You have to give people a reason to come," says Ernie Pearson, director of the CIO/CTO Roundtable. He believes the key topic for this year's roundtable—a look to the future—will satisfy the insurance IT leaders in attendance.
Pearson, who in his day job serves as IT director, applications development, for SECURA Insurance, believes IASA owes it to the CIOs and CTOs to make the program informative and interactive.
"Last year's ratings by the attendees were pretty good, but they were not quite as good as I would have liked," he says. "We are trying to make this year's roundtable much more interactive. We believeThorntonMay will give a high-energy start to the day and we hope we can the attendees excited about the program so they will come back in future years."
May is a futurist, educator, author, and executive director of the ITLeadershipAcademy. He will open the roundtable with the theme: "Eye on the Ball: Staging an Insurance Technology Revolution."
"Having an IT futurist to get people thinking about things will be valuable," says Pearson. "The guy has an energy level that I can only hope to have some day. He is going to try and get people to think about future challenges for our industry."
Pearson rattled off several of the challenges that insurance IT leaders face including big data, predictive analytics, social media, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and the demographic challenges that insurers face with both customers and employees.
The second session is the first of two parts: "Technology Management of the Future — Infrastructure, People, and Policies." John Johansen, owner of Agile Technologies, will serve as moderator. Panelists include Chris Preston, senior director of EMC Corporation; Chuck Fillizola, vice president and chief strategy officer for CSC; Jane Bracken, vice president of new development for Great American Insurance Co.; and Julia K. Davis, CIO of American Safety Insurance.
Celent CEO Craig Weber moderates part two of the session, "Preparing the Technological Foundation." Speakers at this session include Andy Scurto, president of ISCS; Bruce Winterburn, vice president of industry relations for Vertafore; Piyush Singh, CIO of Great American Insurance Co.; and Bill Pieroni, COO of Marsh, Inc.
The final session of the day is called "Finding Company on the Edge: CIO Open Forum." Deb Smallwood, founder of Strategy Meets Action, will serve as moderator.
Pearson explains that all the sessions are designed to be interactive, but that the final session with Smallwood moderating will be totally interactive, with no panelists to lead the discussion.
"The last session will be Deb Smallwood bouncing around the room trying to get a fire started," says Pearson.
For example, Pearson explains that technology leaders might want to know of a company that has implemented a policy around BYOD.
"What does it look like? What are the challenges?" asks Pearson. "We want this to be much more interactive than in the past. I think we'll succeed in that way. Deb will have some questions and comments. She's been working to make sure we don't have a silent room so we'll be able to get the ball rolling. We'll find out who has been down that road before and how they solved their problem."
Pearson explains the changes to this year's roundtable reflect the real-world needs of the insurance IT industry. A year ago, the featured speaker for the roundtable was an economist and while the speaker's words were well received, Pearson felt the economy was less of a factor on what IT departments needed to know than things like the significant storm season that insurers dealt with in 2011.
As director of the roundtable, Pearson also feels that the IT leaders in attendance would much rather hear about case studies and what their contemporaries have done to solve a problem or install a new system. "Hopefully we'll be able to drill down into how something was actually done," he says. "People will be able to take home thoughts and ideas on how someone solved a particular problem."
One of the criticisms IASA received in the past about the CIO Roundtable was it had not been as interactive as some of the attendees would have liked, according to Pearson.
"I hope this year's event comes across as a major effort to change that," he says. "The only real presentation is fromThorntonMay. Everything else should be interactive."
With earlier roundtables, the moderators were CIOs and Pearson said they sometimes had difficulties in bringing more interaction between the panelists and the attendees.
"In the past we had moderators and their day job was CIO," says Pearson. "We tried to fill our panels out with CIOs this year and tried to get some expert moderators."
The CFO Roundtable was the inaugural event for the IASA Executive Education Series, points out Pearson, but he thinks the technology side is giving the accounting side a run for their money.
"I think the CIO/CTO roundtable is starting to sneak up on [the CFO Roundtable] in terms of attendees," he says. "We could have as many as 120 CIO attendees this year, which would be excellent."
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