2019 Track Details

PA TechCon 2019, the largest government technology conference in Pennsylvania, will be held May 1st, 2019 at Harrisburg University. The conference will be held throughout the downtown Harrisburg campus. Five conference tracks will be delivered during PA TechCon: Business Value of IT, Digital Transformation, Building Solutions for Digital Transformation, Security and Tech & Ops.

Track 1: Business Value of IT – IT Professional as Digital Innovator and Salesperson

Sales 101 Training

  • Selling a concept, an idea, a proposal.
  • Selling starts when the customer says “No”.

Best Practices for Governing Government IT

You have a Steering Committee, so what? What needs to happen to make IT governance in the public sector successful & more importantly, durable.

What Successful BRMs Know

  • Top 5 Takeaways of a Successful BRM Program in a Shared Services Organization.
  • What does a successful BRM program look like?
  • Is there a difference between a BRM & a portfolio manager?

Track 2: Digital Transformation – Latest Digital Tools & Techniques to Transform Government

Citizen Journey Processes

The life of a citizen and where the paths cross into Government.

Citizen Identity Management

Transitioning to a common ID for a citizen to access all Government services.

Citizen Focused Data Modeling

Where to start; What are the common citizen data elements shared by Government services?

Governance

Common practice for incorporating digital and data disciplines into governance processes; importance of decision making by the right people at the right time; difference between management and governance.

Track 3: App Dev – Building Solutions for Digital Transformation

Analytics and Agile: It’s effect on reporting and requirements

The Commonwealth owns and maintains terabytes of data, but have you harnessed to true value of your data? Usage of static, complex reports can (and should) be heavily minimized by applying analytics. And, in the process, perhaps change to the evolution of SDLC to agile. Think in terms of – what buckets of information do you need to collect and analyze?

Joining the Open Source World

Commonwealth developers have been leveraging open source code for years, but can we actually think about sharing OUR code? In 2018, GitHub was bought by Microsoft. If you leverage DevOps, what changes need to be considered on ensure any thought of code sharing is safe and purposeful?

Micro Services Containers

Problems arise when the supporting software environment is not identical. Containers are a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. Discover open source tools which bundle of logical units that make up an application. Discover tools for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, and grouping containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

DevOps

Users continually need improvements and additional capabilities faster than they ever have in the past. DevOps provides the culture, tools, and processes needed to deliver on these expectations. We’ll review how agile principles are made real with Extreme Programming(XP) iterations to deliver incremental solutions with high quality partnering with the business to enable their evolving needs. Project management, quality assurance, production support, and many other practices are matured through DevOps teams which have Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. How these standard approaches from the commercial sector can be leveraged across public sector teams will be discussed.

Track 4: Security – Keeping Digital Government Safe

Insider Threat

  • Best practices for combating insider threat.
  • Creating effective insider threat programs.

Risk Management

  • Using Metrics to report on effectiveness of security program/maturity.

SOAR

  • Streamlining Security Workflows with SOAR.
  • Compensating for staff shortages with SOAR automation.

Track 5: Tech & Ops – Digital Transformation Provides Enhanced IT Management and Operations

SOAR Technologies: New Technologies and Tools Speed Deployment of Infrastructure While Providing Better System Monitoring and Reporting.

Automation: In the past we used manual processes to execute repeatable defined processes that have traditionally been manual in nature. Now it is possible to build a virtual server after submitting an online request. Service Operations: New tools allow opening an incident for an application/infrastructure issue discovered through monitoring. Capabilities could also include self-healing of application/infrastructure issue.

Software Defined Infrastructure: Data Centers and Networks will increasingly be supported by software tools to make the management process easier and faster.

Software Defined Data Center is infrastructure components (networking, storage, CPU and security) being virtualized and delivered as a service. Allows for flexibility in moving workloads from place to place (on-premise data center to/from cloud, etc.) without needing any reconfiguration.

TRM: Defines common building blocks that can be used to support and build complex services.

A technical framework categorizing the standards and technologies to support and enable the delivery of Service Components and capabilities. Included are Service areas, categories, and standards.

Digital Data Replication and Sharing

No more tapes – Data protection using backup to disk or solid-state storage with rapid replication for restoration and archive purposes. No more shared/personal drives – Using cloud-based services to store user and team data that can be securely shared and accessed anywhere (Ex: OneDrive).