Disruption/Innovation

Emerging Technologies: Shiny Objects and Disruptors 

Architects need to be aware of emerging technologies and the potential impact to the business they support. Many times, the technology can provide little or no competitive edge, but should still be well understood by the architects as another option in the toolkit should a valid need arise. This presentation is not going to present all emerging technologies but will use some as examples to illustrate the thought processes for utilizing, not utilizing, or delaying utilizing a particular technology. Examples discussed will be AI and Blockchain.

The Five Persistent Myths of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA is one of the hottest topics in IT today. The return-on-investment (ROI) for an RPA project can be remarkably high. But our experiences in building and maintaining some of the largest Bot ecosystems in the world have made one important lesson clear: organizations should focus on long-term benefit realization, not just the quick wins that RPA can deliver.

TALENT BREAKOUT SESSIONS

Internships – How to Create Your Pipeline AND Get Project Work Done

Larger, more mature organizations have been using Interns and Coops for years as a strategic piece of their Talent Pipeline. In fact, many companies now only hire college graduates they’ve already vetted through prior internships. Furthermore, the vast majority of graduating talent have had relevant coop or summer internships.

However, a lot of organizations (often small/mid-size companies) are reluctant to utilize interns due to a concern about the amount of organizational overhead consumed by onboarding/managing interns. Ironically, these are often companies who have challenges recruiting against the “big name companies” down the street. Importantly, intern projects pay for themselves -- when done right these internships produce high-quality project results at a fraction of the cost of utilizing outside IT service providers.

This session is a working session that will provide a “cookbook” for how to successfully utilize summer interns and coops as a strategic part of your company’s talent/recruiting process and to deliver successful project results.

Grow Your Own – Retain and Grow Your Talent

Employers face major challenges with the increasing difficulty of finding skilled people, a millennial workforce with different attitudes about work, a growing population of older workers heading toward retirement, ever-changing technology that requires continuous skill updates and the growing demand for IT talent.

What is the secret sauce to creating, managing, developing and motivating a strong technically equipped talent pool?

DATA AND ANALYTICS BREAKOUT SESSIONS 

What a Data, Analytics and Science Community Could Mean to Your Company

During this session, executives will get together to share the vision of how the Data and Analytics community has and will impact companies in the local community.

A sampling of topics and questions from the audience for discussion will include:

• Best practices (lessons learned) for Data Analytics
• Common Challenges Experienced
• Sharing Data with one another
• Keys to successful IT and Analytics partnerships
• From Raw Data to Business Intelligence to Predictive Modeling to AI – what is really needed and making an impact, now and tomorrow

A highlight of the session will be a discussion on partnering with a Machine Learning Meetup to work on problems that impact our community. Our goal is to connect the members of the Machine Learning Meetup with organizations in our community that are trying to determine how machine learning can help them while giving the participants of the Machine Learning Meetup real business problems and data to develop their skills. Featured in this discussion will be the Kenton County Airport Board and some of the analytics issues they wrestle with. You do not need to be a machine learning expert to participate. We will introduce the organizer of Machine Learning Meetup and a business problem for the Meetup to hack in the future. Everyone will leave this session armed with information on how to get involved in a “Community of Peers” that will focus on sharing real-life experiences and collaboration. Attendees will also find out more about future Machine Learning Meetups.

Brett Starr

VP of Business Intelligence & Data Management

Cincinnati Insurance Company

“Add a Little Spark to your ETL”

A large proportion of enterprise data is locked away in complex and verbose industry data standards, or other proprietary formats based on XML/JSON. Standard ETL tools do not work well to unlock this data for analytics. They do not scale, don't perform well, and they don't handle change gracefully. Besides, traditional ETL development takes forever to create the required data pipelines. Big data solutions have now solved this problem and completely automated the process of converting complex XML/JSON into text, a relational database, or Hadoop.

In this talk, Cincinnati Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Cincinnati Financial Corporation, will describe how they solved the problem of processing complex XML files (modeled after ACORD Standards). The discussion will walk you through the architecture and go into the technical details of Cincinnati Insurance Company’s data warehouse solution. Along the way, we will describe the problems we have solved with our existing data pipeline and how we made our platform more flexible in terms of ingesting different types of XMLs originating from our operational systems. We will also provide the architectural inner workings for XML/JSON processing.

“Transforming to a Data Culture” or “Accelerating Your Transformation Journey”

Data and Analytics Strategy & Roadmap, a Critical Success Factor in Strategic Data Management & Analytics Success

Success with Strategic Data Management and Analytics is about organizational change. Investments in Data Governance, Data Quality Improvement through Stewardship, next-generation data management, and analytics platforms and tools in the cloud, data science, and machine learning can yield significant benefits when complemented by a comprehensive organizational change program that enables the human factor (Business and IT) to optimize collaboration, adoption, and engagement. This presentation will discuss proven techniques for creating a comprehensive Data Management & Analytics Strategy, and Roadmap anchored in business strategy as a way to improve the ROI on program investments and ensure success!

Mindful Machine Learning

Understanding how your machine learning models may help or harm is just as important as choosing your algorithm. Every step from training data selection to model implementation should be done in consideration of the potential human impact.

In this session:

• We will walk through two machine learning case studies, predicting employee departures and prioritizing employees for staffing assignments.
• We will dig into the tech – choosing data, designing the models, and implementing for iteration.
• And we will delve into the human side – building confidence and comfort with your stakeholders, implementing the models in the real world, and communicating outcomes.

While this session will focus on machine learning, the principles learned can be extended to a variety of technology projects with high human impact.

Security Breakout Sessions

Data Privacy – attaining and maintain compliance

Over the past 10 years, companies have invested heavily in filling their data lakes. Then along came GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act – with others on the horizon. Now we must be able to find and delete personal data upon request. The definition of personal data will evolve over time.

Cyber Security Talent (Buy or Build)

Qualified Cyber Security candidates are often difficult to find. Finding candidates who understand working with and creating security “big data” log models too is a challenge. Complicating the situation is talent often specialize.

This will be a panel discussion. Panel members will address these questions and any additional questions the audience may have:

• What cost-effective options are available to companies staffing a cyber defense plan?
• How much do I need typically by industry?
• What does a cyber team model look like?
• Onshore and Offshore challenges presented?
• Where is the talent and when do I just contract it out?
• Advantages of a hybrid approach to staffing.
• Finding/retaining top talent.
• What specialties are there in the field?

The Internet of Transgressions (Things)

The Internet of Things promises benefits to businesses, organizations, and society in general. This session will explore the security implications of the IoT ecosystem and why we have to get this right or deal with consequences. A primer on key aspects of a secure ecosystem will be discussed, including the intersection of cyber/physical disciplines and the importance of building good security and safety protocols into our “things”.

Qbit by Qbit: Emerging Technologies and Security

This session will explore how technologies such as AI/machine learning, blockchain, and quantum computing can help or hinder security. Topics covered will include device protection, anomaly detection, using blockchain for attribution and data security, and the impact of quantum computing on computational-oriented encryption and security.

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE SESSIONS

Architecture Community Session: 

This session will give an overview of the goals and objectives for the Architecture Community are, followed by examples of few members of how information shared in the meetings, over the past two years, has impacted their companies in a positive way. If you work with the infrastructure side of the business this is a session you will want to check out.

EA and the "Transformation of the Day”

Digital disruption is the current “big thing" in today’s business. There are success stories everywhere you look, and business and IT will never be the same again. And while that may be true, it isn’t the first paradigm-changing transformation we have faced and it won’t be the last. Often misunderstood and poorly executed, enterprise architecture thinking plays an important role in guiding an organization through transformations and then preparing for the next. Though legacy/traditional EA is labeled as “bad” and new/improved EA is considered “good”, they are all still EA. It is all in the execution. In this session, we’ll talk about the variations, and why EA matters in a rapidly changing world.

BONUS BREAKOUT SESSIONS 

Business Relationship Management – Driving IT/Business Convergence

Attendees will walk away with an overall understanding of why and how to leverage Business Relationship Management (BRM) to move IT to converged strategic partners with the business.   The session will review what it means to build relationships, evolve culture and drive value.  Additionally, the top 6 failures with BRM and the importance of identifying and developing your Business Relationship Managers will be discussed.

Kip Fanta – Kip Fanta Group

In the Pursuit of Digital Happiness

Over the last decade, digital technology has pervaded every aspect of our lives. Whether it is shopping, forming an opinion, organizing our financial affairs and even helping us find our life partner. Organizations are rapidly applying advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform, themselves into algorithmic businesses, anticipating the continuously rising expectations of the digital ‘empowered’ consumers. Platforms are emerging that efficiently match supply and demand, optimizing these two-sided markets and give the incumbent ‘pipeline’ companies a run for their money by outsmarting and out-competing them.

But with all these apparent benefits, most have not stopped to ask: does technology actually make people happier?
Organizations need to be vigilant and very transparent about the ethical values that drive their technology decisions. They need to design ‘happiness’ into every process, product, service, and technology application. Only then they will be able to demonstrate that all advancements are primarily benefiting their customer's wellbeing. Because it is a fact that a more trusted version of your company or organization is always only one mouse click away.

During this session, Michiel Boreel, CTO of Sogeti, will present SogetiLabs most recent research papers, ‘The Happiness Advantage’ and ‘In Code We Trust’. He will explore whether people’s peak-hope regarding technology is justified in a world that is experiencing a melt-down of trust in established institutions.

Attending the session will enhance your understanding of the essence of ‘Digital Transformation’.

Michiel Boreel

CTO & Head of R&D Group

VINT

Leadership in the Loop with Technology 

This session will explore the IT trends that will be happening throughout 2019. Attendees will discover how some of the 2018 trends have merged to create a new set of trends and why you should either ‘adopt’ them today or just ‘learn’ more about them. Info-Tech will explain each trend in each category and provide real-life examples of how they are being utilized. In specific ‘Adopt’ covers Digitized Serialization, Digital World, Autonomous Swarm and ‘Learn’ covers 5G, Dapps, and Digital Ethics.

David Glazer

Practice Lead, Research - CIO

Info-Tech Research Group