Workshops
2008 Workshops: Unique Learning Opportunities
Part of the GTEC FREE learning program. The Workshops emphasize practical, useful information that is delivered by subject matter experts, and provide important opportunities for attendees to get in-depth information on technology solutions.
All sessions in this program are presented free of charge. Seating is available on a first-come basis.
Tuesday, October 28
Workshop 1
10:00 am to 11:15 am
Les Saisons Room
New Age Information Classification
The digital age has revolutionized the way we create and manage information - IM specialists, public sector institutions and central agencies are all working feverishly to better understand how to renew information management practices to keep apace of the digital revolution. Towards this end, departments have been exploring new models of information classification that better support:
- departmental decision-making needs;
- individuals in their information retrieval goals; and
- records management specialists in managing information to meet legal, historical and policy obligations.
But are the mainstream models under consideration sufficiently forward-looking or are they merely incremental improvements on existing paper-based classification thinking? Join Lindsay Fraser, Systemscope's IM Practice Lead, for a lively discussion of how digital age changes in information creation and use have led to the need for "new age" classification approaches, including:
- If "everything is miscellaneous," will hierarchical taxonomies continue to serve information management requirements in the digital age?
- What other approaches to classification might effectively meet government business, user and records management needs?
- Are sophisticated electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS) required, or can familiar desktop tools (such as MSOffice) be leveraged to begin meaningful classification of electronic resources?
Lindsay will be joined by Peter Cowan, Director of Enterprise IM at Natural Resources Canada, who will discuss a thoroughly modern classification approach based on faceted metadata – an approach which:
- can be implemented in the absence of an EDRMS;
- allows for great flexibility in information retrieval; and
- minimizes the user classification effort.
Tuesday, October 28
Manitoba Room – Morning Session
Workshop 1
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Brenda McIntyre, ITSM Specialist, Sierra Systems
Robert Gravel, IT Portfolio Manager, House of Commons
House of Commons Case Study: Taking IT Service Management to the Next Level
The House of Commons completed the first phase of their ITSM program in 2007. It is based on ITIL best practices, Axios assyst technology, and an adaptive governance framework. This session will draw upon experiences at the House of Commons, where Continual Service Improvement is driving the ITSM agenda.
This session will cover a range of topics including:
- Do you need a CSIP? What does it look like?
- How do you assess the effectiveness of governance?
- Augmenting the solution – should you increase the breadth or depth? How do you gauge organizational readiness?
- Looking at CSIP from a process, procedure, tool related perspective
- Structuring the service offering
- CMDB: what is the right level of granularity?
- Optimizing the configuration of assyst: solution architecture, integration points and supported services/systems (for example telecommunications, engineering, etc)
- IT Service Management portal: Performance measurement, Reporting, and
Dashboards
Tuesday, October 28
Workshop 2
1:00 pm - 2:10 pm
Les Saisons Room
Moving to a Model for Content Re-use: the Journey and the Challenges of Information and Knowledge Management
Citizenship and Immigration Canada is transforming client services. This includes re-examining the way it creates and delivers "front counter" information to its clients as well as "back office" operational guidance to its staff and service delivery partners. What CIC had heard from stakeholders was that:
- delivery agents were suffering from information overload;
- there were significant challenges with the amount of time it took to find the right information;
- there was a proliferation of "local" solutions developed to fill the gaps;
- operational guidance was delivered through so many different vehicles that it was difficult to determine which source to "trust"; and
- there were clear inefficiencies in sharing and disseminating information.
This session focuses on how the CIC Service Improvement Office began a journey to identify best practices in knowledge management that capitalized on content re-use and collaboration techniques to streamline information development and dissemination processes, reduce the number of products providing operational guidance, and make better use of technologies. The session will cover:
- industry and public sector best practices;
- the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA);
- the CIC vision for content collaboration and re-use;
- the road to achieving the vision.
Join Linda-Daniels-Lewis, a senior IM Practitioner at Systemscope and Donald Pineau, Director of Service Modernization Governance at CIC, for this engaging discussion of a radical new approach to creating and delivering information that could provide a foundation for horizontal integrated information service delivery across the GC.
Tuesday, October 28
Workshop 3
2:30 pm – 3:45 pm
Les Saisons Room – All Day
Getting Your Web Site(s) Under Control
Many public sector organizations are striving to improve their Web sites, and finding that it's much more challenging than they imagined, for a variety of reasons:
- Lack of consensus about site purpose and success measures;
- A weak understanding of site users, user goals, and how to support them;
- Siloed publishing models that result in complicated sites with poor findability and usability;
- High volumes of content, with a high proportion that has not been adequately maintained;
- A lack of clear, coherent guidance with respect to relevant policies, standards and editorial considerations.
Jane Stewart, Director – Web Channel Management, Systemscope, will offer practical guidance based on her experience in supporting Web renovation for both large and small Internet and intranet sites. The session will cover the "six pillars" of successful transformation and renewal, with plenty of examples of innovative solutions to Web publishing challenges. Jane will also discuss common sense approaches to achieving compliance with Government of Canada Web-related policies and standards.
Jane will be joined by Anne Lamar, Director General of Communications for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), who will talk about the components of DFO's Web Renewal Initiative, including its Web governance model and its approach to research-driven design.
Tuesday, October 28
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Alberta Room – Morning Session
Stewart Dinner, Federal Government Account Manager, Pitney Bowes MapInfo
Make Better Decisions
Public sector organizations are challenged with improving communications and improving services; learn how you can use location intelligence, enhanced data quality and communication management capabilities to do both.
Concepts
- Discuss and look at large organizations data environments, how they are established, set up, standards, quality, maintenance and the issues that are inherent with these concepts
- Discussion surrounding foundation or base data, data stewards, dissemination, business processes and KPI’s and the pro’s and cons associated with these concepts
- Address information as one of the data elements in which to build a enterprise foundation
- Learn how to leverage location intelligence tools, to link tabular data to geospatial data – what are the issues and benefits
- Professional Services, Tools and Technology that are available
Tuesday, October 28
11:00 am – 11:45 am
Alberta Room
Chris Bishop, President, Public Sector Research Inc.
New Trends in Government IT Spending
How much are governments spending on information technology? What are they spending it on? What has changed? What are the trends?
This seminar will review the major challenges facing information technology management and the plans of governments to deal with them. What are the emerging technologies that will have the most impact and how are they likely to be deployed. The demands on resources at every level are increasing each year; it has become critical to understand the changing roles of the players involved.
This seminar builds on the IT market studies of the federal and Ontario governments prepared annually by Public Sector Research Inc., further supplemented by other provincial and municipal surveys.
Tuesday, October 28
9:00 am – 12:00 pm
British Columbia Room – Half Day Session
Alf Young, Market Development Manager, Motorola Canada Ltd.
Benefits of a Wireless Indoor/Outdoor Network
There are various factors that need to be considered when deciding how a wireless network can improve your organization's operations. Some of these factors include security, costs such as capital and life cycle expenditures, value of wireline vs. wireless solutions, availability, worker mobility and reliability to name a few. Various aspects will be discussed in terms of indoor, campus and wide area wireless environments and the many applications that can reside on the network. Real customer wireless applications, key success factors and lessons learned will be discussed.
Tuesday, October 28
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Manitoba Room
Eric M. Krauss , Director Sales - Americas
New Directions in Secure Business Mobility…
Secure Business Mobility…
Businesses are increasingly putting themselves at risk by allowing unencrypted use of portable storage devices. These devices pose two kinds of threats: Intentional and unintentional. Controlling these new risks involves strategies to enable Enterprise and Government departments to remain productive while at the same time control, manage and monitor the use of mobile storage devices.
We will discuss several topics surrounding Best Practices in Endpoint Security.
- Securely storing and managing enterprise data.
- Assessing the Security of Hardware-Based vs.. Software-Based Encryption on USB Flash Drives.
- Boosting employee productivity by mobilizing the corporate computing environment with new directions in virtualization and identity and access management.
Tuesday, October 28
1:00 - 3:00 pm
British Columbia Room
Simplifying Identity and Access Management -- Without Sacrificing Security and Compliance
The challenges faced by today’s complex, heterogeneous environments typically lie in three main areas: efficiency, security, and compliance. But far too often security and compliance take a back seat to efficiency as organizations attempt to streamline operations and save money. When it comes to identity and access management, this reality is especially painful. As your organization grows and becomes more complex, so do the number of identities that your IT team must manage efficiently. Still, you require an ever-increasing level of control of those identities to protect your organization and ensure you meet mandates. In this presentation we will discuss and explore;
- Improving efficiency by automating and consolidating of your identity infrastructure based on existing investment in Active Directory (AD); you can manage fewer identities with greater ease.
- Enhance security by implementing stronger authentication for multiple systems -- including smart cards and tokens; -- you’ll control privileged accounts, including who accesses what, and when, why and how access is granted.
- Achieve compliance with powerful and integrated audit, reporting, and enforcement tools; you can easily control access and segregate duties, and rest assured know you’re always compliant.
Tuesday, October 28
1:00 – 2:00 pm
Alberta Room
Jennifer Savage, President, WebDrive Canada Inc
Wikis and Blogs and Facebook....oh my!
The non-technical guide to planning out and implementing social media strategies to connect with industry, special interest groups, other jurisdictions and the Canadians public.
Web 2.0 technologies are allowing for new levels of interaction with Canadians, stakeholders, industry and special interest groups. The advantages are endless but how do you get started? And what factors do you need to think about when deciding upon and implementing social media tools?
In this session you will hear about the journey that departments such as HRSDC, Finance Canada and the Governor General's Office took in exploring social media options. You'll also learn the ABC's of planning out and implementing a social media strategy. Items discussed will include:
- Exploring the various social media options available for reaching Canadians, stakeholders, industry and special interest groups
- Motivating people to participate in your wiki, blog or video blog
- Reaching out and attracting people using Facebook, MySpace and YouTube
- Monitoring activity in the social media areas of a site
- Determining the return on investment of social media
Tuesday, October 28
Workshop 1
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Alberta Room – Afternoon Sessions
Raheel Zaman, Senior Manager, IT Effectiveness Practice, KPMG Ottawa
Satyendra Singh, Manager IT Effectiveness Practice, KPMG Ottawa
From Records Management to Knowledge Management
Records creation, management, and destruction, once totally paper based, is now distributed in the millions of digital records and e-mails that make up an organizations information universe. Keeping records, once only the responsibility of a few, has now proliferated into all levels of the organization and right to the desk top. Failing to manage records throughout their life cycles can present significant risks for an organization. Furthermore, failing to properly manage records limits the ability to the harness its inherent value, knowledge, to support sound decision making.
This presentation will explore the journey from Records Management to Knowledge Management and what you may need to consider along the way.
Workshop 2
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Alberta Room
Yvon Audette, Managing Partner, IT Effectiveness Practice, KPMG Canada
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 connects people in ways that can make it easier to collaborate, share knowledge, and tap into the collective wisdom of the group to aid in better decision making and problem solving. There is also something inclusive and eclectic about Web 2.0, engendering new possibilities for creation and innovation across the enterprise.
While some organizations are moving quickly to embrace Web 2.0, others see challenges and barriers that must be addressed before their organizations can realize the potential of Web 2.0. Issues such as security risks and governance are paramount, particularly the development of security policies specifically tailored to Web 2.0. On a more basic level, some are unsure how to measure the benefits of Web 2.0 while others are struggling to understand what Web 2.0 even has to do with their business.
The objective of this presentation is to discuss how Web 2.0 can help facilitate the transition to Government 2.0.
Tuesday, October 28
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Manitoba Room
Heba Elaraby, Chief Executive Officer
Business Transformation, Agile Development, and Rapid Deployment
Technology in government services today is a key differentiating factor for success. In an ever-changing environment, it is imperative for government agencies to adapt quickly and stay ahead of technology for competitive advantage.
To thrive in this dynamic environment, agencies must be agile: The ability to address market and customer needs is crucial. For effective business transformation, agencies must have the capacity to evolve – to leverage personnel, knowledge bases, assets, and technical solutions.
AHCC, Inc. – a pioneer and leader in business transformation, agile development and rapid deployment – grasps the challenges and risks involved in business transformation, and has demonstrated the knowledge and expertise to integrate business processes and advanced technological solutions seamlessly to fully realize business potential.
Workshop 1
1:00 – 2:00 pm
Manitoba Room
Erik Wynn, Senior Solution Architect, Solutions Management Office, CGI
Application and Project Portfolio Management in the Public Sector
Application Portfolio Management (APM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) are management disciplines enjoying increased priority and visibility. This session examines these disciplines and explores how effective APM and PPM programs can be established to help increase business / IT alignment and enable strategic planning and investment decisions to facilitate business and IT transformation. We will explore best practices and pitfalls, and present a brief case study of APM within CRA.
The primary objective of APM is to gain a better understanding and enable effective management of the application portfolio. This requires managing a list of all applications, containing technology profiles, size and complexity metrics, as well as architectural interdependency details. This information can be used to expose patterns and trends within the portfolio, and to identify areas of poor performance and opportunities for improvement. Trends across lines of business or within specific technology areas can be more clearly understood, and action plans can be established to address these issues at an enterprise level.
APM facilitates the definition of a current-state architecture. This current-state architecture provides an improved understanding of the application portfolio, and enables strategic and tactical approaches to be defined to enable business and IT transformation initiatives. This allows scope and impact analysis for the identification of common services, asset reuse, and technology migration planning.
PPM focuses on enabling project investment decisions to ensure the alignment of business and IT plans and priorities, and that these are addressed in the project portfolio. When PPM is combined with APM, the core mechanisms for strategic project spending are established. Existing organizational structures and governance processes, such as an Enterprise Project Management Offices (ePMO), Investment Management Committees and Architecture Review Boards can incorporate APM and PPM principles to help advise funding and project implementation decisions, and to monitor and track these project to ensure they are meeting their objectives.
Finally, this session will represent a brief case study of how CRA has adopted APM to assist in managing their application portfolio, and examine how this approach is being used to facilitate a large-scale architectural transformation from IDMS to DB2 within the Agency.
Workshop 2
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Maureen Cunningham, Focus Lead, People and Change, CGI
Implementing Management of Change – A Federal Perspective
Many organizations fail to appreciate the profound effect that change has on their employees, clients and partners. Most technology rollouts falter due to a lack of effective strategies to achieve alignment, build trust, allay fear and engender commitment. This session will take you through the key aspects of change: development and strategic multi-directional communication of a compelling vision, diagnosis of readiness and key levers for change, design of a new organization structure and processes, creation of a culture change strategy which overcomes resistance from leaders, managers and employees and aligns external stakeholder needs to new ways of working, development of training and change interventions, facilitation of cross-discipline product development and issue resolution and ongoing team-building and performance inspiration and optimization.
At the end of this session you should:
- Better understand what is behind resistance to change
- Have greater awareness of the key elements required for change to occur
- Be able to draft an outline of your organization's change strategy
Office of Small and Medium Enterprises
Tuesday, October 28
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
British Columbia Room
Why Should You Sell to the Government of Canada?
Have you ever thought about doing business with the federal government? Are you interested in learning more about the federal government as a customer?
Based out of Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), OSME assists small and medium enterprises in navigating the federal procurement system. In this presentation, OSME will focus on the importance of small and medium enterprises to federal procurement, the benefits of having the federal government as your customer and opportunities (both national and regional) for small and medium enterprises. This presentation will also include information and resources for businesses interested in taking the next steps in selling to the Government of Canada.
Wednesday, October 29
Manitoba Room – Morning Session
Workshop 2
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Altaf Jadavji, Vice President, Federal Practice, Sierra Systems
Adrian Cerchia, Technical Director, Sierra Systems
A Case Study in Secure Service Delivery to Canadians – Simplifying Integration with the Secure Channel
Departments are typically on a tight timeline to deliver secure on-line services and to provide users with an intuitive experience across their entire Internet presence. Both requirements can be addressed by adopting a Portal architecture that integrates with the Secure Channel. A Portal provides secure access to additional applications with relative ease and significant cost savings. This workshop examines the approach and lessons learned from a fast-paced integration project that implemented this solution.
Workshop Format: Interactive PowerPoint presentation
Workshop Topics:
- Determining security needs
- Evaluating identity and authentication management options
- Compressing timeframes by reusing UPSS solutions and centralizing the integration interface
- Meeting GC standards (CLF)
- Technical environment
Wednesday, October 29
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Manitoba Room – Morning Session
Luc Carrière, Chair of Computer Science (CS) Group, Professional Institute of Public Services Canada (PIPSC)
Hélène Rogers, Vice-President – Full Time, Professional Institute of Public Services Canada (PIPSC)
On behalf of the Professional Institute, I am pleased to accept your invitation again this year to provide a presentation at the GTEC event on the following subject; CS community supporting Government 2.0
The Government of Canada currently employs approximately 16,000 skilled and knowledgeable CS professionals who provide an array of expertise to ensure the government’s complex and extensive computer systems are developed and maintained for Canadians to have an on-line access to the services and information they need.
Government’s IT projects are often very complex, deploy on a large scale and also very expensive. Not only do we need a combination of leadership and technology but we believe that a better utilization of the human resources is the key to a successful completion of these changes and transformations. Inter-Departmental communication and implication are mandatory to achieve this.
Wednesday, October 29
Workshop 3
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Paul Haskins, Director Consulting Services, IM Practice Lead, CGI
Stephen Donahoe, Executive Consultant, IM Practice, CGI
Integrating Collaboration with your Information Management Strategy
Following its success in the consumer market, Social Networking and its ability to quickly bring together individuals with shared interests to collaborate around common goals, is a keen interest of business leaders in the public sector. At the same time, email volumes have reached unprecedented proportions and have spiraled out of control for many workers. Efficiencies are impacted and critical corporate memory is lost in the communication trail.
Many organizations have moved ahead with pilot programs to test collaboration technologies in the workplace with interesting results. This session will present a maturity model for collaboration and will identify the key activities required for the successful implementation of e-collaboration in the workplace. Furthermore we will present the need for an integrated approach that places collaboration in a logical continuum with the information lifecycle and in doing so provide guidance in its integration with the Information Management Strategy and support of the Management Accountability Framework
At the end of the session you should:
- Be able to identify the maturity of your organization in its approach to collaboration
- Understand some of the key issues facing implementation of eCollaboration in the workplace
- Determine the need for integration with the Information Management Strategy
Wednesday, October 29
10:00 am – 4:30 pm
Les Saisons Room – All Day
Infrastructure Virtualization: Service on Demand
Speakers:
Scott Davis, Chief Data Center Architect, VMware - TBC
Doug Keller, Senior Technical Specialist, Star Lab Project, Canadian Border Security Agency, Innovation, Science & Technology Branch
PWGSC PenMod Project - TBC
Panel Discussion:
Scott Davis, Doug Keller, PWGWC PenMod, Chuck Henry, Chief Technology Officer, Office of the CIO, Treasury Board of Canada
This workshop covers IT Infrastructure Virtualization benefits which include Capacity Sharing, Green IT, Business Continuity and IT Economies through the use of IT Virtualization Technologies.
The workshop delivers presentations from Industry Experts and Examples of deployment studies within the Government of Canada.
Wednesday, October 29
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Alberta Room – Morning Session
Understanding Data Governance: Data Management Strategies to Increase Performance, Reduce Risks, and Control Costs
This will focus on addressing Data Governance challenges in two main areas:
I. Archiving Strategies to Support Data Retention, Security and Compliance Requirements
In this portion of the session we will explore the business and technical issues driving data retention; the issues caused by data growth and suggested best practices and solutions for addressing these issues.
- Data retention and compliance requirements, as well as data strategies for compliance
- Managing data to meet the needs of the business without sacrificing performance and increasing costs
- Decommissioning and migration strategies to simply your infrastructure
- Options for increasing efficiency for business continuity and disaster recovery
- Discussion of analyst research and recommendations
II. Managing Test Data Effectively and Ensuring Data Privacy in the Testing Environment
This portion of the session will examine the full anatomy of a data privacy project as relates to the implementations of the best practice of data masking.
- Data privacy requirements and strategies for compliance
- Best practices for removing, masking and transforming data in your testing environment
- Proven methods for reducing testing time and costs for launching new applications internally
- Case studies: The Cost of Non-Compliance
Wednesday, October 29
Workshop 1
9:00 am - 10:15 am
British Columbia Room – Half Day Session
Philip Antoniades, Systems Engineer Manager, Sun/MySQL
MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy
MySQL is a core component of Web 2.0 as well as many OEM/SaaS and Enterprise IT organizations. Find out how MySQL and the ecosystem of Open Source software can deliver high performance, highly available databases at a fraction of the cost of their proprietary counterparts.
Wednesday, October 29
Workshop 2
10:30 am - 11:45 am
British Columbia Room – Half Day Session
Brian Down, CTO, Sun Microsystems of Canada
Addressing Eco Initiatives with Green IT Solutions
Sun Eco's Solutions address both the ECOnomics and ECOlogical aspects of eco-friendly computing. Our commitment to our customers:
- Use our innovation to deliver products with leading energy efficiency
- We will freely share accurate energy data and best practices
- Help you simplify and lower the costs of deploying energy efficient solutions
- Make it easy for you to return products for environmentally responsible lifecycle management
Canada School of Public Service
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
British Columbia Room
Natalie Martel: Director of CampusDirect (Possible)
Serge Lessard: Manager of Service Delivery
Mohamed Elmi: Service Level Agreement Coordinator.
E-learning solutions for a dynamic public service
Campusdirect is the online campus of the Canada School of Public Service. This e-learning portal is for public service employees at the federal and provincial level across Canada who want to take their learning to the next level. CampusDirect is also a leading provider of customized e-learning products and services that can be distributed to a vast audience with diverse learning requirements.
For the first time, CampusDirect will be presenting its recently innovated core e-learning services. We pride ourselves in providing e-learning services that meet industry standards, user’s satisfaction and government of Canada knowledge priorities - and we are pleased to discuss them with you.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
11:00 – 12:00 pm
Alberta Room
Tyler Cashion, Technology Generalist
Un-Wire your WAN...and Simplify your Network!
Join DragonWave, Redline Communications and FirstComm Wireless to understand why more Government of Canada Agencies are choosing Microwave Wireless Connectivity to securely interconnect their facilities. Learn how Wireless Connectivity along with Fibre Optic Circuits provide ultimate redundancy while significantly reducing costs and improving performance. Today's Point-to-Point Technology can deliver performance up to 1.6 Gbps over 20 kms while WiMAX Technology can provide up to 20 Mbps performance over areas of more than 100 Square Kilometres. Wireless WANs and LAN Extensions can also be deployed in less than 24 hours hours for emergency and temporary requirements. Learn how Wireless can work for you.
Wednesday, October 29
1:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Alberta Room – Half Day Session
Presented by xwave, HP, and Sun
Seminar 1: 1:00pm – 2:30pm
Speakers: Jason Bremner (IDC), Brian Down (Sun),
Don Bryant (xwave ATS)
Seminar 2: 3:00pm – 4:30pm
Speakers: Jason Bremner (IDC), Victor Garcia (HP),
Don Bryant (xwave ATS)
The energy consumed by your data centre typically will double every five years.
Chances are your budget won’t.
Ever-expanding server farms and mounting acquisition and energy costs have a lot of organizations thinking green these days, but many are unsure of how and where to begin. The xwave Green IT seminar is a good start. One of Canada’s largest business-solutions providers and a longtime technology consultant to all levels of government, xwave offers an extensive portfolio of products, services and solutions around IT consolidation and virtualization.
The xwave Green IT seminar will offer GTEC attendees two separate 1.5-hour sessions, each of which will provide a comprehensive overview of the green IT landscape and some of the tools and strategies available to help organizations minimize their footprints
About our speakers:
Jason Bremner, Director of Research for Canadian Infrastructure Hardware at IDC
Jason will discuss some of the key drivers behind green IT.
Brian Down, Chief Technology Officer, Sun Microsystems of Canada
Victor Garcia, Chief Technology Officer, HP Canada
Brian and Victor will, in their respective sessions, look at how government organizations can address their green IT needs through energy-efficient solutions for the data centre and broader workspace. Learn how to better integrate IT into your green business goals.
Don Bryant, xwave Advanced Technology Solutions
Don will discuss why maximum flexibility, speed, and efficiency are critical for a robust IT strategy, and he’ll provide insight into the professional services and best practices to consider in the consolidation process.
Join these industry experts for some helpful insight on the operational realities—and genuine business benefits—of greening your IT.
Wednesday, October 29
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Manitoba Room
Robert Grapes, Chief Technology Officer
Avoiding Compliance 'Gotchas' When Managing Privileged Passwords in the Datacenter
The threat of data loss and exposure is driving the creation of specific legislation that addresses access control and policy enforcement in enterprise datacenters. It is this legislation that is driving organizations to begin tackling the issue of managing elevated privilege accounts. While every organization knows that "it is the right thing to do" few organizations are dealing with this issue…in part because of other priorities but also because they know of no solutions that solve this security problem. They also are anticipating the potentially enormous human resources and significant network downtime that remediation will necessitate. Join Robert Grapes, Chief Technologist of Data Center Solutions at Cloakware as he explores the new compliance regulations surrounding privileged passwords. Robert will highlight the pitfalls to be aware of and will discuss ways in which to protect enterprise datacenters from both internal and external threats, helping organizations become compliant while maintaining their operational continuity.
Wednesday, October 29
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
British Columbia Room
Darren De Jean, Director of Business Development, Thinknostic Inc.
Paul Jackson, Information Technology Project Officer, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
DFAIT (TBC)
CLF 2.0 Implementation Challenges & Opportunities
The Common Look and Feel Standards for the Internet (CLF 2.0) provide
an accessible, consistent and predictable presentation of government
services and content for public facing websites. An overview of the
CLF 2.0 Standards along with implementation success stories related to
deploying a CLF 2.0 compliant website will be discussed by the
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and Department of Foreign Affairs
& International Trade.
Vendors need to understand how CLF 2.0 affects their products and
services and what it means to provide compliant solutions to
government departments. Potential business opportunities, related to
technical solutions and tools, will also be discussed followed by an
open forum question and answer session
Wednesday, October 29
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Manitoba Room
Steve Blancq, Co-founder, Vice-President, ASC Group, Inc.
Agnes Jackle, Managing Director Canadian Operations, ASC Group, Inc.
Christian Drouin, Manager, DG Proc Services / Director Major Procurement, Department of National Defence
André Lizotte, LCol (ret’d)
Next Generation Service/Contract Management: A Systematic Approach
Whether transforming the delivery of services through an internal shared services organization or through a contractor, the ability to articulate and manage to specific performance standards is of paramount importance. Both the client and service provider must have a common understanding of what the performance standards are and how they are to be managed throughout the life of the relationship. The TF! (Tabular Format) approach provides a process for defining these measures supported by best practice metrics from previous implementations. The Department of National Defence has applied this approach as part of its performance-based service contracting to implement alternative service delivery or major outsourcing initiatives since 1996. These initiatives range from site support at Goose Bay Labrador to Pilot Training at Southport Manitoba, to contractor support to deployed Canadian Forces operations. The term performance-based service contracts specifically means those types of major service delivery contracts that are often referred to as outsourcing, privatization or ASD - Alternative Service Delivery or sometimes PPP – Public Private Partnerships. They are generally characterized as complex in scope and structure and are usually high value and long duration – up to 22 years in one case. A performance-based service contract contains services specified as performance/outputs, and includes an approach to identifying and monitoring quantity and quality of service. It also bases contractor compensation on quantity and quality delivered.
The objective of this seminar is to transfer knowledge on processes and considerations in progressing through the procurement cycle from requirements to contract, then to contract management, and possibly to re-procurement. The case study will identify parallels with in-sourced or shared services situations where sophisticated performance management of service commitments and increased accountability are required.
