Tee it up on the 27-hole Arnold Palmer signature golf course at the Starr Pass Tucson Golf Club.  This is a true desert course, and natural elements are used as hazards, while showcasing majestic vistas of the Catalina Mountains.  Along with the beauty of the mountain ranges in the background,  this course also offers a double-loaded driving range, rejuvenating 20,000 square foot clubhouse and top-quality golf shop.

Join the CIO Executive Council on Sunday morning, March 2, at an exclusive, luxury estate in the heart of the Catalina Foothills where dignitaries from all of the world have been guests. Our three hour retreat will be a wonderful setting for you to join others in an informal networking setting as we share experiences, strategies and best practices to improve diversity & inclusion efforts at our respective organizations.

The retreat cost is $95.00 and includes shuttle transportation, which leaves the JW Marriott starting at 8:00am.  Please click here to pre-register for the event.

The CIO Executive Council welcomes all attendees to network with the Council’s leadership team and engage with CIO members about Council’s newest programs and resources. Benchmark your IT communication efforts, find out how to connect with and influence tech entrepreneur and start-ups, and check out the leadership and team development programs you can bring to your organizations.

Welcome to the Premier 100 IT Leadership Conference and to Tucson, AZ! We invite you to immerse yourself in Tucson’s heritage, which centers around a unique blend of Native American, Mexican and Western/Ranching cultures. We’ll kick it off tonight by enjoying sounds, sights and tastes found south of the border. As the mariachi music plays, sample creamy guacamole dip and shredded beef tacos plus try your hand at making your own salsa. A specialty tequila-infused cocktail awaits you as you meet your colleagues, and learn more about one of the oldest cities in the U.S.

Every year on April 15, Boston celebrates Patriots Day with the running of the Boston Marathon. In 2013, it was also the day the city went into lockdown and the IT team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center became responsible for guarding the privacy of dozens of bombing victims as well as the suspected bomber. Beth Israel's CIO, John Halamka, tells the gripping story and poses this question; how do you invent a security plan that makes responding to the worst possible disaster come off like business as usual?

Enjoy lunch with your peers and as you reflect on the morning's sessions.

Council members break out for their own in-depth workshop on how to leverage the Council’s new model for digital business innovation and transformation.

This session is open only to members of the CIO Executive Council and Pathways.

The IT department builds things that scale and last, while marketing wants the next big thing - and needed it yesterday. How can heads of technology work effectively with marketing? At Kelloggs we have a close partnership between marketing and IT in a way that directly leads to massive engagement and revenue increases. As digital marketing becomes ascendant, the relationship between marketing and IT departments is becoming more dependent. To strategize, execute, analyze, and apply the latest findings, Kelloggs is collaborating closely to draw the right insights to deliver the right message to the right consumer at the right time.

Learn how CIO Venki Rao and his team hit the bull’s eye on GE Digital Energy CEO’s growth priority with its new Smart Grid as a Service product line. The SaaS offering became an instant success with more than 20 customers signing up in the first year and  another 30+ ready to embrace it in its second year. GE's Digital Energy business views its Smart Grid As A Service offering – which delivered $80 million in revenue from scratch --  as an affordable competitive differentiator, which also will further enhance the company’s relationships with smaller customers.

In 2012, Capital One purchased ING Direct and HSBC’s U.S. card business, which were two of the biggest deals in banking that year, with a total value of $12 billion.  During the 15- month transition, Capital One’s IT team headed my Mike Wisler executed the smooth transition of around 25 million customer accounts while ensuring the integrity of both companies’ ability to operate without disruption.  In this session, you’ll learn how IT delivered on the corporate business imperative of “nailing the integrations” so that Capital One could leverage its one opportunity to make a great first impression and provide the best possible experience for millions of newly acquired customers.

This session will illustrate the strategies and technologies leading organizations are using to make self-service BI & analytics available to analysts, management, operational employees, partners, and customers. The presentation will use examples from leading banking, manufacturing, healthcare and government organizations that integrate dashboards and reporting with predictive analytics, social media, geographic intelligence, mobile and more. This discussion will also address new requirements in data management and the relationship between business and IT.

The most successful organizations are beating the competition and leading their industries with innovative business applications. This session will feature real-world examples of IT executives who reinvented their IT organizations and are now continuously delivering value to their business. Attendees will learn how IT teams can:
•  Rapidly deliver applications without disrupting current processes and infrastructure
•  Develop cross-platform mobile apps with existing resources
•  Continuously respond to business needs and enable innovation

Lee Congdon, Red Hat CIO, will discuss crucial issues faced by IT organizations and how they can use emerging cloud solutions to enable their enterprise, commence the journey to next generation IT, and prepare for the future.

What is your game plan? Invest for growth and efficiency? Make business process improvements? Or build an infrastructure for mobility and cloud? Whatever your plan, you have to innovate quickly, more quickly than imagined just a couple of years ago. The good news is that if you get it right, your business will have new connections. Connections that are more valuable. Connections that will help you achieve better business outcomes. It is a world of possibilities where people, process, data, and things—virtually everything—converge online. It is the Internet of Everything. The result? Amazing. In this session, you will hear how Cisco works with our customers to create value from connections every day. You will learn how to capture your share of the amazing and deliver outcomes your business demands.

Join Cynthia Stoddard NetApp Chief Information Officer, Mike Carraway Red Hat Senior Director of IT, Sal Giambrone Tickets.com Senior Vice President of Architecture and Operations, and Matt French ServiceNow Vice President of Strategy as they delve into the specifics of their strategies for driving global IT transformation. These IT leaders will talk about how they standardized and globalized IT in their diverse organizations. They’ll also share their perspectives on using cloud technologies and providers to accelerate transformation, and their thoughts about the expanding role of the CIO as a business innovator and strategy leader. Attend this session to hear directly how some of your peers were able to radically revamp IT’s reputation from the “Department of No” to the “Department of Now.”

Social, mobile, cloud and analytics are all key technology disrupters… for now. But what about two, five, 10 years from now? In this action-packed session, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory CTO Tom Soderstrom gives us a glimpse into what rocket scientists see on the high-tech horizon and demonstrates prototypes of real solutions the venerated space agency has in the works now.  During the special gamification workshop, Tom challenges participants to define the next decade’s key disrupters in their own company or industry and come up with strategies to get ahead of them.

The advent of social networking in the late 2000s turned the advertising and marketing business model upside down, and with it venerable Mad Ave agency Ogilvy & Mather. In 2009, it fell to Chairman and CEO John Seifert to prove that O&M is a brand and a company for the future, not just a great agency of the past. His reinvention agenda includes new products and channels, a new leadership dynamic in his c-suite, and most challenging of all, instilling a new mindset and comfort level in Ogilvy’s front-line employees. John will be joined by his CIO, Premier 100 alumni Honoree Yuri Aguiar, for audience Q&A and a Reinvention Workshop.

The US Intelligence Community has embarked on an initiative to establish a common IT architecture direction for all IC agencies to align to and share common services with 3 principal goals in mind: to better integrate and improve information sharing; to improve enterprise security; and to become more efficient. Hear first-hand about the cultural, technological and leadership challenges involved in creating this architecture, which includes a classified secure private cloud for the IC. CIO Al Tarasiuk was appointed by President Barack Obama as Intelligence Community CIO in 2011. Since then, he has led the implementation of an entirely new business model across the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. In this session, he chats with Computerworld Executive Editor Julia King about the risks and rewards of what many considered an impossible mission.

IT leaders have embraced the cloud as an efficient way to build and deploy new services or refresh existing ones. As a result, business processes are becoming increasingly interwoven among on-premises and multiple cloud environments. In addition, the explosive growth of social media, mobile usage, and data are increasing the number and complexity of integration points. Today integration must be at the forefront of your IT strategy. This session provides practical insight on how to build a comprehensive integration strategy for your cloud-based and traditional applications.  We’ll review results from organizations that have made integration part of a successful application architecture design process, and look at how successful integration creates better insight for the business.

Supporting business innovation and agility, mobility and user self-service are just a few of the challenges IT executives must manage while maintaining security and keeping costs low.  Cloud computing is supposed to solve many of our problems, but it also comes with its own unique set of challenges. How do you manage software, infrastructure, platform- as- a -service, Big Data, and visual analytics in the Cloud as part of an overall IT strategy?  In this session, we will discuss best practices for leading innovation while leveraging the power of the Cloud.  We will discuss lessons learned from organizations that are succeeding and from those that hit roadblocks that have derailed their strategy.

This lively, multi-topic “working lunch” features a select group of Premier 100 Honorees holding small-group discussions on the practical details, ROI and lessons learned from their business transformation projects. Click here to view the list of projects.

**Please note - space will be limited and is available on a first-come/first-serve basis**

Current participants in the Council’s Pathways leadership development program, as well as 2014 Ones to Watch honorees, are invited to join this uniquely engaging master class for practical leadership coaching. In these round-robin, small-group discussions, participants will tap the wisdom of IT’s most respected leaders for career-advancing advice on building business skills, stretching beyond your comfort zone and learning from mistakes. This session is open only to current Pathways program participants and Ones to Watch honorees.

Land O’ Lakes is about more than butter – a lot more. In this session, you’ll hear how the $14 billion agricultural cooperative is leveraging state-of-the-art mobile technology, cloud computing, Big Data and analytics to design and deliver new and innovative software tools to growers to optimize in-field production of corn and soybeans. CIO Mike Macrie will explain the process by which IT transformed itself from a provider of internal services to a provider of revenue-generating software solutions.

A steady increase in online purchases by consumers means residential deliveries now comprise 30% of all DHL Express’ business. The downside of consumer business is it means one or two packages per stop as opposed to the larger volumes DHL delivers to warehouses and stores. Consumers also are more likely to not be home to receive packages. DHL went from 1.5% of “not homes” in 2010 to 4.2% in 2013, racking up $170 million in incremental costs. Enter IT, which working with its business partners in operations, developed and implemented a new pre-delivery process and notification service. CIO Pablo Ciano will explain how the new process contributes to profitable growth, improves customer experience plus reduced home delivery failures by 40% and  cut the number of re-scheduled deliveries by 25%.

Covanta’s Organic Growth Initiative focuses on increasing revenues, reducing costs and managing corporate assets, while simultaneously making it easier for customers to do business with the sustainable waste solutions and renewable energy company.  To achieve these objectives, Covanta IT initiated a global program to integrate, synchronize and leverage multiple technologies and services to deliver breakthrough capabilities that among other things increased customers’ website use by 400% and their credit card payments by 50%. The strategic innovation program required hundreds of system changes involving nearly the entire IT organization.  In this session, CIO Stuart Kippelman takes us behind the scenes of this massive and massively successful IT-enabled business growth initiative.

Your data center ensures your ability to compete, to communicate, and to drive your business forward.  While cloud, virtualization, and big data show incredible promise for delivering business value, their deployment increases data center complexity and data throughput requirements.  With this complexity and need for high availability and performance, the slightest interruption in information flow can mean the difference between profit and loss, a customer gained or lost to competition.
In this session, former Computerworld Publisher John Amato will discuss how to protect your data center investment through implementing a structured connectivity management system.  Attendees will hear proven strategies for cutting OpEx, achieving extreme uptime and performance, eliminating associated risk and downtime.

Competition for talent will make or break digital business success. Rapid technological advancement, the commoditization of IT, big data and globalization are all driving an unprecedented quest for digital expertise.. Strategy , architecture, information security, business analysis and service and contract management are all core competencies today. Our panel of experts describe how IT and business roles are evolving and how and where they’re recruiting the expertise they require to stay competitive.

As social, mobile and big data-driven technologies spread more rapidly across the enterprise, move deeper into business functions and accelerate competition and change, CIOs have become more attractive candidates for executive roles outside of IT. Not just adding shared services or supply chain duties to their title – but actually leaving the CIO job behind to become CEOs, COOs or chiefs of other business functions. In this leadership reinvention panel, a group of former CIOs will speak frankly about how they made the leap. They’ll delve into how they managed their own learning curves and offer candid advice on how IT leaders can broaden their perspective, gain greater executive visibility and break out of their operational comfort zones to become more strategic thinkers.

Join us as we celebrate the Class of 2014 Premier 100 IT Leaders and the Ones to Watch Award recipients at a black-tie dinner featuring a formal roll call of honorees and the presentation of Premier 100 and Ones to Watch awards.

As a courtesy reminder, please note that the Awards Dinner is black tie optional.

Sponsored by VMware

Hey Y’all, be sure to saddle up for an exciting Wild West After-Party. Pull on your boots and learn the newest line dance under the star-filled Arizona skies or grab a cowboy hat, lasso and your colleagues for a novelty picture in the Old West Photo Booth. If your little doggies are hurting, grab a seat, kick back and relax by the fire. Cowboys, cowgirls, and even city slickers won’t want to miss this last hour!