already seem to be converging. Few people disagree, for example, that knowledge flows better between people who have a connection to each other; or that people who collaborate on a project tend to stay in touch with each other and solicit each other’s advice later on. How do enterprises transform this trend into an advantage? During this roundtable, participants will share experience and hear advice on the corporate uses of social media, the connection between communities of practice and social media, and how these trends contribute to new workflow for the retention and sharing of expert knowledge.
9:45am-12:15pm
Exercise
Teaming in Action
Alan MacCormack, Cutter Fellow; Adjunct Professor, Harvard Business School facilitating Group Exercises in Teaming
In this lively session, Professor Alan MacCormack leads two interactive teaming games that will rock your preconceived notions about the ways teams work -- and don't work. You'll be surprised by what makes teams innovative and flexible, as well as the team dynamics that sabotage effective solutions. The insight you glean during these exercises will help you improve your organization's teams ability to innovate and devise creative solutions. Whether you bring these exercises home to jump start your teams, or apply the lessons to the way you create those teams, the teaming strategies and techniques that you practice during this session will change the way you think about teaming.
1:15pm-4:00pm
Keynote & Panel Session
Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
Amy C. Edmondson, Cutter Fellow; Professor, Harvard Business School on Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
No longer is it enough to merely create effective teams. Successful organizations excel by leading effective teaming. Through years of case study research at companies including GM, Toyota, IDEO, Prudential, and the Minneapolis Children's Hospital, among others, Amy Edmondson discovered that organizations learn by building teams that learn.
Yes, today's organizations thrive (or fail to thrive) in great part by how well the smallest of their groups embrace continuous improvement, understand complex systems, and promote innovation. It's these elements of the learning landscape that make it possible for small, flexible, team-like entities to create value for customers.
In her keynote presentation, Cutter Fellow and Harvard Business School Professor Amy C. Edmondson will divulge what prevents organizations from learning, including interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics and information hoarding, and will show you how you as a leader, can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming the defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Discover how to alter learning processes different types of work, and learn tips for how to do Collaborative Learning well. Amy’s clear explanation of the practical concepts you can apply to increase your teams' learning capabilities will help your organization improve business results.
This 90-minute keynote is followed by a 90-minute panel debate.
Panelists
4:15pm-5:30pm
Interactive Work Session
Business Architecture: Simplifying Complexity
William Ulrich, Cutter Senior Consultant
Business architecture is not just another method, tool or implementation technique. To the contrary, it represents a fundamental shift in how business communicates, engages in situation analysis, prioritizes objectives and envisions and communicates deployment options. In this interactive working session, William Ulrich cuts through the myths and discusses business architecture using common industry viewpoints and case studies. You’ll get to try your hand at identifying capabilities, completing a value stream and designing actionable solutions through the lens of business architecture. The session wraps up by discussing common options for launching, sustaining and benefitting from business architecture. Discover why and how organizations are leveraging business architecture to streamline mergers, shift to customer centric business models, deploy horizontal business solutions and pursue a growing range of transformational opportunities.
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
9:00am-1:00pm - Business Technology Strategies Track
Forum
CIO Roundtable
led by Ron Blitstein, Director, Cutter Business Technology Strategies Practice
Join a seasoned group of former CIOs -- Ron Blitstein, Bob Benson, Lynne Ellyn, Robert Scott, and Bart Perkins -- along with current CIOs and senior IT execs in an open conversation. This is the place to put your forth your challenges and get advice from experts who've handled many of the same issues you're tackling now. From political struggles to budgeting concerns, from managing vendors to insight about when to call it quits on an ERP project, no topic is too big or too small to discuss in this forum.
9:00am-1:00pm - Agile Track
9:00am-10:00am - Workshop
Want to be Radical? Here’s How.
Hubert Smits, Senior Consultant, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice
Radical Management applies Agile-like principles to the organizational level. The idea is not just theory: Hubert Smits has done it. In this workshop, Smits will walk you through the journey that migrated CISCO’s Voice Technology Group1 to a set of Radical practices for product development on a large and complex scale2.
In this session, Cutter Senior Consultant Hubert Smits will lead you through the change process -- from the executive team’s very first communication steps that set the scene and started the change process in the VTG organization to how the complexities of portfolio and project management were addressed in this large-scale organization.
As you’ll discover in this session, training and pilot projects are important first steps to organizational change. (Smits illustrates this by revealing how CISCO VTG uncovered the need for a pacemaker process via their pilot projects, and how they made this new process the iterative heart beat of their new agile world.) You’ll learn why Agile practices are more successful when they’re implemented outside the product delivery domain (most notably in the product management and the production domain) as a set of "Radical Practices". And most importantly, you’ll come to understand that the change itself needs process -- it doesn’t just happen without care and attention!
Moving CISCO VTG's formal, plan-driven, stage-gated process to an agile framework was challenging, but the change has shown rewarding results. You'll walk away from this session with the insight to help make these kind of changes in your own organization.
1CISCO VTG, now called CISCO Collaboration & Communication
2 How large? 1,000+ people working on 30 or more products. How complex? Not only do those 30+ products have dependencies, but product development is motivated by two different sources: fulfilling the needs of individual product managers and responding to the vision of the leadership team.
10:00am-11:00am - Workshop
What Leaders Need to Know About DevOps
Peter Kaminski, Senior Consultant, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice
It has been an interesting ride since the term devops was first coined in 2009. Initially, people dismissed the idea, calling it anything from transient to a blatant scam. Now many believe devops is here to stay and that it makes a significant contribution to a company's competitve edge.
The lead time between idea conception and production remains high in many organizations, despite various project management methodologies and the push towards operational excellence. Internal fights emerge as Development and Operations strive towards conflicting goals: Agile shortens software delivery time by introducing a greater number of smaller changes; ITIL increases stability by minimizing changes. How can an organization overcome this internal conflict? With devops.
Instead of optimizing an individual part of the delivery process, devops looks to optimize the whole process. In this session, you'll come to understand the whys and hows of increasing collaboration between the separate organizational silos. You’ll learn:
- The history and drivers that have pushed forward the notion of devops
- The translation of agile concepts within the traditional ITIL world
- Where devops fits with existing concepts like Scrum, Kanban, ALM
- The role of tools such as virtualization, infrastructure as code, and monitoring
- How to introduce devops within existing/new environments
- The similarities with the open source model and opening knowledge
- What the Agile community can learn from devops to foster future ideas
You'll discover that devops is not about tools, but about mindset and trust. Like TDD and continuous integration for Agile, new technologies such as infrastructure as code, virtualization, monitoring and deployment can play a crucial role in supporting this collaboration. And you'll come to understand how exploiting the "symmetry of ignorance" and moving beyond the traditional boundaries inside organizations will make it possible to collaborate more frequently to reach business goals.
11:00am-12:00pm - Workshop
Reclaiming Business Glory through the Lean Worldview
James Sutton, Senior Consultant, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice
Lean works in today's companies ... sometimes. Agile works ... sometimes. Traditional methods used to work, but don't anymore. Over the last 45 years, across tens of thousands of companies and despite massive expansions in both management and technical theory, corporate ROI/C today is only ...
25% of what it was in 1965.
Let that number sink in a minute.
How can companies be doing so poorly when they are more bottom-line focused than ever? In this session, Cutter Senior Consultant James Sutton will show you that the problem is a mismatch between the way the world really works today and the obsolete mass-production worldview still used by nearly all business, operations and development organizations.
No technique -- Lean, Agile or traditional -- works well under the old worldview. James will provide you (the CIO, COO, system architects, or small team leader) with a proven framework and practices for converting your organization to the Lean worldview, an environment that releases Lean, Agile and even traditional methods to work at their highest potential. The actions are practical, natural and non-disruptive additions to your current way of doing things. You'll also get great take-home tools to immediately improve, de-stress and simplify your personal work. In today's challenging business climate, it's techniques like those James will reveal that enable Toyota to continue experiencing 1965-like and greater returns. Put these proven principles into play at your organization, and watch your performance begin resembling that of the few, but dominant, Lean powerhouses.
12:00pm-1:00pm - Workshop
Agile 2.0 - Context, Practices, Implications
Israel Gat, Director, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice
Agile, the software method that was conceived as a way to cope with change, is itself dramatically changing. What we are now witnessing is the emergence of Agile 2.0. Three rapidly converging trends are driving the emergence of Agile 2.0:
- Markets are becoming hyper-segmented;
- Markets are also becoming fleetingly transient; and
- The value chains that serve the markets are dramatically different from yesterday’s value chains.
Traditionally, the Agile movement responded to change by “merging” two strands -- development and testing -- at the team level. Agile 2.0 extends this single-level approach by simultaneously applying Agile principles at three tiers:
- The tier at which development, testing and operations merge
- The tier at which strategy and delivery merge
- The tier at which problem and solution merge
Agile 2.0 addresses the key challenge posed by “change is changing”: how to solve a problem when it is not understood well enough to produce a viable solution. Rapidly interlinked iterations at all three levels make it possible to substitute learning for planning. It’s through tight feedback loops in and amongst the three levels that the pace of learning accelerates to match the speed of change.
In this presentation, Cutter Fellow and Director of Cutter’s Agile practice, Israel Gat, will divulge the details you need to know about how to implement Agile 2.0 in your organization/company. You’ll get a blueprint for assessing and responding to the new realities of the competitive environment — without compromising the tried and true Agile tenets.
9:00am-1:00pm - Data Insight & Social BI Track
Workshop
Agile DW/BI: Why Try It?
Building the Agile Analytics Delivery Machine: Realism & Performance
Ralph Hughes, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium
It's been proven that by using an iterative approach (versus a traditional approach), organizations have achieved as much as a 65% reduction in their data integration effort. In this half-day workshop, Cutter Senior Consultant Ralph Hughes will answer the key questions -- Where does Agile get its speed? What makes Agile Data Warehousing unique? What are the pitfalls and best practices? -- that will help you forge ahead with your Agile DW/BI projects.
From kicking off your project to understanding which Agile mashups work and which don’t, you’ll discover not only how you manage the program right, but also how to ensure that an enterprise data warehouse emerges when many agile data mart projects take flight.
This session will help you understand how to:
- Adapt Agile for data integration
- Adapt Risk Management & QA for Agile data integration
- Choose the best tools and architecture for Agile DW/BI
- Get a project team started right
- Measure success
Plus, Ralph Hughes will lead you through a sample 120-day roadmap that will help you lay out the ways that project architects, data modelers, system testers, systems analysts and Scrum Masters need to adapt to make Agile DW/BI successful in your enterprise.
9:00am-1:00pm - Business & Enterprise Architecture Track
Workshop
Insider Secrets: Architecture Programs that Work
Mike Rosen, Director, Cutter Business & Enterprise Architecture practice, Claude Baudoin and William Ulrich, Senior Consultants, Cutter Consortium
Architecture programs make is possible for enterprises to be flexible and agile; that is, to be truly competitive. Whether your organization is just getting started with Enterprise or Business Architecture, or you have an established program, during this workshop, Mike Rosen, William Ulrich and other experts from Cutter's Business & Enterprise Architecture team will help you envision the best ways to organize the architecture function in your organization so that it can deliver maximum value.
During this working session, the Cutter team will discuss and lead exercises on:
- How to initiate an architecture program
- The key to aligning deliverables with your goals, culture, and stakeholders
- How to build a stellar Business Architecture team
- The differences between federated and centralized structures and your approach to them
- What is a collaborative architecture team?
- How to align agile and architecture
- The success factors and stumbling blocks to successful architecture programs
- Just how much governance do you need?
- Proving your value: Using metrics
Spend the morning learning and practicing how to create or improve your architecture program so that it's laser-focused on what these programs are uniquely positioned to do: create things that are enterprise wide. Discover how to make the most of architects’ enterprise-wide viewpoint to improve the integration and flexibility of business solutions.
1:00pm-2:00pm
Keynote
End-of-Summit Wrapup: Where Do We Go from Here?
Tom DeMarco, Fellow, Cutter Consortium
Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco borrows from Agile's Retrospective practice: He'll review what's been discussed and debated during the previous days, then reveal his insight into the strategies, themes, and ah-has that have emerged -- establishing a framework for applying those lessons in your organization.
2:00pm-5:00pm
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Cutter Fellows who are members of the Harvard Business School faculty will both guide the discussion of HBS cases/exercises you'll work through as a group, and keynote on topics that enhance your case learnings.
In addition, you'll benefit from hands-on seminars and breakfast and lunch sessions led by Cutter's Practice Directors and Senior Consultants on topics such as Agile Management, Business and Enterprise Architecture, CIO/CTO issues, Agile Analytics and Social BI, to name a few.
You'll enjoy (and join in on!) raucous panel debates; networking at lunches, breaks and entertaining evening events; and get one-on-one guidance and input from expert presenters and participants.