Emerging and Evolving Technologies Briefing – a Unicom workshop

Chaired by David Norfolk, Bloor Research

The IT industry is going through an era of disruptive change. In order to ride out the waves of this disruptive change, senior managers need to keep abreast of developments. This 2 hour briefing gives the opportunity to get up to speed with developments in four specific areas:-

1. Cloud Computing: Business Assurance ‘in the virtual’/ Open vs Proprietary Standards
2. Agile:  Emerging new ways of working
3. Configuration Management/version control: more important than ever?
4. IT Governance/IT Audit: running the organisation’s IT health check

The rapid development of the commerce of directly sourced technology services has been one of the greatest areas of change in the way we run our businesses. The fast growing market place for the supply and sourcing of many of these services, colloquially called ‘the Cloud’, reflects the widening impact of the technologies of virtualisation. The creation and delivery of software and systems with assurance in this new environment calls for a radical overhaul of our approach. “The Cloud” ideally offers an enabler for more effective, more agile, business process automation, but some concerns that should be addressed include: how to achieve business assurance ‘in the virtual’, and how relevant are the arguments for open standards vs. proprietary standards in this context?  How easy is it to transfer from one provider to another without suffering loss of service or loss of business assurance?

As Agile becomes increasingly mainstream, it can no longer be seen as a bottom-up or top-down approach, but an all-pervading way of working which cuts right through the organisation. There are cultural and leadership issues involved, and many find the behavioural change required as challenging as the technological changes. How does your organisation cope with “Agility”? If it is already embedded, what can be done make it more efficient; or if you are moving to Agile, how can this be made easier and the end result more effective?

Configuration  Management is not new, but these days, IT Management and governance generally are defined by issues of people/management/control, as well as by “what you have, where it is, how it is configured, the history of how it got where it is; and where it is going”. As the pendulum swings towards more governance and regulation, this implies that people will start wanting to apply version management far more widely than it currently is. Do you know what is currently understood by version management? Configuration Management? Release Management? Software Configuration Management (SCM)? 

IT Governance/IT Audit are becoming ever more important as business managers need to know that their IT departments are running at maximum efficiency and minimum cost; IT Managers need to use most modern hardware and software technologies but do not know what works and what is industry-hype. When an IT disaster occurs, it is essential to determine the cause(s) and assess whether similar problems could occur in other areas, and how these problems can be avoided or fixed.   During Mergers and Acquisitions, senior management need to know the quality and suitability of IT systems that they will have to merge with.

This two-hour briefing is a joint venture between UNICOM and Bloor. Busy executives get the opportunity to hear an authoritative, independent briefing on the emerging and evolving developments; to network with peers and to benchmark their own progress against that of similar organisations. There will also be a closed exhibition alongside where a limited number of vendors will be available to demonstrate relevant products and services.

Presenters:

• David Norfolk, Bloor
• Dr Richard Sykes, Bloor
• Jim Jones, Perennius Ensemble
• Les Oliver, Connections Agile Services / DSDM Consortium