Past Events - 2018 and before

Members Only Annual Holiday Gala on December 13th at the Stamford Yacht Club! Come and enjoy a wonderful social evening with friends and colleagues that will feature great food, great conversation, live music in a great venue. Each member may bring one guest free of charge. Cocktails and live entertainment will start at 5:45 with a delicious dinner and festivities to follow. The event will run to 10:00 pm.

Featured Entertainment
   Jodi Keogan - Singer
   Chris Coogan - Jazz Musician
   Mark Richards - Trumpet

Come listen to an informal dialogue with SIM Board members, Susan Certoma and Beverly Lieberman, who will host this program.  We will get a candid insider view of a career on Wall Street  – What really happens when extreme wealth, politics and ego collide. What it takes to survive and succeed. What decisions are the tipping point of crossing the line. Susan has been a mentor and sponsor to many at the beginning and later on in their careers. We are inviting our members to bring their high school and older children to hear this revealing talk and ask career questions. She will talk about key influencers, leadership and management style.  She will help us understand the skills and experience that prepared her to navigate a highly diversified career spanning leadership roles in corporate IT – from CIO of Wachovia (Wells Fargo) Bank through current day as President of a Fintech company.

How does a systems analyst move her career to CIO and then President?  Did she have a career plan? What obstacles did she overcome? Are there things she would have done differently?  How does she manage the demands of an all-consuming career vs. her family and friends. We will talk about how she “de-stresses” and “re-energizes”.  We will also find out her favorite role models and her vision of the next 5 years of her career.

Fireside chats have been among our best attended programs.  This will be our fourth in a row and Susan is following a distinguished series that included Jeanette Horan, Sigal Zarmi and Michelle Garvey.

The Speakers:
   Susan Certoma  President, Enterprise Engineering, Inc.
   Beverly Lieberman  President of Halbrecht Lieberman Associates

Reimagine, Reinvent: Building a Customer-Centric Organization In Highly Disruptive Times

In today’s fast-changing business landscape, it’s not your competitors that threaten your company’s survival. It’s your organization’s willingness and capacity to disrupt its existing business model or be disrupted. Because the CIO is at the center of the digital transformation journey she or he is uniquely positioned to deliver fearless leadership, fuse emerging technologies with process redesign and people skills, partner with the C-suite and board of directors, and successfully navigate the business into the future.

The courageous leadership traits needed to foster a culture of innovation and transformation on the path to genius will be the focal point of the 2018 Greenwich CIO Executive Leadership Summit.

Industry experts Jon Eisenstein of IronStone Advisors, Sigal Zarmi of PwC, Johnny Dranchak of OneWorld Management, David O’Malley of GE Digital on a World Cafe style discussion of Digital Transformation and its many aspects. The format allows for audience participation and everyone will leave better informed.

Strategy & Planning for Digital Transformation
Johnny Dranchak will discuss how to evaluate the current situation, the need for digital transformation, leadership alignment, planning and successful execution. Participants will have a chance to interact with the speaker to learn the unique challenges, tricks, and techniques to gain constant alignment with the executive and key stakeholders during the digital transformation journey.

Start-Structure-Scale
The key to a successful digital transformation lies in core cultural and behavioral changes at all levels. Product management, agile delivery, technology enablement – the three pillars of a successful digital organization – are supported by a culture of customer focus, transparency and constant innovation. In this World Cafe talk, David O’Malley will discuss GE’s transformation on a global scale.  https://youtu.be/_mtNYQyJAuM

The Digital Workforce
A digital workforce is one that integrates technology to connect all elements of the supply chain. Sigal Zarmi will share her practical approach to:

• Align your workforce and HR strategy with the business
• Start experimenting with more flexible and agile ways of working using proven digital technologies and tools
• Define the digital skill gap within the workforce
• Develop required digital competencies
• Foster leadership behaviors that fuel a digital culture

AI in Digital Transformation
Jon Eisenstein will discuss the key role of AI in Digital Transformation

• AI and Staffing – Key Learnings, best practices and real-world payback
• What can be done with current AI approaches to transform companies
• The role of the Technology Leaders in a democratized adoption of AI and Digital Transformation platforms

 The Speakers:

This program brings together the top minds from government and industry to discuss the Cybersecurity challenges currently facing the IT industry as well as what the future may bring in terms of new developments in cyber defense, privacy and information assurance.

The Speakers:
   Christopher Hetner is the Senior Advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman on Cybersecurity. 
   John Summers VP & Chief Technology Officer oversees the security and technology strategy for Akamai’s web security and web performance solutions.
   Matthew Lagana, CISSP Chief Information Security Officer at MBIA Inc.

Join Us As We explore Tech Startups and Understand How They Work! We will have several presentations from tech startups, followed by a panel discussion.

Stack Overflow is the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge and build their careers. Stack Overflow partners with businesses to help them understand, hire, engage, and enable the world’s developers. Their products and services are focused on developer marketing, technical recruiting,  market research, and enterprise knowledge sharing

Agenda
Welcome from Stack Overflow
Introduction by Jonathan Hill on Accelerators and the NYC Tech Scene
– Presentation one: John Lynn and the Accelerator movement.
– Presentation two: Bharat Krish, CEO, Refine.ai and former VP of Innovation, HBO
– Presentation three: Matthew Hooper, Founder & Host, Live From Tomorrow and former VP, Barclays Bank
– Panel Discussion to follow

Many organizations think of Agility as mainly a technology concern. They focus on increasing the efficiency with which teams are able to deliver on projects, with DevOps now emerging as a primary focus to ensure smooth, rapid flow from development to customer. Integration with the business may be weak to nonexistent.
What these efforts miss is that the biggest source of waste in modern software is failing to ‘build the right thing.’ There are numerous tools to bring rigor to this area and major organizational changes to align to value. Dan will discuss what it means to shift focus from output to outcome and the sweeping implications for this seemingly simple but monumental shift.

Dan Leeds is the Agile Transformation lead at BNY Mellon Bank

Blockchain is being hailed as a technological advancement not seen since the internet was brought to the public. Despite many consumers not having a full understanding of what blockchain is, they have heard that it will be immensely impactful on the world and they want in on it. Join us for this important dinner event, where Richard Gordon of IBM and Ken Zimmerman of Chateaux will discuss the basics of blockchain and, courtesy of True Tickets, Matt Zarracina will demonstrate a real-world example of a concert ticket blockchain solution in action.

The Speakers:

Richard Gordon IBM North America, Blockchain Solution Leader
Matt Zarracina True Tickets, Co-Founder
Ken Zimmerman Chateaux, Principal

SIM Connect Live took place at the Sheraton Dallas in downtown Dallas, TX from Wednesday April 11 to Friday April 13. Formerly called SIMposium, the conference attracts IT leaders from around the globe. This isn’t your typical IT conference. Join us for a truly collaborative and interactive experience!

The Conference features five tracks:

• Security, Privacy, and Risk Management
• Embracing Disruption and Innovation
• SIM Resources for IT Leaders
• Enhancing Enterprise Technologies
• Advancing Leadership

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most important strategic tools to grow a business.  However, the cloud comes with both opportunities and risks.

The Cloud allows businesses to concentrate on core competencies while outsourcing commodity IT services. It provides organizations with the ability to access the services it needs, when it needs them, scaling as required and leaving maintenance to the provider. On the flip side, legal and regulatory compliance, loss of control, potential security breaches, and effective partnerships with cloud providers are key risks that have to be managed.

In an environment where speed is the new currency, the old models that were used in the past are simply not working in today’s landscape.  Businesses need to continuously evolve to stay competitive and IT must become the growth engine or become irrelevant. While IT has made significant investments over the past several years, they are not addressing the current challenges including effective reduction of tech debt. Technology needs to adapt and enable new business models to maintain competitive advantages for the business.

Technology is no longer the sole domain of IT. The world is interconnected and technology is a core component of everything we do.  We can no longer maintain command and control over our business environments. How do we operate in this new environment? Cloud services are an important component. Larry will share his insights in making the shift from a simple environment to a complex one while still managing risks, ensuring security and supporting growth.  Please join Larry as we explore the changing paradigm of cloud computing.

The Speaker: Larry Biagini , Chief Technology Evangelist at Zscaler.

Innovation presents the greatest opportunity for growth in today’s economy. However, balancing financial prudence against funding innovation programs will remain our imperative. How do we ensure our innovation investments will pay off? How do we measure tangible outcomes in our innovation programs? These are the questions every C-Level executive should be asking themselves right now. Companies currently lack transparency on where to place limited financial resources and need a way to explore potential opportunities and validate business concepts quickly. Agile and Lean frameworks have, for years, provided a way to prioritize and deliver the greatest value in software development.

In this presentation, David will present a new way to view innovation funding through agile economics. David will detail how we can reduce risk by applying lean practices to our innovation programs. Most importantly, he will give you the knowledge and vocabulary to engage with technology leaders to achieve balance between the need to innovate and demonstrate fiscal responsibility.

Who to bring?
Bring your CFO!

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is a hot topic in the market and is getting a lot of attention and an increased number of companies have started RPA initiatives. At the same time, there is an evolution of RPA business functions over time towards a state of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) where the future state of RPA will be autonomous RPA that acts on its own, choosing its actions based on business goals. RPA is the beginning of AI in the enterprise and there are some early success stories that highlights its potential.

IT plays a critical role in starting and driving RPA/IPA transformations given that at the core is enterprise automation. Analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester predict that, by 2020, 40% of organizations have adopted RPA/IPA and that is only the tip of the iceberg considering that AI brings an even more fundamental and pervasive change. This presentation will cover the definition and continuum from RPA to IPA, what is currently happening in the market, what constitutes an RPA/IPA project, how do you start and approach RPA/IPA and we will discuss several examples of RPA/IPA initiatives. Attendees will get practical insights and lessons learned as well as a view of the benefits that can be realized through RPA/IPA.

Large enterprises and even the global 100 are becoming increasingly comfortable with cloud solutions. However, cloud deals raise many complex legal issues that need to be thoroughly negotiated and documented in agreements. In this session, lawyer, negotiator and frequent speaker on negotiating cloud deals, Mark D. Grossman will give you the benefit of what he learned in his 30 plus years as a negotiator.  Mark will speak to the unique customs, usages and norms of cloud deals, and the particular provisions that are critical to agreements in this area. The discussion will include issues common to cloud agreements including SLA’s, warranties and limits of liability.

Your key takeaways will be:

• The contract provisions you need for cybersecurity and to protect your PII
• Norms in the industry for cloud deals
• How to protect your data in the cloud
• Strategies to keep your cloud agreements out of court
• Understanding how a bad limitation of liability clause can emasculate your cloud agreement
• How to properly negotiate your limitation of liability provision
• The provisions you need in every cloud contract
• How to negotiate cloud agreements that communicate your deal in clear, simple and unambiguous terms, thus reducing risk to your enterprise and your career
• How to avoid agreeing to a cloud deal that puts YOU at risk of having to refresh YOUR resume

Mark will leave the audience with:

An enhanced ability to spot and intelligently resolve the hot button issues in cloud deals.

About Mark Grossman:

What makes Mark Grossman different than most professional speakers who speak on negotiations is that Mark had done it for real as a practicing deal making lawyer and business person.

Check out Mark in action