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.

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:

• How do you create frictionless collaboration within your data ecosystem - people, tools and data?
• We hear that data is the new oil. What do organizations need to do to become/cultivate a data driven culture?
• What are the key challenges in implementing data-driven strategies & AI to drive business outcomes and improve workforce efficiency?
• What emerging trends and technologies are expected to have a profound impact on workforce efficiency and business outcomes in the near future?
• What are the potential risks and ethical considerations associated with utilizing AI and analytics for workforce optimization?
• How can organizations ensure data security and privacy while harnessing the power of D&A and AI to drive workforce efficiency?
• How can CIOs collaborate with other departments to leverage the power of data, analytics, and AI?
• Implementing new tech like AI 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?

The rapid acceleration of digital business presents IT leaders with a distinct opportunity to enhance their influence and collaboration over business strategies, creating new value. Exploring this opportunity demands a new approach to building relationships and co-operating with business stakeholders.

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. Digitization is also essential for achieving sustainability goals across business operations, as well as driving recruitment and attracting key talent. 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.

So how do you create this intimate alignment in environments of complexity and unite tech with business?

During this roundtable session we will discuss:

• How can we evolve the business-IT relationship dynamic and leverage technology to better serve the business strategy?
• 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?
• Shifting from reactive to proactive engagement with business stakeholders.
• Partnering with other areas of the business to drive recruitment and craft a desirable future IT culture.
• The areas IT leaders should focus on, from finance to culture, in order to attract key talent and drive change.
• 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?
• What do you do about leaders who do not want to collaborate?
• How do you accelerate delivery and deliver new capabilities to the market in a way that compliments or surrounds your technical debt, vs trying to eradicate it all?
• 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 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?

In order to thrive in today's fast-paced and dynamic digital landscape, IT leaders need to understand the implications of the changing technology landscape on the business. Today’s organizations are under huge pressure to keep up with the always-on, always-connected digital economy and its demand for constant innovation. As a consequence, IT ecosystems are undergoing a constant transformation, and IT leaders face an ever-growing challenge: making sense of technology complexity.

Key areas to consider in the tech landscape include the role of automation in streamlining tasks, optimizing cloud-based solutions, managing vast data volumes & understanding the intricate flow of data within organizations, designing robust IT architectures, and ensuring that disparate technologies work seamlessly to benefit the business; all while considering UX, CX, governance, and security.

Naturally, the more complex a company’s technology and processing environment, the more difficult it is to make it resilient. As organizations add new layers to their tech stack, each layer comes with its own surface area to secure, requiring increased investments of time, technology, and talent.

A key ingredient in managing this complexity is to figure out how to measure the current state. However, very few organizations have a formalized approach to measuring the complexity of their application and data environment. If companies don’t know where they are, they certainly don’t know where they are headed.

So how can we measure, evaluate, and make sense of technology intricacy, in order to succeed on a digital transformation journey?

During this roundtable session we will discuss:

• How can organizations ensure that disparate technologies work cohesively, keeping user experience, customer experience, governance, and security in focus?
• How can leaders design agile & scalable IT architectures that adapt to changing business needs?
• How should you decide to what extent new solutions/platforms should replace existing technologies, or be grafted onto previous layers? What challenges arise in managing legacy technology?
• The importance of IT observability & measurement. How can organizations evaluate whether a new change will increase or decrease their tech complexity?
• What does an alternative to complexity look like in an evolving tech stack? How can IT teams reimagine and simplify the ways in which they access their software and tools?
• What levels of talent and upskilling are required when it comes to adopting modern technology stacks? Is there a significant challenge here?
• What are the best practices and strategies for optimizing cloud solutions to accelerate transformation?
• How can we better understand the pathways data takes within the organization, and harness its potential for informed decision making?
• How can we optimize IT & business Ops with the use of automation?
• What's the best approach for breaking large digital transformation initiatives into manageable pieces that can deliver results in 6 months or less?

In this thought-provoking keynote, Keith Ferrazzi will challenge CIO organizations to recognize the critical connection between technology, business, and relationship quotients as the new currency for driving enterprise transformation (TQ, BQ & RQ). CIOs will gain insight to the importance of addressing business priorities first and adopting new collaborative behaviors to build trusting relationships with their C-suite peers, fostering scalable business transformation.

Drawing from our latest research and best practices, Keith will highlight the imperative shifts required to:

• Improve strategic alignment of the CIO and C-suite partnership
• Unlock the full potential of your team to achieve more with less
• Determine how cutting edge collaborative technologies and AI can be an opening for your role as a change agent
• Understand the business vision and customer experience to accelerate growth

The growing adoption of distributed and hybrid cloud solutions by large enterprises demand for enhanced control, flexibility, and choice to drive innovation, operational efficiency, and sustainable growth.

A data driven culture can accelerate the application of analytics, amplify its power, and steer companies and organizations to desired outcomes. What’s involved in developing and cultivating the right culture at the right time? The definition of a data culture is about organizing collective beliefs and behaviors of people in the organization for leveraging data for improved business or mission performance with noticeable evidence. Advancement of a culture requires vision, effort, leadership, action, and measures.

This discussion will present the following:

• What is meant by data culture?
• What are the components of a data culture?
• An example of a culture maturity model
• Sample data culture metrics

More companies and organizations are recognizing why data are critical, but also why a data culture matters.

Experience a Chief Transformation Officer’s story on evolving a company culture initially resistant to digital enablement and the challenges and wins that have helped position RNDC as a distributor of choice.

Business leaders today face a multitude of headwinds including recession, layoffs, budget constraints, labor shortages, supply chain issues and the ongoing need for accelerated transformation and growth. Given the current economic climate, cultivating an environment where employees are well-prepared, well-equipped, and motivated is especially important.

Discover four key takeaways to support your company’s transformation from creating transparency and building trust through communication, empowering employees by instilling greater accountability, reformulating resiliency, and using agility to keep up with the rapid change and expectations of end users.

Join Rob Piascik, SVP, Chief Information & Technology Officer, New York Power Authority, as he shares his insights and perspectives on the “new norm of the CIO” that are applicable to all businesses and industries. Those insights are based on real-life, proven strategies, execution, and experiences in diverse private and public sectors with progressive Fortune 50 companies that seek to lead and differentiate themselves in their industries.

You will learn about the new norm that all CIO’s face and how to survive and thrive by leveraging digital and business transformation, embracing rapidly evolving enabling technologies, and applying innovation to achieve business value, resiliency, and sustainability.