Digital disruption — major changes, paradigm shifts and new products that dramatically alter how markets behave — is perhaps the hot topic in business technology circles. And like most business concepts, it holds out the promise of rich rewards to those who get it, and dire consequences for those who ignore it. Among the 373 million responses a Google search of the term currently yields is a line on a Forrester Research listing that promises you can "Get closer to customers and disrupt the usual way of doing business."

Tuesday's Chief Information/Technology Officer Roundtable at IASA 2014 promises to show just what Digital Disruption can (and can't) do for an organization. And those insights will come via a disruption to the traditional roundtable format, with a single-theme, high-energy session.

The Chief Information/Technology Officer Committee begins planning the roundtable in the fall, trying to predict what will be important to the organization's CTO and CIO members nine months later. This year Committee Co-Chair Bryan Fowler, CIO of Oregon Mutual Insurance, heard a talk on Digital Disruption and suggested it as the theme because it affects every organization, even one as heavily regulated as insurance. It is too easy for CIOs and CTOs to focus on things that are immediate and local to them, while failing to notice something drastically new in the marketplace, he explained. The committee quickly embraced it.

"We felt Digital Disruption is a timely topic. Everybody in our field of technology is faced with having to deal with this in a number of different ways," says Committee Co-Chair Mary Ellen Freyermuth, director of IT at Catholic Mutual Group in Omaha.

Freyermuth explains that insurers have to be able to accommodate Digital Disruption internally, externally and with customers. The speakers will look at it "from a variety of different angles, including recruiting, retention and pricing, because it is affecting everything we do," she says.

The rountable's keynote speaker is Dr. Dom Sagolla, who was part of the team that developed Twitter and is author of "140 Characters," a stylebook of forms and characters to use in tweeting.

Dr. Sagolla will help set the tone for the day by exploring the transformative effects that Twitter has had on business and insurance, said Freyermuth. He'll also discuss how to quickly prop up a transformative idea within an enterprise, adds Fowler.

Twitter has helped revolutionize communications by creating tweets, 140-character messages that consist of a complex combination of abbreviations, special characters, hashtags and shortened links, so it is considered one of the major digital disrupters of our age.

To energize and engage the audience, the next six talks will be brief and pointed, using stories and examples to illustrate a concept but no questions or PowerPoint bulleted slides. These topics and speakers fall into three categories:

1. Digital disruption within the organization: "Leading the Fastest Moving Profession in a Slow Moving Industry," by Doug Moore, chief technology officer, ISCS, Inc.; "Insurance IT Recruiting and Retention: Finding and Retaining Talent," by Laura Ford of Ernst & Young.

2. Digital disruption outside the organization: "Differentiating Beyond Price" by John Johansen, partner at Agile Technologies LLC; Product Ideation and Development" by Scott Mackey, Vice President, Underwriting, at Columbia Insurance Group. "

3. Digital disruption for your customers: "The Internet of Everything" by Mike Collins, CIO Travelers Insurance; "Consumer Integrated Transactions," speaker TBD.

The roundtable will conclude with a wrap-up session where attendees can ask questions of the speakers and make comments. Miguel Edwards, director, Ivantage Technology at Allstate, and Sal Abano, executive vice president at MajescoMastek, will lead what promises to be a most informative, and disruptive, discussion.

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