Christine Davis on Best Practices in IT Governance
As IT organizations embrace flexible architectures, customer-centric support, globally distributed systems, inter-company application integration, and adaptable systems to replace monolithic ones, IT will be forced to evolve significantly different governance models than the current centralized, control-oriented ones. In her keynote presentation, Christine Davis will provide you with insight into why establishing some form of IT governance is essential for ensuring vital resources are aligned with the overall business goals and for serving short and long term interests, and how, as companies distribute, their IT governance models must change. You'll discover how your organization can extract more value from its IT investments by adopting a leading edge IT governance model.

Dr. Sam Bayer on How Agile do you want to be ?

A recent Cutter Consortium survey of 129 IT organizations around the world confirmed that Agile is not for everyone. Many of the organizations surveyed unfashionably admitted that their current situation was "good enough" for them. Evidently, they worked in companies and industries where time to market and customer satisfaction weren't their primary concerns. However, greater than 50% of the respondents weren't as fortunate and had embarked on Agile implementations in order to deliver better and faster solutions to their customers.

During this Keynote presentation, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Dr. Sam Bayer, will help you determine whether or not your organization should consider joining the Agile movement. If you already are one of the majority of organizations with Agile experiences, Dr. Bayer will combine the results of the recent "Making Agility Stick" survey, with his 15 years of operational experience, to help you with your journeys.

Initially, we will review the key motivators and benefits that these Agile organizations are expressing. More importantly we will discuss their key organizational, process and personnel adoption challenges and provide best practices and insights as to how they are overcoming them. We will conclude this session with a review of the key Agile Myths that could be preventing your organization from realizing your maximum potential.

Case Study: Managing IT Priorities at Volkswagen of America
Rogelio Oliva will lead you through this Harvard Business School case discussion, which describes the efforts of Volkswagen of America, the U.S. subsidiary of Volkswagen AG, to arrive at a process for setting IT funding priorities so that they align with business priorities and the company's overall strategy. VWoA's process is carefully thought out and executed, but still encounters difficulties. The case deals with Enterprise Architecture and issues of innovation, demonstrating the details and difficulties of setting priorities for use of a scarce organizational resource. It provides opportunities to critique the company's efforts and to propose alternative approaches.

Gabriele Piccoli on Sustaining IT-dependent Competitive Advantage
From his vantage point as Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) editor, Gabe has been keeping on the pulse of what's hot in the IT world over that last two years. The good news is that innovation is back in IT shops and that the challenge for CIOs to be business partners and contribute to creating and  appropriating value has been re-issued. 
As Gabe put it in one of his editorials: "With IT innovation making a comeback from the doldrums, this is our time to make sure we exploit the opportunity and show our non-IT colleagues that, while risky, IT innovation can yield significant benefits."  He will be helping you think about your role by recasting the conversation of IT innovation and offering a framework for analyzing if and when your organization can sustaing IT- dependent competitive advantage.

Tom DeMarco, Cutter Fellow, with the Themes and implications of the 2nd Latin American Cutter Summit.