CIOs and technology executives play a critical role as strategic partners by designing, developing, and delivering technology to address increasingly complex DEI priorities. Technology leaders recognise the importance of building inclusive technology cultures that foster engagement, collaboration, and belonging that reflect a diverse technology workforce and deliver value.

Hear the challenges, priorities, and lessons learned of CIOs and technology executives and their role in navigating DEI: from delivering data-driven tech solutions to redefining recruitment and retention strategies for technologists.

John Gibbs, Group CIO - International Airlines Group

Joanna Drake, CIO - The Hut Group

Faye Roth, CIO - McColl's Retail Group

Dax Grant, CIO – Global Operations Technology - HSBC

Adam Forde, CIO - Spectris

In a post-Covid world we will see an acceleration of the trend toward a more sustainable and inclusive capitalism.

For businesses to not just survive but thrive, they will need to undergo a deep-level paradigm shift and embrace a form of capitalism that seeks not just to help individual businesses flourish but also to preserve humanity and the planet.

In this session we will cover why these profound changes are so critical and how you can empower your business to thrive in our rapidly changing world, leveraging what we see as the three main areas of Digital Transformation:

• Experience Management
• Agile Processes and Automation
• Analytics and Decision Science

In this session we will explore how Microsoft 365 along with the Azure platform, can be maximised to deliver an agile and secure workforce, capable of working from anywhere without limits, but with unobtrusive security providing enterprise class protection.

You will hear from Mark Bramwell, Saïd Business School’s CIO on the journey they have been through with Centrality from an entirely on-premise world to one that will be entirely cloud-native.

Lee Cartmel - CISO - Stagecoach

Drop the Ego-System of vendors and buyers A CIO in 2022 needs to be able to create an Eco-System of partnership and drop the Ego-System of vendors and buyers, what does it take to make that happen with everyone, start-up to multi-national and how can the lessons this teaches us help ‘inside’ the CIOs own office.

Rich Corbridge, CIO - Boots UK

As the pace of technology continues to increase the importance of Start-ups grows. In a symbiotic relationship, large scale companies can gain great benefit by working with Start-ups and Start-ups can leverage many cost prohibitive item from the larger players while data is often the common currency.

There are obvious great synergies for both sides but how can you setup a successful frame work that fosters collaboration while delivering mutual benefits?

Securing and protecting 625M mobile customers, enterprises and governments. And managing over 100M digital identities and over 1M endpoints. Vodafone Business and Accenture Security are on a mission to make businesses resilient against cyber threats.

On average a business experiences 280 cyber attacks every year with 1 in 8 attacks resulting in a breach. Cyber-criminals are increasingly turning their attention to vulnerable organizations with weak defenses.

Vodafone in collaboration with Accenture Security have a commitment to the creation of market leading security services, co-creation and driving innovation in new security services for organizations with more than 100 employees.

Helping businesses to reinforce their security resilience and enabling them to take advantage of everything data and the digital economy has to offer.

Up until last year, Microsoft was a new player in the cloud collaboration game. While the app is evolving and growing quickly, there are understandable gaps in the offering, most notably its voice platform. But then there’s the administrator user experience, ease of access to detailed analytics, limited calling plan coverage and over eight hours downtime a year. And calling plans are expensive. 

That’s why around 80% of companies using the app rely on Direct Routing to strengthen its offering. Direct Routing delivers everything you’d expect from an enterprise-grade phone system, without needing to install and maintain it, or invest in expensive calling plans. 

It makes sense then that, as hybrid working becomes a reality, many businesses are weighing up the benefits of Direct Routing as a long-term solution for a dispersed workforce. 

So what can organisations do to gain more from MS Teams? 

Join RingCentral and an intimate group of IT thought leaders for a discussion where we will answer: To Direct Route or not to Direct Route? 

Plus a lively discussion on all the cons of Calling Plans. 

What can be done to ensure your business communications meets the needs of a distributed workforce, without sacrificing the native Microsoft Teams experience? 

How can integrations and cost reductions help users be more productive, and companies more efficient? 

What does Microsoft Teams Direct Routing success look like in action?

Sonja Browning-Page - CIO - British Transport Police

Anna-Lisa Miller - Group CISO - Spectris plc

Things are pretty tough in cyber security right now. Widespread cyber attacks continue to exploit vulnerabilities targeting people, organisations, and governments around the world. Cyber attacks are increasingly endangering valuable data and critical infrastructure. The complexity doesn’t end there. Distributed decision making has expanded the volume and variety of information risk decisions to support, regulators are approaching privacy and security with greater scrutiny and executive teams and boards are looking to better understand cyber security and its implications for strategic planning.

Meanwhile, the skill barrier to entry into cyber criminality is lower than it has ever been. Off-the-shelf hacking tools, which require very limited technical expertise to utilise, are available at little to no cost. In general, cyber criminals face few barriers and are free to be creative and inventive in an increasingly organised and supportive global network.

The 2020 Nominet CISO Stress Report suggests that 88% of CISOs are "moderately or tremendously stressed," with 48% saying the role has negatively affected their mental health. Add to that consistent reports of a global talent shortage of over 3.1 million workers – most organisations report that cyber security staff shortages are putting their organisations at risk.

The tough world of cyber security is taking its toll on many people in our organisations.

We all know this. We live this on a daily basis.

This session covers four areas that will help you and your teams to keep #winning, whether it’s building an effective and sustainable cyber security strategy, keeping pace with rapid digital transformation, or high pressure cyber response and resilience, while helping to protect people’s mental health and well-being.

A Keynote in association with Builder-ai

Sachin Dev Duggal; CEO & Co Founder, Builder.ai

Against a backdrop of exponentially increasing volumes of data, IT organisations are being challenged to transform to deliver agility and efficiency. Cloud services are hugely powerful and suit many use cases and workloads, but not all.

While progress is being made with cloud transformation, there is plenty of room for improvement. In fact, 89% of IT executives say their organisation is experiencing barriers to cloud transformation, according to a recent Aptum study. The top three obstacles include, security/data protection, legacy applications requiring modernisation, and a lack of budget.

Nowadays, many businesses are operating a hybrid environment unintentionally, which can result in poor design, inefficient management, and a lack of visibility and control. So, how can you make the right platform choice when modernising your infrastructure or deploying new services? How can you better manage a hybrid environment while keeping your data secure?

Join Aptum and a select group of industry experts to explore your challenges and understand how hybrid approaches can deliver agility and efficiency when architected effectively from a holistic, technology-neutral perspective.

Faye Roth - CIO - McColl's Retail Group

Nick Harris -  CIO - The Salvation Army Trading Company 

A Boardroom in association with Barco. 

COVID-19 has transformed the way we work and the way we feel about work, it has opened up our minds and the possibilities of harnessing technologies, driving more sustainable infrastructures and making a difference in our communities and the planet. We have found a way to do this in our business and for our customers; we call it ‘warming our cockles’, where innovation, ESG and technology come together to do amazing things!

Gibson Nascimento, Head of Solutions EMEA, will discuss the 5 steps companies can follow in order to be successful in their Open Initiatives. From Monolith enablement to opening data and services to customers and partners.

Despite the ongoing threat of cyber attacks, security awareness training remains a major challenge for management teams. Security threats are evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Traditional technology defenses are not enough to secure an organisation from its largest security gap - the human element. Human nature is a key vulnerability and cyber criminals know how to exploit it. This session titled, Creating a Culture of Security Awareness in the Workplace, will explore the strategies, challenges, and the best approach to embed a culture of Cyber Security awareness to change user behaviour within an organisation.

Attendees will receive a free copy of Cyber Security Awareness for Dummies to act as a playbook for implementing  real behavioral change and embedding a culture of cyber awareness in their organisation.

Robert O'Brien, CEO - MetaCompliance

John Lockett - CIO - Serco

Recent front page cyber attacks like Kaseya and SolarWinds have proven that no matter how good your first party cyber defences are, you can still be vulnerable to attack via your digital supply chain. We will discuss this threat and share examples of how both militaries and companies in national defense are addressing it, including:

• Leveraging how nontraditional metrics for predicting and preventing risk
• Acquisition and application of supplier intelligence
• Supplier monitoring strategy

CIO’s want to focus on things that are strategic and transformative and in the current environment the confluence of cyber security and remote working is that key point. This talk will give clear case studies of how CIO's have enabled companies to achieve transformative impact on their operations in this new world and helping their own teams to avoid the logistics trap. There will also be a brief overview of the technology and how it achieves this.

Sudeep Shetty - Global CIO - Britvic Plc

Dax Grant - CIO Global Operations - HSBC