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WELCOME
Room: Atrium
Welcome to the 5th annual Triad Technology Conference. This year we have renamed the conference from the Triad Developers Conference to the Triad Digital Technology Conference to reflect the increasingly diverse interests of participants. We have gone from a conference focused on software practitioners to one that presents topics that inform of technology and business issues as well as practical technical ones.
Keynote by Andrew Sohn
Room: Atrium
The Insurance industry as we have known it for centuries is going through a dramatic transformation due to new digital technologies. The ways companies productize, deliver and service insurance is changing, as well as the focus of insurance itself. Andrew will highlight some of these exciting digital changes going on in the insurance industry that will drive these businesses forward.
How to use design thinking to disrupt your digital status quo
Room: Auditorium
Figuring out “digital transformation” in your business can be an agonizing feat. The term itself can be confusing at best and meaningless at worst. Yes, digital transformation includes technology and process changes, but savvy digital strategists use design thinking to understand value, capture new frontiers, and reevaluate new ways to operate a business before leveraging technology to power the results.
Eric will demonstrate how the power of design thinking can be applied in unique, low-cost ways to maximize business value for digital strategists.
Are You Cursed? Using research to improve product design by reducing the effects of cognitive bias
Room: 153A&B
Due to the fast-paced nature of Agile software development, advocating for time dedicated to user research can be a challenge. It’s quick and easy to fall back on “assumption-centered design,” especially when working with Subject Matter Experts who are already immensely knowledgeable about your target audience. However, the “curse of knowledge,” a cognitive bias which refers to the blinders that result from expertise, may lead lead to communication breakdowns on both sides. This leaves UX designers with the uneasy sensation of making uninformed decisions, while SMEs wonder why UX is so insistent on validating what is already known. Whether you’re struggling to get research buy-in at your organization, trying to determine the best way to incorporate user research, or are simply trying to convey the value of user research to a client, come chat with us about how lean research can be used as a valuable communication tool and provide value regardless of formal structure or stakeholder buy-in.
Creating Great Product/Digital Roadmaps for Your Agile Teams
Room: 155A&B
Building effective roadmaps is paramount to the success of Agile teams. Agile teams are great at reacting to change, but to be their best, they need to see and believe in the vision for the product. They want to understand the roadmap and why it is important. They also need to feel like they have some control to have a high impact. A good roadmap protects the team from constant one-off requests and other chaos from day-to-day short term thinking.
At the end of this session, you should leave with a better understanding of why your Product/Digital roadmap is so important and how to build and manage your roadmap in an iterative Agile environment.
Let’s spend 50 minutes diving into why a great Product and Digital strategy and roadmap is so important for the success of both the product and the agile teams, and how we can build better Product Roadmaps.
So you want to do Data Science and Machine learning...what now?
Room: 150
AI(Artificial Intelligence) is poised to transform every business industry domain as is now anticipated to be the 4th revolution that has potential to change the way interact, conduct business, offer richer solutions with continuous refinement at scale and depth. Between now and end of 2030, it is estimated to create $13 trillion of GDP growth in business and growth and so enterprises and governments alike are now laying their AI strategy and mission critical statements for future.
Raja will be sharing strategy and structure for: what does it takes to lay AI strategy and build AI products and solutions; what are the tenants for a successful AI project – pilot to production; common pitfalls and recommendations for AI projects; technology landscape – Classical ML to Deep Learning(Neural Networks), etc.
Cultivating Digital & Cognitive Transformation
Room: Auditorium
Organizations need leaders who both understand today’s digital and cognitive forces and who can lead their teams and organizations to adopt new ideas and approaches. Richard Starets moderates a panel of experts to talk about leadership in the digital age. We will explore ways you and your organization can transform and stay relevant amidst today’s important digital and cognitive trends. Bring your questions for this interactive discussion.
Joining Richard on the panel is: Karl Hightower and Laura Dezarn.
Predictive Analytics – Enabling Insights through Standardization
Room: 153A&B
Embedding Predictive Analytics into business processes to drive operational value – specifically on how we are using standardization to enable more timely / persistent analytics to highlight risk matters, non-compliance scenarios and other reporting anomalies that are reflective of risk.
I will connect the dots between the high quality data relevant for productive predictive analytics and the underlying relevant standards and where/when they can make the most significant impact.
Using AI and Machine Learning to Improve the UX
Room: 155A&B
Exploring how AI and machine learning can help proved an even better Online User Experience.
Clean code and the case against unmaintainable code
Room: 150
As delivery speed increases in Agile contexts it is important to remember to write code that is maintainable. Clean code practices and software craftsmanship are of primary importance to ensure the quality of the code does not suffer from the pressure and speed of Agile delivery. We’ll look at some practices and principles to help improve and show some terrible (but funny) examples of “un”-clean code.
Will you be the Disruptor or the Disrupted?
Room: Auditorium
Drawing from his book Digitally Deaf: Why Organizations Struggle with Digital Transformation Steve discusses how organizations can adapt to disruption. Steve will talk about how Digital technologies are enabling new nimble competitors and business models, how organizations must be perceptive to customer trends and embrace change, what the technologist’s role needs to be to enable organizational speed and agility.
Beginning with the End User in Mind
Room: 153A&B
Great product strategy begins with the end user in mind. Join Diana Medina as she shares her product strategy development process. She’ll draw upon her e-commerce experience within the grocery retail industry and provide keys takeaways to help any company best serve the needs of their customers.
Driving AI Adoption through Enterprise Architecture Principles
Room: 155A&B
Are you management material? Things to consider before moving into management.
Room: 150
Everyone growing up has been asked at least once, what do you want to be when you grow up? When I was six, I thought I wanted to be the President. Boy was I wrong. Once in college, we’re asked to make a judgement call. To pick a degree that will set us down a career path. A path we don’t even know how to define. We all have to start somewhere. I chose technology through the path of Project Management. However, as we learn more about the workforce, we can become burnt out. We hit a crossroad in our career where we want a new challenge. We start to wonder what does life after this job look like, and how do I move up the corporate ladder?
We can research new titles all day long, but that doesn’t tell you what it actually means to make the switch. It’s important to understand your strengths and weaknesses before deciding to go into management. And sometimes it’s not so easy to just jump in. It’s a good idea to learn lessons from other’s experiences, and this session will do just that.
THIS SESSION WILL COVER:
- Where can a career in technology take you?
- What it means to be a manager?
- Lessons learned from managing people
Customer Journeys Are Not Enough: How Service Blueprinting Can Break Down Silos & Build Alignment
Room: 155A&B
Most organizations today understand the value of focusing on the customer journey. Yet, how an organization evolves, works together as a cross-disciplinary team and transforms itself to serve those customers is where the rubber meets the road.
If you’re interested in learning how to bridge the customer journey to the “how” of delivering value, this talk is for you.
You’ll learn:
• How to look “under the hood” of the customer journey and connect it to organizational processes, technology and interactions
• How to create greater cross-team alignment to prioritize specific opportunities to improve how you deliver value to customers
• How to facilitate a service blueprinting exercise with cross-functional leaders
• What to do with the insights from a service blueprint to create action and momentum
Image Classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)
Room: 155A&B
We will start with demystifying and clarifying AI, machine learning and deep learning that are often used interchangeably. We will explore deep learning that really helps get insightful value out of the data. We will then introduce Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and walk through an example of using it for image classification. We will create and train a neural network by providing a set of labelled images and use it to characterize a new, unlabeled image dataset.
Blazor, the bleeding edge of .Net
Room: 150
How mature is your digital strategy?
Room: Auditorium
Advanced Pipelines for Hypothesis-Driven Development
Room: 153A&B
We automated our deployment pipelines. We do blue/green and canary deployments. Now we need the next step
to reach another level of software releases. Now we want to test our business hypothesis. Three different approaches outstand in this area: smart routers, feature toggles, and service meshes. We’ll have it covered.
Come to this session to see lots of demos and deployments with smart routers and feature toggles to check how effective A/B testing can be achieved. You may be thinking about A/B, but after this session we’ll get you from A to Z.
Choosing the right technology with no regrets
Room: 155A&B
Are you about to kick off your digital transformation initiative and are feeling overwhelmed by the technology decisions that you’re faced with? Are you a founder, CIO, product manager, or architect who is worried that a technology decision will lock you in a corner forever? Have you ever been forced to use a certain technology because it was the status quo? Come to this talk and learn some guidelines and strategies to help make the right technology decision. Gain an understanding of how you can work with your team to architect solutions that will evolve over time without regretting your technology choices. We’ll talk at a high-level about the how’s and why’s around architectural patterns and technology stacks.
Turning Sales Data into Golden Insights with Tableau
Room: 150
The AI Hero's Journey
Room: Auditorium
In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell introduces the concept of the “hero’s journey.” As Campbell explains, a hero’s transformational journey consists of a cycle of essential stages. These stages of transformation are similar to the AI development process.
The product development journey, much like the hero’s journey, is marked by challenges. Developing an AI product requires patience, strategy, and like the product you are building, the ability to learn along the way.
Five of the stages are particularly essential in any AI hero’s journey. Stage by stage, we will look at an AI adventure in light of the “hero’s journey.”
Rushing In
Room: 153A&B
Agile is Not Always the Answer: How to Determine the Right Scheduling Approach for your Project
Would you use the agile approach to build your house or have your government build missiles using agile? Agile is an adaptive approach to managing projects, however there are many other predictive scheduling approaches that may work better. This topics covers the strengths and weaknesses of Agile, Critical Path Method, Resource Critical Method, Critical Chain, Earned Value and Earned Work approaches and how to determine which approach works best for your project management needs. This topic is based on the research of Eric Uyttewall, who is also the author or Critical Path 2.0 and Forecast Scheduling.
Networking Reception at Incendiary Brewing
Join us at Incendiary Brewing where the first round of drinks is courtesy of Flywheel Coworking!
Celebrate a day of learning and catch up with colleagues you’ve met at the Conference.