Hybrid work redefined: Unlocking collaboration & navigating security risk The future of work is rapidly evolving in the digital age, and IT plays a pivotal role in shaping it. IT leaders find themselves at the forefront of this transformation, tasked with ensuring that hybrid work environments are not only efficient but rewarding, secure, and sustainable. To achieve seamless collaboration in the workplace, we must address the challenges around employee efficiency, well-being, burnout, technology integration, and security risks.

Key discussion points:

• Hybrid Work Strategies: Learn how to optimize hybrid work arrangements for efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction. Understand the importance of flexibility, scalability, and adaptability in the post-pandemic era. Discover innovative approaches to scheduling, workspace design, and technology integration.
• The Human Element, Well-being and Burnout: Recognize the challenges posed by remote and hybrid work on employee well-being. Discuss strategies to combat burnout, promote work-life balance, nurture mental health, and foster a healthy work culture in a distributed environment.
• Security Risks & Solutions: Examine the heightened security risks associated with remote and hybrid work arrangements. Discover best practices for safeguarding data, networks, and endpoints, and learn about emerging cybersecurity threats in the new work landscape.
• Collaboration Tools & Technologies: Evaluate the latest technologies and tools that empower IT leaders to enable effective communication and teamwork across physical and digital boundaries. Explore innovations in collaboration software, remote monitoring, and digital communication platforms.
• Leadership & Culture: Understand the role of leadership in shaping the future of work. Learn how to nurture a cohesive and productive team while embracing a flexible work environment.
• Future Trends: Gain insights into emerging trends and predictions for the future of work, including the role of AI, automation, and the continued impact of remote work on IT job roles and responsibilities.

This session highlights the importance of embracing digital transformation efforts and adopting a comprehensive approach towards capturing and utilizing customer data effectively for outbound communication. The poll questions will hopefully demonstrate the current state of digital transformation efforts and highlight the opportunities and risks associated with different stages of adoption.

IT leaders know that the key to success in this digital age is data. It fuels the new economy of AI by providing the building block on which AI algorithms work. Data is part of every business decision around digital transformation, and is now widely recognized as arguably the most important strategic asset of an organization. According to McKinsey, companies that treat their data as a corporate asset grow revenue 5x faster than companies that do not.

To shift the perception of D&A from a mere support function to a strategic growth asset, organizations must innovate in alignment with the rapid pace of digital transformation. How do IT leaders quantify and prove the ROI of data initiatives in the context of business value? How can we drive change while bridging the gap between business and technology?

Furthermore, new tools like Generative AI have the power to change the way the workforce accomplishes goals, but it is imperative that leaders practice care when implementing these technologies. What are the major opportunities and challenges within this space?

Scaling and operationalizing AI and ML are critical to driving value and impacting how decisions within the business are made. It is vital to establish the technology trends, organizational requirements, skill development and talent required for successful deployment. How can we set ourselves up for success and develop a transformative vision for AI and data & analytics?

During this roundtable session we will discuss:

• What are the key challenges in implementing data-driven strategies & AI to drive business outcomes and improve workforce efficiency?
• What are the potential risks and ethical considerations associated here?
• How can organizations ensure data security and privacy while harnessing the power of AI?
• How can CIOs collaborate with other departments to be successful in this space?
• Implementing new tech often requires new ways of operating, how can organizations rethink their operations from both a business and IT perspective?
• How can organizations ensure their teams and staff are equipped with the right skills?
• Strong AI outcomes require trust, data-fluency, and agility. Why is leveraging change management to create the right culture so important?
• What emerging trends and technologies are expected to have a profound impact on workforce efficiency and business outcomes in the near future?

Modernizing the digital core is essential for business transformation, and IT must be an enabler of this process, delivering an environment that is proactive, agile and uninterrupted. Digital transformation is expected to remain the top strategic business priority of enterprises in almost all industries over the next few years. Gartner research recently found that 94% of CEOs want to “maintain or accelerate pandemic-driven digital transformation” in 2023. With 60% of CIOs and CTOs indicating that their IT modernization program is not yet ready for the future, we see many fast-tracking their digital technology initiatives this year.

Digitization is also essential for achieving sustainability goals across business operations. The key to success for the IT leader is arguably maintaining a close partnership and alignment with all business functions, as well as placing customers and employees at the heart of every digital transformation effort.

A desire for greater flexibility, efficiency, and reducing expenses is driving organizations to rethink their approach to technology delivery. However, as companies begin to adopt increasingly innovative technologies, like data analytics, hybrid cloud, and AI & automation, they are still faced with the challenge of siloed teams and processes, without the sustained support needed to be effective. Successful digital transformation comes not only from adopting technology, but adjusting the people, processes, and culture to support it.

The challenge for today’s CIO is to enable business transformation and to successfully do so, modernizing your digital core is vital.

Questions to answer in this roundtable include:

• How is the over-arching theme of digital transformation currently shaping your organization?
• Successful digital modernization comes not only from adopting technology, but adjusting the people, processes, and culture to support it. Do you agree? What are the key challenges here?
• What are the key challenges that companies face on the path to modernizing the digital core? How do we enable speed and agility?
• How can we utilize digitization to meet sustainability goals across the business?
• In order to transform at scale, how can technical and non- technical teams work together?
• How do you accelerate delivery and deliver new capabilities to the market in a way that compliments or surrounds your technical debt?
• How can IT leaders channel innovation and extract the value from modern technology, whilst also prioritizing cost savings? And how can IT become a business enabler, rather than a cost center?
• How do you prioritize your transformational needs with those of other departments?

In today's rapidly evolving technology landscape, businesses are presented with unprecedented opportunities for growth, efficiency, and innovation through cloud-based solutions.

IT leaders play a vital role in enabling their organizations to deliver innovation and digital transformation. The cloud, and mobile, are central enabling technologies in delivering world-class digital solutions. Companies that optimize cloud solutions will bring new capabilities to market more quickly, innovate more easily, scale more efficiently, reduce technology risk and stay ahead of competitors.

To achieve this, engagement with the leadership team is fundamental for technology funding, business- technology collaboration, and finding the right technical talent.

So what are the best practices used by world-class digital teams who have created world-class digital solutions? What expertise and talent will you need? What approaches work best to enable the IT leader to reliably deliver innovation and digital transformation at the increasingly rapid pace required?

Roundtable discussion areas include:

• How does the hybrid cloud enable organizations to balance flexibility and security while pursuing agile innovation?
• How do you identify points of innovation that will deliver real business impact?
• What's the best approach for breaking large digital transformation initiatives into manageable pieces that can deliver results in 6 months or less?
• What's the optimal length of time between cloud releases?
• What is the optimal balance of employee and outsourced staffing for world-class digital teams?
• How can organizations effectively monitor and measure the sustainability performance of their hybrid cloud infrastructure? What key metrics should be considered?
• What are the challenges you've encountered in the above topics?

As industrial companies strive to improve operational agility, resilience, and sustainability, their technology strategies require heavy adoption by frontline workers to achieve their strategic targets. Learn how the adoption playbook at Holcim helped the company drive platforms across dozens of countries and hundreds of millions of tons of shipped products.

GenAI is a cutting-edge technology serving as the fundamental component upon which enterprises can construct their future success.

The AI-powered building blocks are designed to address various aspects of business operations, enabling organizations to adapt and thrive in an increasingly digital, data-centric and hybrid environment.

In this keynote, Nuno Miller, an experienced leader in the tech industry, highlights the pivotal role of a Chief Information Officer (CIO) in guiding organizations through a transformative journey. Nuno, drawing on his extensive experience, provides valuable insights into how CIOs contribute to the path toward digital, data-driven, and agile excellence. As the heart of the business, the CIO serves as the architect of this crucial transformation, ensuring that the organization's pulse aligns with the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Throughout the keynote, Nuno emphasizes the significant importance of 'Going Digital.' With a forward-thinking approach, he discusses how CIOs help organizations integrate digital technologies seamlessly into their core operations. This includes transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-based solutions and driving automation initiatives, fostering a culture of adaptability and innovation within the organization.

The role of the CIO in 'Data as the Compass' is a key theme throughout the keynote, with Nuno guiding the discussion. He highlights how CIOs ensure organizations effectively extract valuable insights from data, empowering them through data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to make informed decisions. As a leader, Nuno emphasizes that CIOs play a pivotal role in helping the heart of the business beat with data-driven wisdom, guiding the organization toward limitless horizons.

Transformers are at the core of the new AI excitement, with its focus on large-language-models, but AI has already had a leading role in all enterprise application development over the past 30 yrs. What will be the transformation in the CIO organisation's role and purpose that this transformer will bring? Join us as we cover the main dimensions and considerations for the change ahead, providing a simple framework to be used as a guide during the new era of transformers and transformation.

DevOps is responsible for massive innovation in our space, but with all that innovation, teams still struggle with unstable code making it into production and a lack of fine grained control over their software release processes. Using Feature Flags and Feature Management, teams can build a bridge across that gap, and use it to connect the code their engineering teams develop, to customer experiences. We’ll look at the basic usage of feature flagging, options that are available in the space, and some advanced techniques to target users and measure the effectiveness of every feature. DevOps might have solved deployment - but in this session, we’ll show you how you can solve for Release, the last mile in software delivery.

Strong business services and products are not enough. Visionary leadership is not a solution. Robust digital cores only create a foundation. However, when each dynamic is in sync with one another, business outcomes grossly outperform individual unit contributions. You move from pockets of brilliance to an enterprise of excellence. How do you create this intimate alignment in environments of complexity and unite tech with business? Here are three common critical success factors I discovered amongst three different best in class organizations… Vision, Governance & Alignment.