Aetna CEO Williams to keynote 5th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
"Balancing Innovation and Cost Leadership in Your Firm" is this year's theme for the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium expected to gather some 500 CIOs and CTOs.
Aetna Chief Executive Officer Ronald Williams will be the first keynote speaker when information and technology officers converge at the at the Kresge Auditorium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 21, 2008 for the 5th annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.
The theme of the international event, which will be attended by some 500 CIOs and CTOs as well as senior technology officers, will be “Balancing Innovation and Cost Leadership in Your Firm.”
Gopi Bala, co-chair of the symposium, said the conference would offer the attendees a unique program combining the pragmatism of industry with leading-edge academic research to help information officers perform better. The conference will combine seminal academic insights on IT trends with CIO best practice recommendations within MIT’s setting that have proven high-value learning and networking environment.
“In an era of unprecedented global competition, CIOs need to be at the top of their game,” said Bala. “We’re excited about the quality of this year’s program, which will address topics that are very much on the minds of today’s technology executives.”
The other resource speakers in the symposium include more than 50 senior executives and professors from corporate giants Rolls Royce, Alcatel-Lucent, Marriott International, Massachusetts General Hospital, Bank of America, Forbes.com, IDC, Adobe, Special Olympics International, MIT, and Harvard Business School.
Bala said the conference would feature chief information officers and the academic keynote panels. In addition, he added, there would be a luncheon to honor winners of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium 2008 Award for IT Innovation.
“The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium focuses on the core value propositions associated with global delivery models, emerging capabilities, and best practices. It is an opportunity to look beyond the day-to-day issues and focus on solutions that are either here already or just over the horizon,” said Michael Johnson, a co-chair of the global event.
Symposium organizers said the sessions would help participants attain better performances by leveraging innovative technologies while maintaining cost-efficiency programs. The topics to be discussed include the greening of the data center, virtualization of the IT infrastructure, the “analytics-driven” enterprise, and enterprise 2.0 technology enablers. Discussions will also focus on key vertical industries, including financial services, telecommunications, utilities, healthcare and life sciences, and the public sector, the organizers added.
The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is sponsored by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Boston, in association with the Boston Chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM), and the MIT Center for Digital Business. Those who wish to register or find out more details about the event can visit http://www.mitcio.com.
