October, 2007
by Kathy Steffens, CMG‘07 Program Chair
Kathy was first-line manager of the Defense Department's Defense Logistics Agency corporate office of capacity management from 1992 until 2004. Prior to that, she was the lead capacity planning technician (mainframe platform) in that office from 1987 to 1992. She was the Program Chair for CMG2002.
About the Author
Kathy Steffens
Late-Breaking Technology Paper Submission: Six papers have been accepted through the late-breaking paper category for presentation during the conference. Presentations include:
These presentations will be included in the on-line agenda shortly.
Conference Schedule: You can see the whole conference program schedule on-line right now by way of the CMG web pages at http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2007/. Under the Conference Program option, you can customize personal preferences for sessions of interest via the Conference Scheduler option. This is a very cool feature where you can create your own printable schedule of sessions you plan to attend. Of course, you are free to choose any weekday sessions once you get on-site, but it is a nice option to be able to locate sessions on topics of special interest to you before-hand! It's an easy way to create a document that you can hand to your manager that shows the value of attending the conference via those selected sessions.
Keynote Speaker Session: We have exciting news on the keynote speakers since the last MeasureIT edition! Our Monday starting session at 1:15 PM will be a 75-minute double keynote featuring:
Jerred Ruble, President and CEO of TeamQuest Corporation, will present his viewpoint on the topic "Is Capacity Planning Still Relevant?" This is certainly a topic of much interest to CMG members!
An inaugural keynote panel of past Michelson Award winners Dr. Annie Shum, Dr. Jeff Buzen, Dr. Bernie Domanski, and Mark Friedman will present a discussion on "Cultivating ‘Next Practices' Innovative Thinkers". After examining key strategies employed by past and present ‘Next Practices' innovators, the panel will focus on exploring the way current and emerging technologies are likely to play a key role in sustaining ‘Next Practices' IT-enabled innovations.
Plenary Speaker: Our plenary speaker, Dale Dauten, is working with key CMG personnel to tailor his presentation "The Best at Better" to CMG'07 attendees. The focus will be on how we can improve the knowledge we have of our work environment to better leverage our expertise in the organization. Dale will follow up his morning session with a breakout session in the afternoon using specific examples suggested by attendees.
Poster sessions: Poster sessions will be held Thursday at 5:15 PM in one of the larger conference areas. Poster sessions are a way for authors to present papers in a less-formal format, where interaction between attendee and author can be more personalized. Each poster presenter will have a large poster board on which to place slides of their presentation, and for an hour, attendees can wander around and review up to 13 poster boards and discuss the presentations with the authors. This was a hit in 2006, so we will reprise this option at CMG'07!
Volunteers for on-site tasks: You have the opportunity to sign up on-line for on-site tasks of session chairs and session monitors. As last year, volunteers can sign up directly for sessions of their choice. We will be trying a revised version of monitoring this year where a monitor will be responsible for tracking up to three rooms for an entire morning or afternoon. Basically, a monitor's duties focus on making sure assigned sessions are running smoothly and have access to hotel and conference assistance via a radio headset. To view available monitoring opportunities, click on http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/monitor.pl.
If you are interested in chairing a session, check available sessions at http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/chair.pl. Session chairs introduce the speaker and assist the presenter with managing the session. In addition, there will be 8 industry luminaries presenting in-depth multi-session presentations via CMG-T sessions throughout the week, included in the weekday conference registration cost. For an additional nominal fee, attendees can participate in 1 of 7 concurrent Sunday Workshops in both morning and afternoon 3-hour sessions. It will be hard to choose only 2 sessions to attend, so do check out the list of workshops!
With this year's quality and breadth of offerings, you will not want to miss out! Plan to attend CMG'07, and register now. We look forward to seeing you in December!