This forum is intended for the finance leads for IT within your organization.  It will be a special joint meeting of the IT Financial Managers Organization and the IMF’s IT Finance Community of Practice.

Cultural Differences in Offshore Outsourcing:  Making It Work
Cultural differences are among the key challenges in offshore outsourcing, understanding how to manage the relationships is critical to your success.   Lack of trust, inadequate communication, different time zones, difference in work ethics and values are only a few examples of the problems that can arise. Our speaker, David Bass Director of Application Development at PCSU Financial Services setup and ran Time Inc.’s offshore initiatives and traveled frequently to their offshore locations.  He relocated twice to Chennai where he lived in India for a total of five years. David will discuss how organizations should address differences to make for a productive ongoing relationship.
Presented by:  David Bass, Director Systems and Applications Development, PSCU Financial Services
**Joint Session with IMF Senior Executive Forum attendees

What Makes USAA the Best Place to Work in IT
Recently named as the best place to work in IT by ComputerWorld – the technology leading news source, Brian Coulter, Vice President of eCommerce and Hosting Services, will discuss what USAA has done to gain this prestigious honor.  He will discuss such things as USAA’s focus on innovation, how each employee has the opportunity to drive change and seamlessly change roles for career advancement, as well as USAA’s unique approach to recruitment.
Presented by:  Brian Coulter, VP of eCommerce and Hosting Services, USAA
**Joint Session with IMF Senior Executive Forum attendee

Best Practices in Enterprise Portfolio Management
Michael Bender, Director of IT Vendor Management Services at CISCO, will discuss his thoughts on how CISO and other large companies fund and govern their strategic cross functional initiatives (e.g., large scale ERP engagements).
Michael Bender, Director of IT Vendor Management Services, CISCO
 

A Simple Approach to Measuring Application Development
Previous discussions about application development benchmarking at IMF events have tended to devolve into contentious debates about the merits or shortcomings of function point analysis. After seeing the same debate go nowhere time and again, IMF’s benchmarking group took a step back and asked themselves, “Is there a comparable and effective way to compare application development and maintenance that is simple enough for any organization?” Caleb Masland, who heads IMF’s benchmarking practice, will discuss the method that we’ve been using with our benchmarking clients in recent months and how it’s yielded actionable results without the headaches (and costs) associated with a detailed function point study. Participants will have the opportunity to provide feedback on the methodology and understand how it might be used in their own environments. Caleb Masland, Managing Director of Information Exchange, The Information Management Forum

Cost Improvement Strategies
Given the ongoing recession and poor top line revenue growth environment, companies are undergoing structural changes to address a slower or no growth environment.   This discussion will address some of those changes and how they are being implemented. Phil and Jeanne will open the discussion with their recent initiatives through reorganizations to address both efficiency (cost savings) as well as increased effectiveness (enhanced service delivery) opening up opportunities to implement variable staffing structures, better demand management, better metrics and better resource allocation. This will be an open round table discussion.
Jeanne Carbone, First Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, New York Life
Phil Folz, Senior Vice President and IT Controller, Chubb

Facilitated discussion
This is open time to discuss your issues and initiatives with the group. Open discussions are guided by the participants for their deeper understanding of other’s experiences on similar challenges. 

Location Information