Schedule: SIM National Executive Retreat

Birdies on the Beach
Mark Taylor, SIM CEO, invites you to join him for a round golf at the Golf Club of Amelia Island. This will be a casual golf outing with a shotgun start at 8:30 AM. Cost to participate is $130 per person and will be paid onsite to the golf course. The Golf Club of Amelia Island features an 18-hole championship golf course designed by PGA Tour veteran Mark McCumber and golf legend Gene Littler. The course offers challenging yet fun play with strategically placed bunkers and shifting ocean breezes and is lush and meticulously maintained.
Please complete this form if you'd like to play!

Joan Higginbotham
Retired NASA Astronaut, Electrical Engineer Third African American Woman in Space
Flying in space looks glamorous, and by all accounts it is. But what about the less-chronicled process to get there? Joan Higginbotham shares her personal journey and challenges to become only one of three African American female astronauts to fly in space. Using STS-116 as the backdrop, Joan explores the significance of empowered leadership, the majesty of a diverse crew working together to accomplish a common goal and how the reality of seeing Earth from space compelled her to examine her perspective of humanity.

Sponsored by:

Diamond Sponsor Presentation: DevSecOps: 5 Key things you should be doing now
In this session, we will be providing guidance on our observations of working with multiple Fortune 1000 companies who have gone through or are going through their DevSecOps transformations. We will share the lessons-learned in the trenches as well as the state of DevSecOps today with some considerations for the future and the impacts that are coming to the industry in the near-term and mid-term. Learn how you can combine Cyber Security with Modern Delivery practices to drive successful DevSecOps transformations for your organization.

How one leader’s willingness to rethink everything transformed a field and is now impacting museums, education, business, healthcare, and beyond. Philip Yenawine, creator of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and former Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art, and Dabney Hailey, a curator who brought the method to the business world with VTS@Work, will tell the story of this paradigm-shifting approach to group discussions. You’ll experience VTS and reflect on how it transforms the way we observe, listen, lead, collaborate, and think. They’ll share examples of VTS application in a range of current contexts, from preschool to K12 and from Harvard Medical School to Fortune 500s.

Workshop #1: Can an equitable classroom be a model for a more equitable conference room?
Nick Gardner, Executive Director, Watershed Collaborative
What does equity look like in practice? In this session, participants will learn how the VTS process changes the power dynamics and levels the playing field in K-12 classrooms, explore how a similar experience might impact their company’s process and culture, and how VTS might be an effective way to engage and support their employees, community, and schools.

Workshop #2: How might we lead teams into flexible thinking and collaborative problem-solving?
Dabney Hailey, Founder + Principal, Hailey Group
Our world urgently needs to move beyond command and control leadership, particularly within organizations committed to innovation, inclusion, and flexible thinking in the face of uncertainty. Hailey will model a different approach—a facilitative leadership stance—by guiding us through a Visual Thinking Strategies discussion. We’ll observe and listen deeply, become aware of our own thought processes, take the perspectives of others, and experience why slowing down can help us speed up. Hailey will pinpoint specific VTS techniques leaders can learn and use to shape such conversations: suspending judgment, creating space for all perspectives, seeking evidence, listening to understand, quieting our egos, and modeling openness, among others.

Workshop #3: Diamond Sponsor Presentation: DevSecOps

As a sports writer and author of more than two dozen books, Don has had a front row seat with some of the greatest winners in athletics, including Walter Payton, Jimmy Connors, Michael Jordan, John Wooden, Pat Riley and Dale Brown. They are all legends in their own right, but does anyone believe the athletes mentioned above are really the GREATEST athletes of their time, physically? Remember, Jordan wasn’t even the first pick in the draft. Payton had to go to a small black college because bigger schools didn’t want to risk a scholarship on him. Each became a champion through strength and skills that had nothing to do with physical prowess.

Using rich personal accounts gathered from more than twenty-five years of interviews with many of today’s sports legends and business leaders, Don has distilled Sixteen Consistent Characteristics of Greatness. Don shares some of these characteristics with audiences, in an easy, engaging style, which helps participants realize that they, too, can achieve a higher level of personal success.

How many of you need to be concerned with ticketing systems – no, not help desk ones, actual tickets? Does your job entail global news and television stations, streaming services, radio, and print news coverage on a daily basis? Do you have to provide real-time stats across a national network with millions of outlets and fans counting on 100% accuracy? Have you purchased an aerial antenna for each office location to ensure your guests can reach their babysitter via cell phone even though that’s not part of the services you offer? All of these scenarios illustrate how being a CIO in the sports industry is very different from the corporate or non-profit space, but what’s the same is the need to be customer-obsessed and to deliver on the best customer experience possible! As we’ve all discovered coming out of the pandemic, the rules of the game have changed, and we all need to learn, and compete, anew.

While the World Watched: COVID/Vaccine CIO Panel
Moderator: Daphne Jones
Jon Joplin, Owner, Socorro Labs
Marene Allison, CISO, Johnson & Johnson

When your organization is in the midst of a crisis, a leader leveraging command and control leadership practices is not unusual, but when the world is in crisis and your organization steps forward to help lead all of humanity toward safety, every single member of your team has to be engaged. Obstacles like time, money, resources and needed to be obliterated. Partnerships under exacting guidelines and security were secured. Supply chains that were broken globally needed to be bridged. Hear our panel of leaders share how they led their teams in fighting Covid-19 while the world watched.

Common Cause: An Exploration of the IT Talent Crisis
Jointly Presented by TechServe Alliance and Society for Information Management (SIM)

Cybersecurity roles Unfilled. Projects delayed. Hiring Needs Unmet. Whether building an internal team as an IT leader or meeting a client’s hiring needs for a project as an IT staffing professional, the problem is the same: the supply of talent in IT is insufficient to meet demand. This supply-demand imbalance shows no prospect of improving. In this joint client/IT staffing forum, we will explore the IT talent crisis, its implications, and innovative solutions being developed in response to this enduring challenge.

The IT Talent Challenge: IT Leaders and Staffing Executives Speak
Moderators: Mark B. Roberts, CEO, TechServe Alliance & Mark Taylor, CEO, Society for Information Management

Panelists: Caren Shiozaki, CIO, TMST, Inc.
Lou Senko, CIO, Q2
Sarah Martin, President, Dale Workforce Solutions

The numbers do not lie. Unemployment in IT is at historically low levels. There is little likelihood our domestic pipeline of talent will significantly expand in the foreseeable future. To varying degrees, both official policy and public discourse has ranged from less than welcoming to outright hostility toward IT professionals from abroad.

In this candid discussion moderated by the leaders of Society for Information Management and TechServe Alliance, CIOs and IT staffing executives will explore the IT talent gap, its implications, how various stakeholders are coping today and planning for the future.

IMPACT! Talks
Innovations in Talent Acquisition: Diversifying the IT Talent Pool

Fast paced, IMPACT! Talks feature three compelling speakers sharing powerful ideas in the space of 60 minutes. These brief high impact talks are designed to disrupt ordinary thinking and inspire you to reimagine what is possible. For the Talent Forum, the focus of the Impact! Talks will be on innovative ways thought leaders are diversifying the talent pool in the face of the perennial shortage of IT professionals.

IMPACT! Talk #1: Expand Your IT & Engineering Candidate Pool – Eliminate the College Degree Requirement!

Roland Selby, Vice President Strategic Partners, NPower

This session will challenge you to think differently about tech talent and highlight a great untapped resource – the non-college talent. Roland’s talk will address the historic barriers to employment, hiring trends for non-college degree talent, and the value of having a diverse talent pool.

IMPACT! Talk #2: Neurodiversity & Tech Talent
Marcus Murph, Partner KPMG
Five conversations we should be having about Neurodiversity in technology

As corporations compete in the war for top talent, they must question their current talent acquisition strategy. This session's focus is on conversations on the challenges, opportunities and changes that need to happen to attract, retain and unleash the potential of neurodiverse talent within today's organizations.

IMPACT! Talk #3:

Tamara Nall, President & CEO, The Leading Niche

With the extraordinary demand for talent, businesses continue to expand their reach to every corner of the globe in search of IT resources, including India, Philippines, and Eastern Europe. However, many overlook the vast and largely untapped domestic – based resources right in our backyard: Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). From Morgan State University to Prairie View A&M University to Edward Waters College, many of these schools are typically not on the radar of IT recruiters. In an ever-changing, yet highly competitive market, corporations must be sure that they hire the best and the brightest as part of their teams. Join Tamara Nall, Founder and CEO of The Leading Niche, to learn how she successfully partnered with over 100 employers including Fortune 500 companies, to expand recruiting to these institutions and gain access to a vast pool of untapped IT and engineering talent.

SIM Foundation Keynote

Be The Rainbow

Presented by Brian Shul, Former SR-71 Pilot Major, USAF Retired

Brian Shul's compelling story of living fearlessly and embracing the opportunities of each day. As an Air Force fighter pilot, Brian was shot down in the Vietnam War and severely burned in the ensuing crash. Initially given up for dead, he was finally rescued, spent more than a year recovering and was told his flying days were over. Amazingly, Brian returned to active duty flying, and became one of only 89 men in history to fly the SR-71 spy plane, the fastest jet ever built. Brian inspires hope, overcoming obstacles, daring to dream and shares his passion for the magnificence of U.S. ingenuity and technology.