YOUR HOSTS

Nine hours of insightful presentations in a virtual meeting space. Click on the speaker names for their bio page and connection details. Click on the topic titles for session replays and access to the PDFs.

All times are shown as US Central time (CST is UTC-06:00).

9am – 10am: People Centric Innovation

DR. SUDEENDRA KOUSHIK
an Innovation and Technology management professional

How do we bring people rather than process at the center of Innovation? If empathy is key to defining powerful problems human emotions, people should be leading the innovation while processes support the innovation cycle.

Dr. Koushik will discuss his research on this and case studies, while using the succinct points raised as a part of my TEDx talk on how to become world class Innovators.

10am – 11am: Organizational Transformation through Strategic Innovation

JOANNE HYLAND
Founder & President of the Innovation Group

Strategic innovation, the umbrella term for radical innovation, is a key driver of organizational transformation and culture change. A systematic approach for scoping emerging opportunities and reducing uncertainty is required to enable this transformation.

The purpose of this presentation will be to make the case for why strategic innovation changes the game for organizations seeking growth and corporate renewal. It will also present what the building blocks and seven principles are for building an innovative organization. These building blocks, of three competency areas (Discovery, Incubation and Acceleration) and four uncertainty categories (Technical, Market or Mission, Resource and Organization), are key findings from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI’s) 25-year, pioneering research program.

11am – Noon: Become Indispensable: Strengthen your EA Practice by Producing Valuable Business Outcomes

DAN HEBDA
Chief Strategy Officer, MEGA International

Organizations have spent the past years focusing on efficiency, which meant when hit with a major disruption like COVID-19, many business processes were too brittle to quickly adapt and simply broke. During the rebuilding process, Gartner indicates that leaders must design an architecture that: enables better access to information; can augment that information with new insights; and is composable, modular, and can change and respond more quickly as decisions are made.

But how do you do that? A good first step is to add a business architecture top layer to your enterprise architecture efforts. Using this lens, you can connect IT to business objectives (ensuring your efforts are business-outcome-driven) and therefore easily changeable when business objectives evolve or change.

In this session you will learn how to:

• Create a strategic roadmap where you can plan future business capabilities and other IT investments
• Understand how emerging technology can be leveraged to support business objectives
• Optimize your current IT portfolio for cost, lifecycle, and agility
• Ensure transformation projects are aligned with strategic objectives
• Implement business-outcome-driven enterprise architecture

Noon – 1pm: Leading Change as an Architect

KAINE UGWU
Enterprise Architect at MTN

Kaine will discuss the question, “how can architects be effective in fast-moving, agile environments, and architect within self-organizing teams.” In an era where digital innovation is an increasingly important subject, and Agile approaches have become mainstream, how do you architect in an agile approach without losing the essence and value of architecture?

1pm – 2pm: Houses, lakes and puddles: dynamic data mesh as an approach to innovation

BENJAMIN WRIGHT-JONES
Solution Architect, Microsoft Services – Azure Cloud & AI

In this session, Ben will propose a new data strategy to support rapid innovation, which shifts from the legacy approaches of monolithic data warehouses or data lakes, to a dynamic data mesh, accelerating digital transformation by focusing on data products and business outcomes using an agile mindset. Ben will present real world scenarios and use cases which require a shift in organizational culture, thinking, and approach to compete in an ever increasing technological world.

2pm – 3pm Cloud Different

MICHAEL FULTON
Vice President of Product Strategy & Innovation at Expedient

In this presentation, Michael will take a look at 15 years of cloud computing, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and what needs to be different going forward for Enterprises to extract the most value out of the cloud in support of their digital transformations.

3pm – 4pm: Innovating for the Next Phase of Industry and Society

MICHAEL CLARK
Digital Product and Strategy Manager

Business has historically been seen as predictable, iterative movements, keeping pace with shareholders and market demands. The advent of digital pushed the focus back to the customer, innovation became a critical component, yet was often still seen as a nice to have or something perceived as being seen to exist in an organization.

Fast forward to today and organizations no longer have the benefit of a 3-5 year rhythm, new business models and society are driving a new era of change. As we move out of a global pandemic and head towards the next phase of industry, business model changes that were seen as fantasy or too far in the future, are the cornerstone of today, further reducing the strategic rhythm of change. Businesses are having to rethink the way they deliver products and services, the impacts to society and the economy changes, on a daily basis, resulting in a race for survival and relevance.

In this talk we will cover what these changes are, who is leading the way, what it means for society and business, and how the leaders and technologists of today can leverage innovation, to build capability and capacity, which will help shape a path for current and future business models.

4pm – 5pm: Using Crowdsourcing to Drive Radical Innovation

A panel with JESSICA DAY, DOR GARBASH, NATALIA CORNWELL, TODD HART and GREG HICKS

This moderated panel discussion features innovation leaders from the public and the private sector who are leveraging the power of the crowd in order to identify opportunities for radical change, whether it’s how autonomous vehicles will impact infrastructure or how blockchain can be applied at an organization. Speakers from Graybar, IOHK, Virginia Department of Transportation, and the US Air Force will talk about the challenges of collaborating with the crowd and share best practices about how to engage and act on ideas at scale.

5pm – 6pm The Future Role of IT Architects

PAUL PREISS
CEO and Founder of Iasa Global

BRICE OMINSKI
An integration architecture thought leader and CITA-Professional

Join Paul Preiss and Brice Ominski for an informal survey of radical innovation and the IT architect’s role.  They discuss the importance of business model innovation and the increasingly important role IT architects need to play in decision making.  Being a successful IT architect means being able to understand the business from a technology perspective.  They look at the changing roles of the architect: from order taker to business colleague.  Several key technologies, along with business modeling, will shape our future.

• 5G will enable new ways of connecting.
• IoT provides vastly more sensory data than ever before.
• Robots and automation will, for now, augment human labor.
• Distributed ledgers and blockchains combine to create entirely new business trust models.
• Artificial Intelligence is making sense of things.
• Augmented / Virtual Reality is helping to display things we couldn’t visualize.
• Quantum Computing is challenging the internet, computing, and encryption.

When these collide with creativity and value creation, you have radical innovation.