Links to the presentations are included below
Chris Armstrong
Mr. Chris Armstrong, President of Armstrong Process Group, Inc., is an internationally recognized thought leader in business and enterprise architecture, formal modeling, process improvement, systems and software engineering, requirements management, and agile development. Mr. Armstrong represents APG at The Open Group, the Object Management Group, and the Business Architecture Guild. Mr. Armstrong is leading the UML Profile for BIZBOK project, a co-chair of the TOGAF Certification Standing Committee (CSC) and EA Capability Improvement project, and is contributing to the next version of TOGAF, ArchiMate, and IT4IT. Mr. Armstrong is certified in TOGAF, ArchiMate, IT4IT, Open FAIR, UML, SysML, and is a Certified Business Architect (CBA).
Click here to see slides: Rationalizing Business Strategies. Continual changes in market forces and disruptive technologies require organizations that are migrating to digital business platforms to deftly navigate how to respond to those changes. In particular, how do those changes impact their business strategies, and complementarily, how they should consider changing their business strategies to respond to those changes. As organizations seek to further digitize their service offerings, they should also consider digitizing all the information required to understand how to best maneuver a continually changing landscape. Rationalizing and digitizing strategic planning content is a critical architecture service required for any organization doing business in the 21st century.
Charles Betz
Charles Betz is a principal analyst with Forrester Research serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals covering enterprise service management and digital operational excellence. Charlie’s experience includes stints as architect and analyst at AT&T, Wells Fargo, Enterprise Management Associates, Best Buy, Target, and Accenture. Charlie has served as an ITIL reviewer, COBIT author, and founding member of the Open Group’s IT4IT Forum. He has published two books: Architecture and Patterns for IT (2 editions), a reference architecture for IT operating models, and Digital Delivery: Concepts and Practices, a survey text for information systems students, incorporating Agile, DevOps, and Lean IT concepts..
Click here to see slides: Towards a Digital Professional Body of Knowledge. What skills does the contemporary digital professional need to succeed in the 21st century economy? We are at a turning point in our industry understandings of IT and digital management. Project management and process management are under pressure from the Agile movement. Disciplines such as data management and enterprise architecture are in question. How can we preserve what’s good about our current practices while responding to new trends such as DevOps?
Come and hear about the Digital Professional Body of Knowledge, a new holistic framework for digital delivery, based on the journey of scaling from a startup to the enterprise.
Tom DeSot
Tom DeSot is the Chief Information Officer of Digital Defense, Inc. (DDI). He is charged with developing and maintaining relationships with influential industry and market regulators, identifying key integration and service partnerships and serving as the prime regulatory compliance resource for external and internal contacts. He also serves as the company’s internal auditor on security-related matters.
DeSot holds a bachelor’s degree in applied arts and sciences from Texas State University and is a master’s candidate in information assurance at Southern New Hampshire University. He is heavily involved in San Antonio’s information security community and has served on the board of directors for the Alamo Chapter of Information Systems Audit and Control Association and was a founding board member of the Alamo Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association. He is also a former Supervisory/Audit Committee Chairman for a mid-tier financial institution and now serves on their Board of Directors as the chairman of their Governance Committee. DeSot also serves on an information security curriculum advisory panel for Texas A&M University, San Antonio and is a member of the North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce IT Committee.
Click here to see slides: Cyber Risk Management: Tools & Tactics. Organizations continue to be a growing target for cyber criminals looking to gain access to intellectual property, trade secrets, and other business capital. As attacks continue to increase, firms are expected to evolve their processes and technologies based on their level of risk.
Tom DeSot – EVP & Chief Information Officer at Digital Defense, Inc. peels back the onion on a layered concept for managing cyber risk through a methodical approach to information gathering, prioritization, and remediation during this presentation.
• State of security and real world scenarios witnessed by industry experts.
• Insight into how to truly understand your organizations security posture.
• Best practices for gaining executive support for security initiatives.
• Social engineering war stories and how to implement effective security awareness training.
• An insider’s look at tools and technology to help mitigate risks.
William (Bill) Estrem
Bill is President of Metaplexity Associates, Inc. a training and consulting firm that focuses on Enterprise Architecture. He has worked with The Open Group on the development of the TOGAF standard since 1995. He was the chairman of the Architecture forum in 2005. He currently serves as chairman of the Architecture forum’s Certification Standing Committee. He was the chairman of the Computers and Automated Systems Association at the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He was the Program Manager for the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences “Enhanced Product Realization Testbed”, a collaborative engineering research initiative focused on Internet-based agile product development techniques. Bill Estrem is an experienced educator. He has presented at many conferences and seminars around the world.
Click here to see slides: Architecting for Agility. Being “agile” is a desirable characteristic for many organizations. The need to be agile exists at several levels and across multiple organization functions. However, one group’s “agile” can be detrimental to another group’s detriment — interfering or delaying their efforts.
This presentation will examine how frameworks and methods such as Agile Development, Enterprise Architecture, Lean Enterprise, and DevOps can be adapted to work in concert to create maximize value for the organization and its customers. How can these frameworks be harmonized to achieve a fine balance between innovation and sound governance to create a truly agile enterprise?
Mike Frost
After 12 years at IBM, Mike joined Target’s point-of-sale team supporting Target Canada in January 2013. In 2014, Mike accepted the role of Security Engineer for Target’s implementation of EMV “chip-and-PIN” payments. In that role, Mike demonstrated a new, PCI-compliant crypto scheme protecting Target’s new payments architecture, enabling Target to begin accepting EMV card transactions ahead of the October 2015 deadline. Now as Director of Enterprise Security Architecture, Mike leads a team of security architects who design and prove “easy button” security solutions to minimize the friction of operating IT securely.
Click here to see slides: “Easy Button Security: Target Security’s Journey from Reactive Design to Prescient Innovation” Complaints about Security’s late involvement in a development cycle are as common as Minnesotans complaining about the weather. In Target’s push to DevOps, new tools, frameworks, and APIs are discarded as quickly as they are adopted, and design happens continuously, not in a preliminary phase. This puts secure architecture further and further behind development. Target’s security architects stopped trying to beat developers, and instead joined in their agile revolution. By aiming to reduce developer friction, we simultaneously solve tactical problems and uncover opportunities for future security capabilities that promise to make the secure solution the easy path.
David Lounsbury
David is Chief Technical Officer for The Open Group. As CTO he ensures that The Open Group’s people and IT resources are effectively used to implement the organization’s strategy and mission, including The Open Group’s proven processes for collaboration and certification both within the organization and in support of third-party consortia.
David’s previous executive assignments at The Open Group and the Open Software Foundation (OSF) include VP Advanced Research and Innovation which fostered open systems technology through collaborative funding and development, including LDAP, ActiveX Core Technology, DCE 1.2, CDE-Next, and Complex Text Layout.
David holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and is holder of three U.S. patents.
Click here to see slides: The Architecture of Abundance. Progress of microprocessors, storage and networking technology has continuously driven down the fundamental cost of computing, and new business models like Cloud have given everyone on-demand access to these inexpensive computing resources. The availability of these resources has driven two separate but related trends: Business are offering products that are “Digital” – digitally delivered, or digitally mediating customer access to physical products. In parallel with this trend, IT functions are applying computing power to automate and manage the creation of digital products to radically shorten digital product delivery and iteration times with Agile and Devops. IT management is adopting new operating models to connect business demand to digital delivery. What does this mean for the practice of Enterprise Architecture? What is the role of EA in this world, and are changes in approach needed? Are new roles and skills needed for professionals who work in this digital world? This presentation will give a brief overview of the forces motivating digital transformation, and what skills and frameworks are needed to operate effectively in this new digital world.
Dan McCreary
NoSQL database architectures and Artificial Intelligence. He’s worked at Bell Labs and Steve Jobs’s NeXT Computer as well as founding his own consulting firm of over 75 people. He is co-founder of the “NoSQL Now!” conference and is a co-author of the book “Making Sense of NoSQL” by Manning Publications. Dan was also a Principal Consultant for MarkLogic for 2.5 years. Dan is currently an independent consultant with a focus on AI and natural language query front-ends to Data Hubs.
Click here to see slides: Data Lakes, Data Hubs and A.I. Many organizations are trying to make the transition from older RDBMS-centric systems to systems that naturally support the tasks around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). This session will explore the requirements of AI and ML and the infrastructure required for building large and consistent training sets to support deep learning algorithms. We will include an overview of how both Data Lakes and Data Hubs are used in these tasks and how organizations can begin to define metrics agile data normalization. We then review the skills and training needed to achieve these goals.
Andrew Ripka is a Spring Framework and Cloud Foundry SME in the Field Platform Architecture organization at Pivotal. He has worked for 15 years in application development and application architecture. He currently works to help customers drive greater business value by embracing the new paradigm of cloud native application architectures leveraging microservices, and employing continuous delivery and DevOps techniques using the Spring Framework on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform. Andrew is a frequent speaker at Cloud Foundry User groups and helps organize the Twin Cities Cloud Foundry Meetup.
Click here to see slides: Structure and opinions – Software Deployment with Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is sometimes referred to as a “structured” platform or an “opinionated” platform. In this talk we will do a quick intro to PaaS and Cloud Foundry, and the meanings of structured and opinionated platforms. We’ll then explore the structure of Cloud Foundry that allows you to utilize pre-built opinions, or express your own. The discussion will include specific examples illustrating using the provided structure to express opinions outside the defaults provided by Cloud Foundry.
Joe Roushar
Joe Roushar is an enterprise business systems and information architect with experience in information and systems and data governance, architecting knowledge frameworks and automating knowledge tasks. With graduate level education in Natural Language Processing at Tokyo Institute of Technology and in artificial intelligence at the University of Minnesota, Joe has spent the last few decades working in health insurance and financial services, high-tech, manufacturing, retail and government to improve outcomes through traditional architectures, hosted and XaaS strategies, advanced, model-based technologies, big data, AI and content convergence. Currently a business and data architect at QlikTech.
Click here to see slides: Business Value from AI and ML with Less Pain. Implementing Watson, Einstein, TensorFlow, Azure ML, Amazon Chatbots, Swarm Intelligence, Intelligent Security and Countermeasures makes for a complex array of choices. In this presentation I will talk about the “Hype Cycle” or Business Value cycle for which technologies are mature enough for commoditization vs. exciting but not yet ready for any but the most well-funded adventurers. I will focus on my areas of deepest expertise, ML, Semantic Search, Enterprise Information Management and self-service analytics, and show how smart Bots in combination with EIM tools can dramatically reduce human analysis needed to get to deep insights and make better business decisions.
Joseph Solinsky
Mr. Solinsky has been an architect, engineer, technical director and sales consultant in the identity and access management space for 15 years, at major software vendors and start-ups. He has worked in most market segments and has built strategies, technologies and teams to address enterprise paradigm shifts, regulatory audits in various sectors, and remediation after data breaches. Mr. Solinsky has spoken at the Twin Cities Oracle User Group and regularly presents to C-level executives as well as engineers in sales meetings and at trade shows. He has developed and delivered Identity and Access Management training classes both internally to the entire security sales community at Oracle and to select Oracle partners.
Click here to see slides: Identity Hunting: Access and Governance in a Decentralized Enterprise. Today’s IT infrastructure presents novel challenges to maintaining continuity across decades of innovation, from the mainframe years up to contemporary, external Software as a Service platforms. This presentation will explore interfacing technologies and processes to govern and interconnect heterogeneous user stores and trust external identities. Different integration strategies will be compared and supporting technologies will be reviewed, based off successful deployments.
David Williams
Mr. Williams has extensive experience in innovation spanning emerging technology and organizational development. He was a Global Strategy Advisor with Microsoft Corporation working with corporations and start-ups on their innovation strategies and development of new business models. Recently, he spent two years at the University of Minnesota studying the development of innovation ecosystems and working with corporate advisory boards developing innovation practices. Currently he is Chief Innovation and Strategy officer at Cheval Partners, a management-consulting firm, actively working with corporations on developing innovation practices and economic development regional cluster development initiatives.
Topic: Top Challenges for Technology Leaders in an Innovation Economy. Building the next generation decision support for real time Enterprise State Management. David Williams delivers a compelling presentation on how the nature of global competition is changing. The presentation will identify key global and regional trends impacting business today. He will explore the critical and strategic new capabilities and roles organizations need to compete in new ways. Specifically he will discuss how CIOs, CTOs as well as technical and business architects can increase their strategic contribution.
Daniel Yarmoluk
Dan Yarmoluk is the business and market development lead for ATEK’s IoT products which include TankScan and AssetScan. Dan has been involved in analytics, embedded design and components of mobile products for over a decade with a focus on creating and driving IIoT automation, condition monitoring and predictive maintenance programs. Industries served include: oil and gas, refining, chemical, precision agriculture, food, pulp and paper, mining, transportation, filtration, field services and distribution. He publishes frequently and recently lunched “All Things Data” podcast with The University of St. Thomas and Dr. Manjeet Rege. He has an MBA and a Master’s of Data Science.
Click here to see slides: Data Driven strategy for business outcomes.
We hear that data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation are driving new business models and opportunities, yet how do we participate in this new reality? There is a need to rethink roles and responsibilities. The IT/OT human capital must converge to bring more business acumen to information technology roles and more technical aptitude to operational technology roles. We must combine subject matter expertise, data science and business models to productionize data insight and integrate them into workflow. Vertical artificial intelligence must provide consumable technology solutions and outcome-based results.
Tom Goodell
Tom Goodell is President and founder of Linden Leadership, which he established in 1987. Tom provides executive, management and team coaching; leadership training; and culture-building services in a wide variety of organizations, including entrepreneurial businesses, large corporations, government, education, and not-for-profit institutions. Tom’s areas of expertise are in establishing organizational cultures of high performance. His approach to culture transformation integrates powerful coaching methodologies, systems theory, emotional intelligence, practices of high-performance communication, and experiential learning. Tom received his CPPM certification in Ontological Coaching from The Newfield Network, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado. He studied somatic coaching at the Strozzi Institute in California. In partnership with Kate Rubin, President of the Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA), he co-designed and co-facilitated the MHTA ACE Leadership Program, providing leadership development training to hundreds of leaders in Minnesota companies of all sizes. Tom is currently writing a book titled Complexity Without Chaos: How Businesses Can Thrive in a Hyper-Connected World.
Click here to see slides: Digital Transformation: Managing the Human Factor. Human systems are the reason every technological system exists. Human systems are inherently complex, and more often than not, human systems are the ones that create chaos. When human systems are managed well, people get to the heart of issues quickly, communicate clearly what is important to them, and collaborate effectively. Managing the complexity and avoiding the chaos that can arise from human systems requires specific skills that go beyond analysis and logic. In this session we will explore what those skills are and how to use them.
Susan Rohde
Susan Rohde is a consultant focusing on guiding large organizations on how to tackle complex problems with an acute focus on how large scale Agile development intersects with architecture and software design. Ms Rohde has over 12 years of experience leading large custom application development organizations utilizing Agile methodologies and five years of public and private cloud implementation experience. Prior to that, she founded a consulting organization focused exclusively on architecture. Most recently, Ms. Rohde focused on leading the State of Minnesota Driver and Vehicle modernization program, a $93 million effort utilizing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodologies. When Ms. Rohde isn’t leading organizations that are building large applications or migrating to the cloud, she is an active bicyclist and gardener.
Click here to see slides: Agile Design and DevOps – A Successful and Cautionary Tale. Agile is tackling bigger and more complex problem every day. Those problems require Agile Architecture and Agile architects. This session provides a real life example of how one organization using Scaled Agile (SAFe) tackled the tension between big “A” architecture and a large Agile development effort. It was a compelling journey from a waterfall approach to an Agile destination for both people and process.
Marina Kerbel
Marina was fortunate to work in many roles throughout her career – from programmer and DBA to leading various architecture teams. She has a Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. Her first job after graduation was in a military organization in Moscow, Russia designing aircraft engines – an experience that ignited her love for solving complex problems and set the stage for future positions. She is currently an independent consultant focusing on Data and Analytics Architecture.
Click here to see slides: Data and Analytics Architecture – Are you Keeping Up? Data and analytics are core to digital transformation. To support business changes, companies are rapidly adopting new capabilities in Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Cloud. The data domain goes through an unprecedented rate of change and is becoming more and more diverse, complex and intertwined with other domains. Architects need to leverage and incorporate new data capabilities, but it is challenging to keep up with changes. Come to this session to discuss what is new in the data domain, what skills are in high demand and how to keep these skills current.
Randy Dufault
Randy is the Director of Solution Development for Genus Technologies, a Midwestern consultancy dealing primarily with enterprise content management systems, and with integration of those systems to business processes and line of business software. His experience with content management dates back 25 years when he was a member of the team who, under contract to IBM, developed the prototype for a software system that ultimately became IBM’s Content Manager for iSeries. Over that tenure, he has developed and integrated a number of advanced technologies including document creation, character recognition, records management, and workflow management, in addition to the key technology of managing unstructured information.
Click here to see slides: Forward-Thinking Content Management Architectures. While there is some argument as to whether 80% or 85% of all information is unstructured, there is absolutely no argument that only a small fraction of the data making a business run is stored in rows and columns. Proper management of that unstructured information (content) is an absolute necessity and the problem only gets worse with the addition of large object technologies like video. This session explores practical enterprise architectural considerations for systems that properly manage all the volume, while still ensuring easy access to the actionable information the objects contain.