Summit 2009 uncovered new ways to think about how IT can enable your organization to soar through this economically challenging time and emerge ahead of the pack.

Each year, the Cutter Summit provides business-IT professionals with a commodity that is all too scarce -- an opportunity to brainstorm key issues, challenges and concepts that require more of your attention than the ten uninterrupted minutes you may squeeze in on any given day -- and to do so with the top thinkers in the field. Summit 2009, 4-6 May 2009 was no exception. Summit 2009 provided plenty of opportunity to drill down on and debate the issues that greatly impact IT and business professionals.

The first two days of the Summit featured three keynote/panel debates, one Harvard Business School Case Study, and luncheon sessions. The third day included breakfast roundtables and longer, hands-on working sessions. Keynoters and panelists, including Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants and industry practitioners, provided multiple perspectives on the topics at hand, and answered your questions -- advice you can implement today.

• View the slide show
• Listen to some audio clips
  The 2009 IT Landscape clip from Tom DeMarco's keynote
  

Keynote Topics and Debate

The 5 Essential Habits of Appropriately Paranoid Business Technology Strategists

There are five things that everyone had better do over the next 12 – 18 months:

1. Rethink and (re-) develop your overall business technology strategies
2. Redesign and redeploy your computing and communications architectures
3. Rethink and re-implement your technology delivery strategies
4. Re-organize your technology organizations with special attention to business technology skills gaps
5. Identify and implement meaningful and measurable technology performance metrics

These five areas define the decisions that must be made as the business technology field fundamentally changes from the world we understood just five years ago. Is there some urgency here? Absolutely, because the nature of the changes we’ve been tracking is so profound that a misstep here could cost a great deal of time, effort and money. These are sea-changing decisions that can make or break a company as it maneuvers through an increasingly volatile business climate. The pressure to get these decisions right is huge. Business executives, technology vendors, consultants and people in the trenches who support our elaborate infrastructures and architectures understand that the role of technology is growing but that the challenges around the cost-effective acquisition, deployment and support of technology are shifting — and becoming more lethal as mistakes threaten corporate agility and competitiveness.

90-minute keynote is followed by a 90-minute panel debate featuring Steve Andriole, Bob Benson, Aaron Weis

SaaS - How the Cloud Computing Environment Can Work for You

According to a recent Cutter survey, the number one benefit SaaS users enjoy is lowered infrastructure costs. But that's not all. Whether your organization is part of the 63% already employing SaaS, or part of the 28% considering it, in this session you'll glean ideas for making SaaS work even harder for your enterprise. In this lunchtime discussion, Jeff Kaplan will offer advice on what kinds of enterprise applications (in addition to the oft-discussed CRM, SFA, and other front-office end-user apps) you can leverage. You'll discover the growing assortment of industry-specific SaaS vendors; learn about the vast array of reconfiguration capabilities that some vendors are offering so users can modify the look and feel of their on-demand applications; and get tips on negotiating (or renegotiating) your SaaS contracts with extremely advantageous terms. This session will give you a nuts-and-bolts perspective on maximizing the value you get from your on-demand applications. And if your organization is one of those remaining 9% of companies that are not considering SaaS, this session might even convince you that now's the time to take a look at this increasingly mainstream offering!

Information Security: Zeroing In on a Moving Target

Crime and fraud on the Internet, once pitched mainly toward individuals, now represent significant and increasing risk to organizations with a digital presence. The risk is aggravated by such factors as personal use of corporate computers, loss of laptops, insecure wireless networks, indefinite retention of personal information, poorly thought-out backup and archiving measures, and offshoring. Add to this the current pressure to cut budgets and we’ve got a perfect storm. In this keynote session, Cutter Fellow Mark Seiden, a high-profile security expert — well-known for his pursuit of Kevin Mitnick and revealing the vulnerabilities in airport security systems — will provide you with tales of the latest security holes, scams, and threats and advice on how to prevent getting caught in the traps. Consider these stories Mark Seiden recently wrote about:

• Signature-based malware detection is mostly bankrupt, as malware is now weeks ahead of the signature files detecting them, and some malware is so ...
• A common scam is to overpay "in error" by a thousand dollars using what appears to be an authentic but forged financial instrument. The scammer asks you to ...
• ...recently sentenced to 18 months in prison after sending a NASA employee whom he met on Singlesnet.com a "picture" of himself with a commercially available malware decoder, which she then loaded onto her NASA computer. During the two weeks before NASA IT security noticed ...

In this highly unusual keynote session, Mark Seiden will reveal an up-to-the-minute look at what’s happening out there right now and prod you to think about what your organization’s defense should look like and what offensive measures you can take. » Full description

90-minute keynote is followed by a 90-minute panel debate featuring Mark Seiden, David Saul, Tommy Ward, and Lee Warren.

Managing Your Boss in a Crisis

Does it seem as though you are constantly managing emergency after emergency? Would you be prepared if one of those emergencies turned into a true crisis? One that puts the future of the entire organization at stake? How do you manage your team? And, even more important, how do you manage your boss? In this session, Cutter Fellow Rob Austin will lead you through two Harvard Business School-type cases bluntly titled, Crisis and Damage, in which you'll "walk in the shoes" of a newly-appointed CIO as he makes decisions on how to handle a major security and customer data breach, as well as the decisions he makes about what and how to inform his CEO. You'll gain insight into management preparedness and response, the process and importance of the CIO managing his or her boss, the CEO, and understand some of the pitfalls that make the job of CIO one of most volatile, high turnover jobs in the business world.

Don't Downsize. Rightplace Instead.

A down economy often causes a kneejerk reaction: downsize. But there is another -- better -- approach for managing a downturn: rightplacing. With rightplacing, you put each employee in exactly the right place. It means thinking very differently about employees, roles and job descriptions. It requires IT managers who can understand people even better than they understand technology. Discover how to implementing this approach -- in which instead of finding people to fill positions, you find custom positions to attach to people; instead of designing an organizational structure top-down, you let it evolve bottom up; instead of putting employees into boxes, you let them construct their own boundaries -- can lead to impressive productivity gains for your teams. And find out what's stopping firms from rightplacing today.

90-minute keynote is followed by a 90-minute panel debate featuring Vince Kellen, Tim Lister, Susan Malisch, Len Rubin

Cost Containment Roundtable

Given current economic conditions, this timely Roundtable led by Cutter Senior Consultant Bob Benson, offers you an opportunity to discuss how to successfully cope with IT cost containment requirements. Bob will open the Roundtable by reviewing a proven, step-by-step roadmap for cost containment initiatives at three different levels (the short-term, cost center level; the mid-term, services level based; and the long-term, portfolio level), and sharing some real-world examples of practical and successful cost reduction and cost containment methods, such as checklists for company performance, prototype SLAs, service-level performance metrics and costing, the connection between IT budgeting and chargeback, and governance charters and process. We urge you to bring your questions and share your own examples during this Roundtable discussion.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The thing about lessons learned is that they are usually discovered at the end, when they’re not easily applied to the project at-hand. In this session, we borrow the Agile Retrospective practice: Tom DeMarco reviews what’s been discussed and debated, and reveals his insight into the strategies, themes, and ah-has that have emerged from the previous sessions -- establishing a framework for approaching Wednesday’s sessions and applying those lessons.

Why Recycle?

Join Harvard Business School Professor Deishin Lee in a roundtable discussion on e-waste recycling: Is recycling end-of-life computer equipment your corporate environmental responsibility? Or is it just good risk management? What are the compelling reasons for recycling e-waste? What impact does the current economic conditions have on your e-waste strategy? In this session you'll share ideas and experiences with Dr. Lee and other Summit delegates and uncover some hidden motivations for recycling e-waste.

Collaboration for the Enterprise

Wikis, chat, webinars, conferencing, content sharing, and social networking have transformed our lives. Interacting with other people has never been easier or more potentially productive. But for collaboration to realize its potential in the enterprise, we have to stop thinking about it as informal, unstructured communication and start integrating it into key enterprise processes — servicing customers, processing orders, hiring employees, etc. This seminar addresses the architecture, design, and implementation of business transactions that use collaboration to extend and enhance business processes. That means transactions that persist over time — so that multiple parties have a chance to contribute, review, comment, and revise — and over space— so that collaborators who are geographically separated can still work together. It requires new layers in our enterprise architectures, new vocabulary (a reconceptualization of “workflow,” for example), and new implementation technologies and techniques. Join us to discuss the opportunities, consider some approaches, and anticipate the obstacles.

Enterprise Agility: Scaling Up and Out

Organizations everywhere are struggling with how to do more with less. Improve productivity. Improve outcomes. Reduce expenses. Eliminate waste. The "old ways" just don't cut it anymore. Many organizations, maybe even yours, have had success with the "new way" - agile project management and development. Project teams have become more efficient and effective. Products get to market much more quickly. Customers are happy with those products: they are both high quality and have the features they want!

As a movement, agile project management and development has expanded into organizations worldwide at an astonishing rate over the last 6-8 years. Some companies have gone beyond thinking of agile as a software development method to viewing agility as an organizational imperative. But the true gains come not just from one or two or even four successful agile projects. The real gains come when the organization makes a complete shift, successfully integrating agile throughout organization. Jim Highsmith explores a number of topics that will help your organization think of agile in this new and vital way.

For many organizations, the next frontier for agile project management is scaling up and out-up to larger size projects and out, meaning distributed projects. Three factors critical to scaling are: designing large agile teams, road mapping and multilevel release planning; changing performance metrics to encourage delivering customer value; and project governance.

Since participants will come with a variety of agile experiences, the workshop will encourage extensive knowledge sharing through discussions and question-and-answer sessions. Learn how to create a path for your organization to enhance its ability to deliver successful agile projects and transform the organization to fully embrace the agile ethic. You'll discover why integrating them throughout your organization is so critical to achieving the Agile Enterprise, and you'll learn techniques you can use to change attitudes and lead the way to achieving a truly Agile Enterprise.

Don't miss this opportunity to take the next step in your organization's progression toward the Agile Enterprise.

Using Operational Business Patterns to Focus Business Architecture

The crux of effective EA programs is to have clear business requirements: this is one of the main purposes of enterprise business architecture. A common problem is that business architecture models are often too broad or too general to provide meaningful guidance for applying IT at the enterprise level. Operational Business Patterns provide a clear understanding of the salient characteristics and overall "shape" of a business enterprise in a manner that gets right to the heart of business-IT alignment.

In this seminar, Cutter Senior Consultant Jeroen van Tyn will compare and contrast two commonly occurring patterns, the Network of Businesses pattern and the Federated Business pattern. In the context of a thumbnail case study, Jeroen will show how these patterns focus EA on key enterprise concerns while delineating the limits of what is reasonable for EA to try to achieve. He will also discuss the implications of these patterns on business decision making and authority.

Business Architecture in Context - A Case Study

In difficult times, knowing where you're going is increasingly important. Business architecture is a missing link in any advanced organization's long and short range plans for the future. Historically, there has been a tendency in the business/IT management world to view Business Architecture as either an add-on or a separate activity altogether, much as many organizations look at Business Process Management as separate from either EA or BA. This session explores what is the right (most productive) relationship between BA and Enterprise Architecture.

To illustrate what they have learned about Business Architecture in the real-world, Cutter Fellow Ken Orr and Cutter Senior Consultant Mitchell Ummel draw up a case study of an enterprise where there is significant interplay between the Business Architecture (goals, strategies, business context, business value chain, major business processes), the business itself and the rest of the business's Enterprise Architecture (data, application and technology architectures). The overall goal of this project has not been just to develop a better Business Architecture or even Enterprise Architecture, but rather to develop a long-range roadmap to help guide the organization to make short and medium-term decisions in this stressful downturn. In this discussion, the presentation will discuss the role of management, access to business managers and key systems experts what has been learned about tools and approaches.

Panel Debate with Jeroen van Tyn, Ken Orr, Mike Rosen, John Tibbetts, and Mitchell Ummel

IT Leadership Forum

With the global economy in recession, business technologists face an increasingly challenging world. They must keep systems running, introduce architectural changes that will allow the business to be more agile and to operate at greater velocity, help business adapt to the emergence of new market influences, and somehow still foster and fuel innovation. All this with bare-bones budgets. These are the topics that the 2009 Cutter Summit keynotes will focus on, and in this half-day roundtable, you will continue to drill down on exactly how to succeed with this daunting mission. Facilitated by Harvard Business School Professor, Warren McFarlan, who is not only an internationally recognized authority but also an unparalleled master at this type of interactive session, this forum promises to be as entertaining as it is enlightening!