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About the Sessions

These are the speakers confirmed for the Your Journey to World Class IT conference October 5th

Click here to register for this full day virtual conference.

What’s IT Worth? Determining the Real ROI of ITby Robert Charette
While the mathematically calculation of Return on Investment is straightforward, determining the true value of an IT investment to an organization is much less so. In this presentation, Robert Charette will lay out the foundational principles necessary to understand the real ROI of IT so that the question, “What’s IT worth?” can best be answered.

Dr. Robert Charette is the President of the ITABHI Corporation, an international high technology company involved in enterprise and program risk management consulting. He is the author of over 80 articles on software, systems, and business management in addition to the following books: “Software Engineering Environments: Concepts and Technology” (1986), “Software Engineering Risk Analysis & Management” (1989), “Applications Strategies for Risk Analysis” (1990), “Introduction to the Management of Risk” (1994, “A Unified Methodology for Systems Development” (1987) and “Decision Empowerment: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Good Decision Makers’ (2007). Several new books on managing enterprise risk are in progress.

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Building an IT Command and Control Center
Dave Smith
Have you ever been surprised by something of significance in your business? Have you ever gotten inconsistent information from your organization? In this presentation, Dave Smith will share some of the challenges he has faced in IT over the last 25 years and will discuss a method for controlling and automating the flow of IT information so that it can be made available to teams, managers, managers, and executives. teaching others business skills, professional skills, and technical skills for more than 12 years. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in education for which his dissertation will focus on the benefits of corporate training and mobile learning. He speaks three languages and was recently inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame. His communication skills, combined with his martial art skills, provide him with a unique combination for keeping his sessions informative, lively, and interactive.

Dave Smith is a senior technology executive at CAI with 25 years of experience leading complex, challenging IT initiatives for industry-leading firms and Fortune 500 client companies. He specializes in the design, development, and launch of technology solutions and processes.

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IT Strategy, Governance, and Value
Leon Kappelman
Are you getting a respectable rate of return on your investments in information technologies? Are you even getting a positive one? The answer to the first question appears to be “no” for about 75% to 80% of organizations; while nearly half of IT investments appear to actually have a negative ROI. While there is no silver bullet to this problem, there are a set of management methods and practices that are almost always found in those organizations which do make the most of their IT spending. Professor Kappelman’s presentation will help you ensure that your organization is developing the practices as well as the intellectual and human capital needed to make the most of your IT investments.

Dr. Leon Kappelman is a research scientist, teacher, author, speaker, and consultant whose research, publications, and presentations in software project management, enterprise architecture, and technology management have received world-wide recognition. He is Director Emeritus of the Information Systems Research Center and a Professor of Information Systems in the College of Business at the University of North Texas, where he is also a Fellow of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge. His professional expertise includes software project management; technology-related legal and ethical issues including intellectual property; continuity of operations; performance measurement; system development and maintenance; enterprise architecture and strategy; and high-tech and public policy matters like privacy, security, and software quality. He currently serves as chair of the Society for information Management’s Enterprise Architecture Working Group and contributed to and edited the SIM Guide to Enterprise Architecture (CRC Press, 2010).

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Evaluating the ROI of IT on a Continual Basis
Michael Bragen
It’s commonly understood that establishing quantitative returns for IT depends on getting reliable and believable hard numbers for the value side and expense side of the value equation. Benchmarking initiatives tend to focus on the expense side, since this is easier to quantify (and tends to be better documented.) Intrinsic value of IT crosses into territory that touches on understanding of strategic and tactical business benefits. This presentation by Michael Bragen will focus on how organizations can evaluate return on a continuous basis by tracking a handful of key metrics. The basic approach is to balance IT application complete life cycle costs (Total Cost of Implementation and Total Cost of Ownership) against the strategic and tactical value of the application portfolio. Often, this analysis strays into the realm of evaluating intangibles, so a common framework for quantifying value must be established. This analysis relies on data collected by and for command and control systems, and therefore can be efficiently promoted in organizations that already have an investment (or intention) to fly by wire.

A software industry analyst, author, and consultant, Mr. Bragen has over 25 years of experience in the fields of strategic management for IT, including software engineering and information systems. Mr. Bragen’s experience centers on the management and implementation of technologies and processes that support, leverage, and enhance business activity. His consulting work focuses on the use of metrics to support project and portfolio management, estimation, and software process improvement. Mr. Bragen has worked with international experience in a variety of industry sectors, including telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, retail, utilities, and government/defense.

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