CIO Europe Retail Summit | Nov 8, 2018 | Park Plaza London Waterloo - London, UK
↓ Agenda Key
Keynote Presentation
Visionary speaker presents to entire audience on key issues, challenges and business opportunities
Keynote Presentations give attending delegates the opportunity to hear from leading voices in the industry. These presentations feature relevant topics and issues aligned with the speaker's experience and expertise, selected by the speaker in concert with the summit's Content Committee." title="Keynote Presentations give attending delegates the opportunity to hear from leading voices in the industry. These presentations feature relevant topics and issues aligned with the speaker's experience and expertise, selected by the speaker in concert with the summit's Content Committee.
Executive Visions
Panel moderated by Master of Ceremonies and headed by four executives discussing critical business topics
Executive Visions sessions are panel discussions that enable in-depth exchanges on critical business topics. Led by a moderator, these sessions encourage attending executives to address industry challenges and gain insight through interaction with expert panel members." title="Executive Visions sessions are panel discussions that enable in-depth exchanges on critical business topics. Led by a moderator, these sessions encourage attending executives to address industry challenges and gain insight through interaction with expert panel members.
Thought Leadership
Solution provider-led session giving high-level overview of opportunities
Led by an executive from the vendor community, Thought Leadership sessions provide comprehensive overviews of current business concerns, offering strategies and solutions for success. This is a unique opportunity to access the perspective of a leading member of the vendor community." title="Led by an executive from the vendor community, Thought Leadership sessions provide comprehensive overviews of current business concerns, offering strategies and solutions for success. This is a unique opportunity to access the perspective of a leading member of the vendor community.
Think Tank
End user-led session in boardroom style, focusing on best practices
Think Tanks are interactive sessions that place delegates in lively discussion and debate. Sessions admit only 15-20 participants at a time to ensure an intimate environment in which delegates can engage each other and have their voices heard." title="Think Tanks are interactive sessions that place delegates in lively discussion and debate. Sessions admit only 15-20 participants at a time to ensure an intimate environment in which delegates can engage each other and have their voices heard.
Roundtable
Interactive session led by a moderator, focused on industry issue
Led by an industry analyst, expert or a member of the vendor community, Roundtables are open-forum sessions with strategic guidance. Attending delegates gather to collaborate on common issues and challenges within a format that allows them to get things done." title="Led by an industry analyst, expert or a member of the vendor community, Roundtables are open-forum sessions with strategic guidance. Attending delegates gather to collaborate on common issues and challenges within a format that allows them to get things done.
Case Study
Overview of recent project successes and failures
Case Studies allow attending executives to hear compelling stories about implementations and projects, emphasizing best practices and lessons learned. Presentations are immediately followed by Q&A sessions." title="Case Studies allow attending executives to hear compelling stories about implementations and projects, emphasizing best practices and lessons learned. Presentations are immediately followed by Q&A sessions.
Focus Group
Discussion of business drivers within a particular industry area
Focus Groups allow executives to discuss business drivers within particular industry areas. These sessions allow attendees to isolate specific issues and work through them. Presentations last 15-20 minutes and are followed by Q&A sessions." title="Focus Groups allow executives to discuss business drivers within particular industry areas. These sessions allow attendees to isolate specific issues and work through them. Presentations last 15-20 minutes and are followed by Q&A sessions.
Analyst Q&A Session
Moderator-led coverage of the latest industry research
Q&A sessions cover the latest industry research, allowing attendees to gain insight on topics of interest through questions directed to a leading industry analyst." title="Q&A sessions cover the latest industry research, allowing attendees to gain insight on topics of interest through questions directed to a leading industry analyst.
Vendor Showcase
Several brief, pointed overviews of the newest solutions and services
Taking the form of three 10-minute elevator pitches by attending vendors, these sessions provide a concise and pointed overview of the latest solutions and services aligned with attendee needs and preferences." title="Taking the form of three 10-minute elevator pitches by attending vendors, these sessions provide a concise and pointed overview of the latest solutions and services aligned with attendee needs and preferences.
Executive Exchange
Pre-determined, one-on-one interaction revolving around solutions of interest
Executive Exchanges offer one-on-one interaction between executives and vendors. This is an opportunity for both parties to make key business contacts, ask direct questions and get the answers they need. Session content is prearranged and based on mutual interest." title="Executive Exchanges offer one-on-one interaction between executives and vendors. This is an opportunity for both parties to make key business contacts, ask direct questions and get the answers they need. Session content is prearranged and based on mutual interest.
Open Forum Luncheon
Informal discussions on pre-determined topics
Led by a moderator, Open Forum Luncheons offer attendees informal, yet focused discussions on current industry topics and trends over lunch." title="Led by a moderator, Open Forum Luncheons offer attendees informal, yet focused discussions on current industry topics and trends over lunch.
Networking Session
Unique activities at once relaxing, enjoyable and productive
Networking opportunities take various unique forms, merging enjoyable and relaxing activities with an environment conducive to in-depth conversation. These gatherings allow attendees to wind down between sessions and one-on-one meetings, while still furthering discussions and being productive." title="Networking opportunities take various unique forms, merging enjoyable and relaxing activities with an environment conducive to in-depth conversation. These gatherings allow attendees to wind down between sessions and one-on-one meetings, while still furthering discussions and being productive.
7:00 am - 7:55 am
8:00 am - 8:10 am
8:10 am - 8:40 am
The accepted number for the amount of the IT budget that is tied up in operational spend, in paying to maintain technology that has already been purchased, is 80% leaving only 20% for the IT department to use to drive new projects. Because this level of funding is so low, as much as 70% of IT sponsored projects fail. Yet IT departments are being constantly pushed to be innovative, to find a way to embrace new technologies and leverage them to drive business change. How can you do that when your time, money, and effort goes to just keeping the lights on? Join us as we collectively explore this issue and examine some of the successful strategies that are being leveraged by top IT leaders.
Takeaways:
8:45 am - 9:15 am
Many organizations are discovering that adopting service catalogues, curated collections of business and IT services, can both enhance IT-business relationships (by clearly outlining capabilities and expectations as well service costs) and improve operational competency (by standardizing service offerings). Service catalogues are only as useful as their accuracy however and a service catalogue with service levels that cannot be met can in many have a greater negative impact than not having a service catalogue at all. To ensure that service levels are set appropriately it is important to understand the capabilities of the people, processes, and tools that underlie them and this requires measurement up front to eliminate guess work.
Takeaways:
9:20 am - 9:45 am
There has been much discussion over the last couple of years about the development and adoption of Mobile or Digital Wallets, yet the pace of development and adoption continues to be slow. As Near Field Communications (NFC) becomes more ubiquitous across mobile devices, the discussion of e-Wallet development and adoption will only increase. Will the future be client-side wallets or provider-side wallets, will it be individual wallets offered by individual retailers, or amalgamated wallets offered by consortia?
Takeaways:
In order to deal with the increasing pressure to increase service delivery, service efficiency, and service effectiveness, IT departments are adopting the ITIL framework. While ITIL adoption has lots of press around the benefits that it can deliver, it doesn't do so without hard work, and it doesn't do so without the tools that activate, measure, and validate adopted frameworks and processes. In order to achieve the four goals of ITIL adoption â?" reduced cost of operations, improved service delivery, improved user satisfaction, improved compliance â?" IT leaders need to be prepared to move beyond just the process and invest in the technology solutions that make them work.
Takeaways:
9:50 am - 10:15 am
When it comes to a move to the cloud, enterprises have three very distinct options available to them (or two distinct options and a third that is the blend of the first two). Public clouds offer the potential of tremendous flexibility and unparalleled efficiency but come with question marks about security and resiliency. Private clouds directly address those concerns but bring far bigger price tags, both in terms of dollar cost and management requirements. On the surface hybrid clouds seem to offer the best of both worlds by marrying the best of public and private, and minimizing their worst. But this isn't necessarily the case and in many ways hybrid can be seen as nothing more than a compromise solution that compromises all the benefits of the cloud. The key for enterprises when selecting a cloud model is to look at the big picture and build a strategy that leverages strengths, minimizes weaknesses, and is built for the long term.
Takeaways:
10:20 am - 10:30 am
10:35 am - 11:00 am
While the business world has been changing for some time now, the current pace is unprecedented. Some are calling it the biggest technological revolution ever, and it's only just beginning. From cloud computing to smart devices to online support, the retail industry is immersed in digital transformation to leverage new advances and meet customer expectations.
With the convergence of products and technology all this technology disruption is speeding the pace of innovation as companies try to stay ahead of the competition. As if all this rapid change and increased innovation isn't enough, the very nature of the workforce is changing with the advent of blended teams, increased diversity, and post-boomer expectations. This means more work, often being done by fewer people.
The need to stay integrated and aligned amid unprecedented technology shifts, full-speed innovation, and changing workforce requirements raises new challenges that require a new management mindset and a broader set of tools.
This is the very problem that work and resource management is meant to address as the next evolution in planning.
Takeaways:
As enterprises take that deep dive into mobile computing, they move from simply allowing mobile devices into their environment towards leveraging those devices to fulfill roles and functions otherwise unaddressable by traditional devices. This means developing and deploying apps, but things aren't as simple as ?write once, publish many?. Leaving the issue of platform variability to the side, one of the biggest issues in app development is form factor differentiation and the clearest expression of that issue is the difference between smartphones and tablets. While Android co-founder Andy Rubin is on record as saying form factor should have no bearing, there is a strong body of evidence that says apps should be developed differently for different devices if the goal is the utmost usability and productivity. As IT leaders invest more heavily in mobile application development, this is an issue that requires significant deliberation to ensure development time and money is not squandered.
Takeaways:
11:05 am - 11:30 am
The promise of the cloud is almost beyond compare; infinite computing resources, unmatched reliability and uptime, instantaneous service availability, simplistic self-service and provisioning, and the low-low prices of a ?buy by the drink? model. These are the reasons behind the rush to the cloud that we are currently experiencing, but the wholesale adoption does bring a downside â?" as more and more capability is moved to the cloud, more and more cloud providers are utilized since, for the most part, each provider offers only a limited suite of services. The MultiCloud environment that creates a new set of challenges that IT leaders need to overcome, notably resiliency, interoperability/integration, and security and compliance through careful planning and the lessons learned from building complex on premise distributed systems.
Takeaways:
From a technology standpoint, as a ?society? the world of business has gone through two distinct stages in the evolution of its information security focus. The first addressed network based protection and preventative controls such as firewalls and anti-malware. The second looked at data-centric and detective controls such as encryption and intrusion/extrusion monitoring. Since breaches continue to occur at a record pace, what is need new is clearly a new evolution, one that pushes towards individual focused security through granular user monitoring and management as provided by solutions such as Identity and Access Management. While IAM isn't a new technology field, it is one whose time has come and CISO need to begin investing in modern-day, light-weight, easy to implement IAM solutions now to stay ahead of the curve, and reduce enterprise threats.
Takeaways:
? The breach onslaught demonstrates that existing security solutions are incapable of defending current threats
? Enterprises need to begin looking at security from an activity perspective rather than an artifact perspective
? IAM provides activity insight, and therefore threat awareness, no other platform can equal
11:35 am - 12:00 pm
Online retailers are exerting serious pressure on those with bricks and mortar stores and as a result many ?traditional? retailers are heavily investing in their own online retail channels. Operating in a dual channel mode however reduces the impact and value of these initiatives as studies show that where on-line and on-premise retailing is tightly integrated, through offerings such as ?Buy Online, Pickup in Store? see as much as a 4% sales uplift. To be able to provide this tight integration however retailers must ensure that they can provide real time comprehensive inventory updates, a consistent experience across both channels.
Takeaways:
Like death and taxes, IT outages are an inevitability whether as the result of power loss, telecommunications outage, or any one of a myriad other potential technical and non-technical issues. In this environment, the savvy CIO knows that what matters most is preparation â?" being ready for that next outage with an IT infrastructure that is both resilient and flexible and Disaster Recovery procedures that allow for efficient and effective recovery, balancing Recovery Time and Recovery Point objectives with appropriate cost. Disasters happen but with proper planning they don't have to be disastrous to your business.
Takeaways:
12:05 pm - 12:30 pm
Organizational complexity is the single most significant impediment that enterprises are dealing with today; it underlies every business problem enterprises faces and undermines every effort to address them. Organizational complexity is grounded in cumbersome processes, but those poor processes exist only because enterprise applications themselves, including those that are customer facing, as well as those that are not, are complex and unwieldy. To address cultural complexity then, enterprises must eliminate the complexity in their application suite by either building new, buying new, or more efficiently simplifying what they already have. Only by simplification can enterprises eliminate complexity in an efficient and effective way and position themselves for success.
Takeaways:
12:35 pm - 1:20 pm
1:25 pm - 1:50 pm
While ?social selling? is predicted to boom, spiking from $3B to $5B is total revenue over the next couple of years, it will continue to represent just a tiny portion of the retail market as a whole. The biggest impact social has on retail is not conversion, but exposure as its real value comes from informing and influencing, so called ?top of funnel? retail activities. As such, while social may not have a significant impact on top line performance for an individual retailer, its potential bottom line impact, by creating and enhancing brand and product awareness can be massive. As such, retailers that have not already done so need to begin investing in a social management capability, leveraging the available social media channels as an interactive extension of its traditional marketing and advertising capabilities.
Takeaways:
Cloud has changed the way we build back-end systems, mobility has changed the way we build the front end too, and now the combination of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) is going to change the way we build networks. By allowing for the separation of control plane and data plane while simultaneously migrating both of those pieces to inexpensive commodity hardware we allow for the creation of more redundant, more dynamic, more efficient, and far less costly networks, eliminating a major bottle-neck to IT and service innovation. CIOs must begin investigating and implementing these technologies now to ensure they are on the leading edge of service delivery.
Takeaways:
1:55 pm - 2:20 pm
Increasingly over the last several years the term ?Big Data? has become prevalent, to the point that it is invariably all anyone thinks of when data is mentioned at all. Often what we think of when we use the term ?Big Data? is actually unstructured data â?" all the new data forms that enterprises have never collected before and are being overwhelmed by the possibilities of. But big/unstructured data is by no means the only data enterprises have and core structured or ?small? data is often still the most relevant and valuable data an enterprise owns. As we collectively push forward into a more analytics-centric and therefore data-centric world what we need is a considered all-data strategy, one that incorporates big data, small data, master data, and meta data.
Takeaways:
2:25 pm - 2:50 pm
The allure of the Cloud is three-fold: the widely seen benefits are reduced cost, increased flexibility, and enhanced time to market. As a result, business are rushing to the Cloud in ever increasing droves. In many cases, however, the rush is omitting the IT department until it is too late, and the specter of incompatible data and communications standards, of an inability to integrate with existing on-premise systems hangs over these deployments. To combat these issues, IT leaders need to recognize the value provided by the Cloud and develop a brokerage model whereby IT can direct business peers to the right Cloud delivered service.
Takeaways:
Application integration is a challenging task no matter what the platform being used. Finding a way to have various enterprise applications communicate and work together cleanly and efficiently requires dedication and focus. Mobile apps stand on the precipices of disrupting everything that enterprises have done so far to manage application integration by throwing new platforms, new communication methodologies, new coding languages and new APIs into the mix. As mobile apps increasingly become the primary enterprise apps as opposed to simplified extensions of existing ones, CIOs and IT departments will need to look at application integration with fresh eyes to ensure that both utmost performance and rock solid operability continues to be offered across the entire integrated application suite.
Takeaways:
2:55 pm - 3:20 pm
It's no secret that Big Data is a big deal, but just how big is it? Some estimates show that while we have a massive 2 Zettabytes under collective corporate management, that this represents one ten thousandth of a percent of the data that has been created. Fortunately, those other ?nexus? technologies are providing the opportunity to make use of these untapped data resources â?" mobile is providing a ubiquitous input channel, cloud a dynamically scalable processing capability, and social the community involvement to process and find value. Leveraged well Big Data can solve a wealth of corporate challenges, ranging from improving efficiency, through mitigating risk, to actually growing bottom line revenue.
Takeaways:
One of the key areas for early IoT projects is in the area of industrial automation, as an extension of existing, older M2M type technologies. In many cases these older industrial automation initiatives used proprietary communications protocols and dedicated sensors that interfaced with controllers that could manage communications between IT and OT platforms. Fast forward to an IoT world however and these sensors and controllers will need to natively speak IP, natively integrate to back-end enterprise systems beyond just simple controllers, systems such as ERP, BI and other core platforms. Navigating the complexity of process, data, security, and functionality implications has the potential to be a minefield for the unwitting IT executive that goes in without eyes wide open.
Takeaways:
3:25 pm - 3:35 pm
4:10 pm - 4:35 pm
To drive greater focus and flexibility in retail capability, retailers are investing heavily in customer data capture and customer data analytics capabilities, whether from traditional loyalty programs, online data capture, or in-store mobile tracking. As more and more personable data is collected or created however, the specter of customer privacy issues begin to loom larger and larger. Enterprises need to take a long hard look at the information they are capturing and the manner in which it is being used to determine whether the potential value outweighs the potential risk, and whether the incentive offer to the customer is sufficient to overcome any reticence on their part.
Takeaways:
Executives are currently facing a difficult challenge in terms of personnel management because they are dealing with three very different generational groups of workers â?" Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials. These three groups all have very different outlooks on the world and on work, and all have very different work styles and capabilities. These differences lead to lack of understanding and conflict in a lot of cases, conflict that leaders must learn how to overcome. Smart leaders know that they need to leverage the differences between generations rather than expecting, and trying to force, everyone to be the same, and that building an integrated workforce, with complimentary skills and abilities, is the key to long-term workforce stability.
Takeaways:
4:40 pm - 5:20 pm
The role of the modern CIO is more complex than it has ever been before, not just because the technology landscape has become more complex, but also because increasingly the CIO has had to become a business-focused executive, not just a technologist. Long have we talked about the CIO ?getting a seat at the table? but modern businesses are now demanding that their technology impresario join them and leverage his deep and rich technical acumen to allow the organization as a whole to better position itself for market-place success. To be successful, CIOs need to invest in themselves, in their personnel, and in the right technologies to allow them to position the IT department to proactively address business needs as an innovator and driver, rather than order-taker and enabler.
Takeaways:
5:20 pm - 5:30 pm
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm