Houston CIO Executive Summit

She answers to “FlyGirl” and make no mistake – Vernice FlyGirl Armour earned those wings. She flew the AH-1W SuperCobra attack helicopter during Operation Iraqi Freedom and became the first African-American female combat pilot in U.S. Armed Forces history. Drawing inspiration and leadership lessons straight from the heat of battle, FlyGirl challenges executives and organizations to “get gutsy” by harnessing the power of a Breakthrough Mentality Mindset and overcoming personal and professional setbacks. FlyGirl now travels the globe with one mission and one goal: to give you “permission to engage” your teams like never before.

We have clearly entered the “Golden Age of Digital,” where businesses are embracing digital to define new business models, create value in existing models and drive operational efficiency.  Regardless of where an organization sits on their specific digital journey, adopting a holistic approach paves the way to success. In this session, Jim Green shares a perspective from the energy industry along with the key learnings and best practices to successfully lead a digital transformation. Join Green to deepen your understanding of what it takes to succeed in the digital world.

The future of work continues to evolve, and every day that future is brought closer by the accelerating business demands of digital transformation, emerging cultural norms and the capabilities of new technologies and innovations. Digitally-enabled businesses must strive to be more global and work outside their normal bounds. The session will explore the growing demand for transparency and less hierarchy in the workplace alongside the advent of real-time communications tools. Hear use cases from firms that are on the leading edge of implementing more data-driven decision making, AI-enabled processes and new models for information security.

Digital transformation is not just a buzzword, but an outline of business and operational plans to integrate and prioritize the latest digital technologies available. Unfortunately, security is often a second priority, or not even in the scope of the transformation project. Worse, many organizations have not identified a plan for how they will migrate their most critical SAP and Oracle applications in a secure way, putting their assets at risk. Join this session to discuss how to make security an enabler instead of a roadblock and discuss what key action items can be implemented immediately to ensure security and compliance of your business-critical applications.

Corporate directors often lack the technology background for nuanced discussions of IT. Yet boards of directors are still acutely interested in harnessing the disruptive opportunities of new technology, and the CIO is expected to deliver. The best CIO board presenters are savvy communicators who can focus on the right metrics and the right message. Go inside the mind of the board in this peer-driven roundtable discussion, and learn how some of your peers are making an impact in the boardroom.

Collaboration is crucial when it comes to protecting critical infrastructure. To improve cybersecurity, there must be a partnership between business, government, academia and private and public industries. Join this fireside chat to learn and share ideas on how to communicate the importance of security as a team sport, and how to build a culture of shared responsibility across all lines of business.

CIOs are not isolated from the challenges of growth, consolidation, customer acquisition and retention, market expansion, or talent departure. But CIOs can take center stage by addressing these challenges, using emerging and transformative digital technologies that demonstrate the business value of IT. How can CIOs move disruptions such as AI, blockchain and IoT beyond the buzz and into the realm of practical IT-led reinvention, while sustaining enterprise scale? David Womack explores actual use cases where CIOs have implemented disruptive technologies to solve traditionally thorny problems, move forward with speed, and achieve improved results.

Instead of the IT status quo, CIOs are now driving business change by embracing the digital forces of analytics, IoT, automation and Agile to create differentiation and new channels of business growth. In adopting the digital forces, CIOs must take partnerships and responsibility to the next level. How do you work with the CFO to achieve the maximum business benefit per dollar spent or align with the CMO to enable digital customer interfaces? How do you augment your portfolio to include operations or separate business units? Join this peer-to-peer dialogue to explore executive partnership and the expanding CIO role.

As organizations gain experience with cloud systems, an increasing number of businesses are creating or re-evaluating their overall cloud strategies.  However, the analysis of these strategies often leads to some common questions. Many IT leaders are left wondering which cloud strategy- cloud only, cloud first, best fit,  hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, IaaS, DBaaS, SaaS - is the best for their business needs.  In addition, they are also identifying how their business processes will need to change to meet cloud and, more specifically, SaaS application requirements.