Wednesday, October 1

The Road to Stronger IT Governance: Paved with Effective IT Financial Management

Keynote: Robert Benson, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant
Panel Discussion: Robert Benson, Eduardo Aldave Fuentes Calvo (AMECE), Gerardo Valdés Jerez (INVEX Grupo Financiero) and Alejandro Pisanty Baruch (Experto en Internet y Sociedad de la Información)

Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Bob Benson will provide you with - and teach you how to use -- a framework for IT financial management and budgeting that will not only improve the financial impact of IT in your organization, but will also enable you to gain the support of your CFO and strengthen your relationships with business unit management. This workshop is not a discussion of "chargeback" -- it is a discussion of how IT budgets and costs are central to effective governance. You will discover the impact of your organization's choice of budget structure; categories of costs that should be included in your IT budgets; business support costs for IT, such as HR and accounting; payment options for business units; and how these relate to your enterprise's basis for evaluating and valuing IT investment.

Robert Benson is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Strategies practice and a Principal with The Beta Group. He applies more than forty years of academic and corporate experience to assist companies and government agencies with understanding the business value of information technology (IT), strategic and financial IT management, strategic IT planning, effective IT application development, and IT governance. Since 2001, he has written numerous Cutter Executive Reports and Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisors, and has consulted for and conducted workshops with Cutter clients in the USA, Mexico, and Poland.

Mr. Benson has been instrumental in the development of portfolio management methods and strategic and financial management methodologies based on Information Economics used by companies and consulting organizations around the world. He has conducted executive seminars and management courses on these subjects throughout the world, and consulted with over 100 companies and organizations in twenty countries.

Mr. Benson taught Computer Science and Information Management at Washington University in St. Louis for 40 years, where he also served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Computing and Communications and in other executive positions. He also has taught Information Management at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, for 20 years, and is member of the faculty there.

He is coauthor of several books and numerous articles and monographs, including From Business Strategy to IT Action: Right Decisions for a Better Bottom Line, Information Economics: Linking Information Technology and Business Performance and Information Strategy and Economics: Linking Information Systems Strategy to Business Performance. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.

Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior

Keynote: Tim Lister, Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council
Panel Discussion: Tim Lister, Roberto Ivon Dibildox (UR), David Mejía Rodríguez (MONEX), Rodolfo Torres Espejo (SFP) and Rafaél Barbudo Sepúlveda (Santander- ALTEC)

Tim Lister, a Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, along with five of his partners at the Guild, have been compiling project management patterns from their combined 150 years of project consulting, for their book, Project Patterns: From Adrenalin Junkies To Template Zombies, due to be published in English and German in 2007.

Like personal habits these patterns can be positive, like flossing…the positive patterns help projects get a good job done, or they can be negative, like not bathing…they hinder a project’s chances. Sometimes they are neutral, like music taste; they just seem to be the way many projects deal with a situation or an issue.

The first key is to identify which patterns are found in your own organization. Then, if they are positive, how can you perpetrate them across all projects? If they are negative, how can you break the habit?

Tim will start the talk with some example patterns from the book project. They have intriguing titles such as “Dead Fish”, “Manana”, “Lessons Unlearned”, and “What Smell?”, He will ask you to submit patterns that you have seen so that you can discuss all the patterns you find with your colleagues at the conference.

Coctail Party & book signature by Tim Lister, Tom DeMarco, Bob Benson and Mike Rosen.

October 2 || October 3 || Agenda