Conference Tracks

The overall theme of this year’s conference is

 

Business Traits of a Modern IT Organization

Meeting the Expectations of An Organization’s Leadership

 

Four conference tracks will be delivered during this year’s PA TechCon: Looking at Automation Through the Lens of the Business, Business Expectations for Justifying Automation Investments, Innovating and Leading Change Within Organizations and Organizing to Optimize Performance!

Track 1- Looking at Automation Through the Lens of the Business

 

This track will focus on topics and/or case studies about:

  • Understanding Business Value and Business Risk
  • Shared ownership for both business strategy, risks, and value-driven results
  • Business relationship management deployed as a “core capability” in IT
  • Importance of Communication and Relationship Management

 

Track Objectives

  • Methods for quantifying and measuring business value and outcomes
  • Essential metrics to track to communicate “The Business Value of IT”
  • Effectively identifying, quantifying, and communicating IT risks and impacts to business stakeholders
  • How to foster an effective, value producing relationship between business and IT organization
  • Framework for establishing a successful BRM capability in IT- comprised of everything it takes (both visible and behind the scenes)
  • Methods for establishing business and IT relationships that strengthens collaboration and drives a culture of innovation and shared ownership as well as creation of holistic value-driven strategies across the enterprise

Track 2- Business Expectations for Justifying Automation Investments

 

This track will focus on topics and/or case studies about:

  • Value of a Business Case and performance metrics
  • Holistic Thinking- Enterprise Approach / Economies of Scale
  • Portfolio Management– creating a holistic view of the enterprise’s overall IT strategy, technologies, investments, and workforce
  • Financial Management for IT managers
  • Agile-driven portfolio management – comparison to the mainstream approach
  • Successful IT Projects are Business Projects

 

Track Objectives

  • Understanding the essential elements to establish a business-like culture in IT
  • How to use the business case to critically examine the opportunities, alternatives, risks, and financial investment in order to make a recommendations and sound decisions
  • Methods and best practices for improving the financial management within the IT organization and obtaining a single source of truth for tech spend
  • Understanding of IT Portfolio Management for obtaining a holistic enterprise-wide approach to IT strategic, tactical, and operational planning (i.e., Applications, technologies, services, projects, and workforce management) and effectively coordinate efforts across the organization
  • Understand the constructs, benefits and best practices of Agile-driven portfolio management in comparison to traditional portfolio management

Track 3- Innovating and Leading Change Within Organizations

 

This track will focus on topics and/or case studies about:

  • Business Process Engineering as a Strategy to Achieve Efficiencies
  • Convergence of Products and Services to Achieve Efficiencies
  • Accessibility, Diversity & Inclusivity: Workforce of the Future
  • Innovative Business Modeling Approaches: Looking forward
  • Management lessons from the pandemic
  • Using Artificial Intelligence to foster innovation, improve customer experience and service delivery

 

Track Objectives:

  • Understand the use of AI and machine learning technologies, development platforms, and techniques to improve business/IT operations and customer experiences
  • Methods, tools, techniques, and best practices used to perform business process engineering analysis, design of workflows, and business processes within an organization to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times and quality
  • Understand how to effectively use service portfolio management to determine theright mix of services to meet required business outcomes as well as converge and optimize services and the associated resources across the enterprise (i.e., people, technologies, processes, cost of ownership, etc.)
  • Approaches for creating and sustaining a culture within the organization that results in a positive and productive work environment that promotes creativity, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accountability

Track 4- Organizing to Optimize Performance!

 

This track should focus on topics and/or case studies about:

  • Organizational Design & Change Management
  • Structuring IT Organizations for Service Excellence
  • Customer Service Transformation
  • Project Management/Lean Processes
  • Security & Data Management
  • IT software delivery and operational improvement

 

Track Objectives:

  • Understand when and why organization design is necessary, and how it happens in practice
  • Learn about comprehensive and holistic approaches to organizational improvement that leads to a more effective organization design, significantly improved results (i.e., customer service, internal operations, capabilities, governance, workforce alignment, etc.), and employees supporting the mission objectives
  • Learn about modern ITorganizational structures to facilitate business growth and improve effectiveness, productivity, as well as help business units effectively consume IT offerings and gain more value from the IT service organization
  • Understand effective change management approach and application of knowledge, tools and resources to deal with changes associated with large scale organizational transformations impacting business and IT stakeholders
  • Learn about the DevOps frameworks, best practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver quality applications and services at high velocity than using traditional software development
  • Understand the process, procedures, and controls for effective data management that addresses acquiring, validating, storing, protecting, and processing of data to ensure the accessibility, reliability, and timeliness of the data for its users