Rolling The Dice At The CTC IT Summit 2011

Today I am attending the Connecticut Technology Council **  IT Summit 2011 at the fabulous Mohegan Sun Convention Center. This is an annual  networking event conducted for the purpose of getting senior IT executives in mid to large size companies located in the state of Connecticut to meet. It is an opportunity to get to know one another, hear presentations and exchange knowledge and experience. It is designed to help make these professionals more successful.

I was invited to attend and moderate a panel on one of the hottest topics today. Senior IT management everywhere are grappling with the trend of employees wanting to bring their own devices to work. Once upon a time, you had the latest and best technology at the office. But today, with the consumerization of technology, the average man on the street has more fire power in his pocket than many office workers have on their desk.  Homes are equipped with faster and completely unfettered access to the internet, while in the office you have to run an electronic gauntlet to eventually squeeze out the relatively narrow, shared door to the web. New information arrives, is viewed and circulated across the plethora of social networks hundreds of times faster than the policy governing use can be distributed by the office email system.

All this has presented new and difficult challenges for the people responsible for technology in the workplace. My panelist are going to discuss what they see as the key issues, and their approaches to dealing with this phenomenon starting with the policies of each of their companies. I have prepared a number of questions about governance and regulatory compliance. We'll look at who now pays for the devices and associated services. What do they see as the greatest risks and how are they dealing with rogue users. I'll try to summarize their answers and any key takeaways I can from this session and report them back here.

I'm looking forward to the opening keynote speaker, Gene Alvarez, Vice President Gartner Research. His topic is CRM systems and his perspective on the need for a partnership between IT and the Business for success. I am anxious to hear how this differs from my view that IT and the Business are one and the same and how everyone across the organization must work in unison on all business systems and processes.

This is followed by three morning sessions that include presentations on Big Data, Social Media and Cloud computing, all major trends. After lunch and a networking break, the afternoon includes a session on leadership specifically for the CIO, a focus on the private variety of cloud and my panel discussion.

As always, I will try to Tweet (follow @JPuglisiLLC) snippets of wisdom I catch that can be conveyed in 140 characters or less, and I may reflect on one or more of these sessions in future columns. For now, I have to hit the blogger  Publish button, straighten my tie and get down to the ballroom so I can get a good seat down in front.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC


** The Connecticut Technology Council is a statewide association of technology oriented companies and institutions, providing leadership in areas of policy advocacy, community building and assistance for growing companies.