Executive Summit

The broad impact of ongoing uncertainty has renewed focus on the geopolitical and economic outlook for 2024 and beyond. The uncertainty of the global market is particularly challenging for CIOs who are now in a unique position within the enterprise to drive forward digital business initiatives. Accelerating forces of globalisation, competition, and a race for sovereignty in technologies like AI must be evaluated and implemented accordingly and in line with business expectations. Join Aidan Hancock, CIO, Johnson Matthey as he shares his journey and insights into crafting a digital strategy that future-proofs the organisation beyond 2023. Specifically, Aidan will cover:

• The importance of creating agility within your global technology environment and how to optimise investments
• Successful collaboration across IT and business teams to pave the way for future reciprocity
• How CIOs can move past immature conversations around ‘cost’ and tackle digital by ‘doing’

The last five years at Legal & General have been among its most successful. Despite a global pandemic, L&G has created a thriving technology community that supports its unique culture. The Board is now more involved with technology than ever before, and there is greater alignment between technology and business divisions. That’s all been delivered without the need for a major organisational change programme.

Mark Hall, Legal & General Group’s CTO (CIO), tells the story of this success. As a Chartered IT and HR professional, Mark is able to share his insights into creating the right environment for technology to succeed. He will discuss the danger of ‘best practice’ models and show how he balances the needs of ‘Group’ with those of the business divisions. He’ll also reflect on the power of influence across the organisation. Mark will share his successes and challenges, as well as the important lessons learned, on his journey to creating a Technology team that adds value. Specifically, Mark will share:

• How to better coordinate your Technology efforts and why hierarchy no longer works
• How to build a collaborative community across devolved technology teams and businesses
• How to engage the Board on Technology

Artificial intelligence has the potential to drive efficiency and technological innovation. Yet taking advantage of this opportunity in the wrong way can have serious security consequences for the organisation. IT and Security leaders need to anticipate and prepare to mitigate potential risks as data is increasingly accessed and analysed in increasingly different ways. For business stakeholders to secure investment, how can CIOs demonstrate the benefits of these technologies? Join this session to learn about:

• How AI plays a role in sophisticated attacks today and how to prepare
• Examples of how to leverage AI to process and analyse large volumes of data quickly...and safely
• How leaders can use AI capabilities to enhance cybersecurity and demonstrate value to the business

As business cycles shorten and the velocity of data increases, CIOs are at the forefront of developing strategies to harness data assets in support of growth strategies. But the highly dynamic, increasingly complex nature of data is creating headwinds that hold organisations back from fully delivering on its impact.

Join this boardroom to discuss:

• Data as a strategic capability to enhance customer experiences and drive growth
• Empowering teams across your organisation with trusted and connected data for real-time engagement and business decision-making
• Collaborating with key stakeholders to design an enterprise-wide data strategy that’s highly responsive to changing business needs

Digital acceleration requires good relationships between CIOs and boards of directors. To deepen these relationships into a business advisory role, CIOs should understand the board’s business priorities and take steps to advance them. But what are the techniques CIOs can use to engage stakeholders, deal with conflicts and build consensus among peers? This Boardroom is an opportunity to share war stories and techniques on effective partnership and alignment. Specifically, you’ll discuss:

• Working with the board to establish digital-friendly budgeting and metrics
• Embracing and enhancing business ownership of technology initiatives
• How to bring your digital strategy to the top of the agenda

**This session is for Next Generation CIO candidates only**

In 2024, the success of the modern enterprise increasingly hinges upon all things digital. This heralds the continued evolution of the CIO role, whose scope has needed to develop to be a representative that can successfully spearhead the digital enterprise. As such, the skills and traits of the prospective CIO have also shifted dramatically – and continue to do so.

The question for any aspiring CIO, then, should be which attributes are currently sought after? – and who better to ask than CIOs themselves.

Join this session to gain insight from Sarah Winmill, CIO Business Functions, Ministry of Defence and David Jones, CIO, AEG on:

• Which qualities are currently in demand from organisations recruiting CIOs?
• What are the key traits organisations look out for while assessing candidates?
• How should you adapt your approach to meet the ever-shifting requirements of a CIO?

Connect with like-minded peers in a one-on-one setting through Evanta’s Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

An interactive session discussing the role CIOs like you can play in communicating risk across the business, and preparing for the next generation of attacks

The security winds are rapidly shifting from "trust but verify" models to ones that assume that every activity is insecure until proven otherwise. In an age of high-profile security attacks and complex business ecosystems, increasingly sophisticated phishing schemes run amok. organisations of all shapes and sizes are urgently seeking new ways to protect their finances, their reputations, and their business operations. With ‘digital’ being integrated in many areas of the value chain for any organisations, a cyber risk is no longer limited to the IT organisation only. 

How can CIOs manage this holistically across the business? Join this session to understand:

•  What the future generation of cyberattacks looks like and how they can exploit common areas of any business’s attack surface
• How state of the art security concepts like zero trust and SASE help to be prepared for this next generation of attacks
• Communicating risk across the organisation to ensure the business is protected

Within the IT function, stress is a given. Between managing stakeholder expectations, implementing new solutions, and navigating governance and company-wide risk assessments, it’s not a surprise that IT professionals — and especially CIOs — are experiencing such high levels of burnout. In this session,  Marcia Goddard (Chief Culture Officer, The Contentment Foundation), will walk you through why and how burnout occurs, signs to watch for, along with tricks and tips to help manage and reduce the potential of it happening to you.

In this session, Marica will discuss:

• How to recognise the signs and symptoms of toxic stress and burnout
• How to remain engaged, energized, and focused during turbulent times
• Methods to reduce stress at work and how to not let the stress overlap into personal lives

 Your unstructured data is incredibly valuable. It’s the product roadmap, financial spreadsheets, customer surveys, and employee records that make your business unique. To get the most leverage out of this data, you need a comprehensive unstructured data strategy – including security & compliance considerations, powering external collaboration, and (especially recently) incorporating artificial intelligence.

Join a group of your peers to discuss how to:

• Identify unstructured data sources and tools in your organisation
• Develop a strategy to secure this data – for both internal and external use
• Leverage artificial intelligence to make your unstructured data even more useful

As the threat surface for cyberattack increases across data centers, edge computing and cloud, ransomware is becoming very difficult to keep at bay. CIOs must have IT and data protection strategies in place to not only be prepared for an attack, but also for a quick recovery — wherever their apps and data live. What strategies and techniques are CIOs using to identify, prioritise and remediate security vulnerabilities across every computing device?

Join this Boardroom to discuss:

• Identifying protection gaps to improve security
• Prioritising key actions/investments to secure their own enterprises
• Integrating data protection with both a cyber-security and a hybrid cloud strategy

**This session is for Next Generation CIO candidates only**

Communication is a critical leadership competency, particularly in remote, distributed work environments. Progressive CIOs use stories to deliver complex technical ideas through simple, persuasive narratives. This session will share best practice on how to seize your moment, distill complex ideas simply and enhance your influence across the organisation.

Join this discussion to hear key takeaways on:

• Understanding what makes a good story, and how to customise depending on the audience
• Managing storytelling campaigns to mitigate uncertainty
• Drive high performance in IT through communication and influence