CIO Edge Agenda 2021

After facing their biggest challenges, our community of CIOs enter 2021 with improved reputations and the biggest opportunity yet to deliver on organisational priorities. Technology has proven its value. Transformations and digitisation have accelerated. People have adopted new tools.
Digital and IT leaders are now empowered to execute a progressive technology strategy.

In 2021, can we now leverage this publicity to partner with business heads, to create new models and revenues, and to execute on the vision of an efficient, integrated, re-platformed, digitised and data driven organisation?

ADAPT’s research and advisory leadership team reveal the latest local fact-based insights, based upon 10,000 conversations and over 1,000 detailed surveys of our region’s executive digital and IT leaders. Matt reveals the core findings distilled from your aggregated pre-event surveys.

Formerly COO for Santander, where he created and merged their services for companies and product delivery priorities. Formerly COO Barclays Bank where he created and scaled their open innovation platform, and delivered the group service company $3B in operating expense reductions. Prior to that was the well known local Group CIO of CBA, where he and his team developed and delivered CBA’s Core bank AUD1.5bn real time re-platform, created the first open data analytics platform with Berkeley’s AMP Spark Lab and enabled their agile DevOps capabilities. Now as MIT research fellow, Michael is researching Technology Value and more recently completed analysis on Digital Business models and Transformation performance.

Was shifting to remote work a blessing, a curse, or both?

The challenges of the pandemic have created an opportunity to radically transform work and organisations. But many organisations simply did a “lift and shift” of office-based practices to video calls — both the good and bad practices.

During this presentation, Matt Loop, Head of APAC at Slack, will share local and international research on the impact of the shift to remote and how organisations can move past the “lift and shift” of work from offices to homes to more fundamental transformation. We’ll share what’s working, and what’s not, to enable distributed teams to be more aligned, agile and productive.

Plus we’ll share our local research on the remote work tech effect, and the productivity strain of app proliferation.

To prepare for a future that is largely unknown, top CIOs are building flexibility and adaptability into both their technology and their teams. For these leaders, top-down mandates have been replaced with a distinctly people-centred approach that engages teams and stakeholders to play a more active, participatory role in shaping change that sticks.

In this insightful, practical session, Jane and Erin will share their secrets for breaking down walls, re-writing the rules, and leading change in a completely new way—one which equips your organisation to transform while ensuring that your team sees change as a personal opportunity, rather than a threat. One such skill is to learn how to do a ‘listening tour’ and real needs analysis – to truly tune into what your internal and external customers need from you today and tomorrow. NOBL helps leaders to make change and organisations adopt new behaviours. Jane is MD for NOBL in California, and Erin Cooper is Managing Director of NOBL Canada.

As we look to the next ten years, it’s clear that the world faces more urgent challenges than ever. People and markets are responding via social movements and investments. In Australia, $0.82 of every $1.00 invested in ASX200 companies is in those companies that provide Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting rated as ‘Detailed’ or ‘Leading’ by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI).

What does this mean for CIOs? Join Greg Lavender and Nicola Acutt, as they outline a new approach to building a better future through VMware’s 2030 Agenda. Integrated and aligned to core business strategy, the Agenda is focused on driving three outcomes: Trust, Equity and Sustainability.

Between now and 2030, VMware will measure and report its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) impact and work to drive progress across 30×30 Goals.

Learn more about how VMware will invest in co-innovation and collaboration with its expansive ecosystem of customers and partners, and together will redefine what it means to be a force for good.

Digital disruption for companies start with digitally savvy top management teams that have a data-driven mindset and knows how to capitalise on new business opportunities, generate more revenue, optimise current operational efforts and can predict market trends in time to take action.

Join ServiceNow VP of IT Strategy, Planning and Business Operations, Patricia Grant as she discusses how companies can become digitally savvy and data-driven or die trying.

Through pointed discussions and real world examples, Patricia will share:

• What makes a company digitally savvy
• How to develop a data-driven leadership team
• Create a data-driven company to ensure you can rise beyond the pandemic and stay relevant for the future

The pursuit of new digital opportunities has prompted many organisations to quickly deploy new apps, capabilities and business models. Moving quickly is critical, but so is detecting and mitigating cyber-attacks that can threaten your user experience, reputation, and revenue. IT leaders are faced with the challenge of aligning security requirements with digital project timelines and stakeholder expectations. Access to the right data and intelligence is critical to making optimal decisions. Join this discussion for advice on how to deploy consistent security across your infrastructure without compromising agility or customer experience.

McKinsey will be releasing their updated perspective on the future of technology and business in Asia and Australia with some fascinating implications for our nation and for you, our technology executives. As one of the authors of the study and leading partner consulting to our largest companies on agile execution and technology transformation, Brant will reveal the viewpoint.

Based on work with over 3,000 IT organisations, we will identify the core competencies required to build, lead and develop your IT Culture and Talent into that of a high performance organisation. The session will provide the information you need along with practical applications that you can utliise in your organisation. We will look at how to transform IT from the typical reactive “IT supplier” role to a trusted partner and leader that drives organisational and strategic value.

We will cover ways to lead your organisation up the IT maturity curve:

• A clear roadmap that you can follow to navigate the IT Transformation Journey of your organisation
• The 14 Core Competencies that IT professionals need to succeed in the modern world.
• The Current State of IT Leadership
• 2 Essential Capabilities For IT to drive organisational and strategic value
• 3 Reasons why Marketing IT’s Value is more critical than ever before
• The required next actions to take based on where you sit on the IT Maturity Curve

Intelligently matched opportunities connecting the right people at the right time for the right reasons.

No code continues to take a more prominent position in the strategy of many organisations to overcome the expense of finding and retaining pro-code application developers. But, can its impact really be revolutionary when it comes to enabling the “citizen developer”?

We’ll consider what no code can deliver beyond automation and focus on the value creation, speed to market, and ability to maintain security and strict standards with a single, standard no code platform.

In 2020, timely decision making has been critical, and access to the right information at speed the difference between survival and failure. We’ve also highlighted a national crisis in data management, processing, policies and strategy which is slowing down the national economy – and the ability to embrace automation, machine learning and emerging technologies to gain performance advantage.

ADAPT’s latest research across Australian CIOs puts creating the Data driven organisation as their top priority for 2021, alongside many key business outcomes that better organised data will enable.

The deepened focus on the digitisation of workplace, workflow, operations, service delivery and customer experience is opening a new chapter for information infrastructure and data architectures. Future application delivery, customer satisfaction and competitive edge must be underpinned by intelligently deliver personalised services, automated through AI, and based on a single view of the customer, with all disparate data points integrated to one pool and enabling that vision.

What are the strategies to execute on that? What are the challenges to manage? And how best to overcome them?

The digital economy started to detach itself from the “real” economy long before any of us had heard of Covid-19, but the dramatic and unforeseen forces were unleashed. Leaders who do not make an effort to foresee what lies ahead for their businesses will have little opportunity to ward off the consequences of platformisation and other major structural change forces – their businesses will simply vanish and be replicated by global platforms in the years to come.

Yet, just as humans rely on a healthy and interdependent ecosystem for their long-term prosperity, the new economy cannot continue to thrive if it leaves behind the tens of millions of businesses and workers who build the core of national and global productivity.

Live from Europe, Mark will share thoughts on a new framework to help us drive structural change: ‘FLP-IT’ (Forces, Logic, Patterns – Implications, Triage) and debate:

• Recapturing the resources and vitality needed to sustain critical contributions to productivity, employment and GDP.
• How to identify new possibilities while preserving the symbiotic relationship between old and new parts of the economy
• Developing a comprehensive response to the macro trends and forces, such as “platformisation”
• The most focused and pragmatically ideated forms of experimentation.

Mark Esposito, PhD, is recognised internationally as a top global thought leader in matters relating to The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the changes and opportunities that technology will bring to a variety of industries.
He was inducted in 2016 in the radar of Thinkers50 as one of the 30 most prominent rising business thinkers in the world. He is a global expert of the World Economic Forum and advisor to national governments. In his academic career, Mark has held academic appointments for some of the world’s leading institutions such as Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, Hult International Business School and IE Business School.

All three of these award winning IT leaders have delivered game changing projects, leadership and execution during the pandemic, and since. Along with our star keynote, we gather them to ask what their 2021 post pandemic IT strategy is? How to maintain the leadership position that technologists have achieved during Covid? What are they doing about digital savviness in their leadership teams? And how close are they to delivering the data driven enterprise?

Based in our keynote room – an opportunity to mingle and meet other attendees, compliant to physical distancing.