Agenda

Digital transformation means something new every decade. This sort of constant change is stressful for any organization that’s achieved success, because success means growth, and growth means accumulation—more technology, more processes, more people, more red tape. In this session, we’ll give an executive-level view of how the cloud removes the stressful burden of  legacy technology and outdated processes from the organisation. We’ll examine what digital transformation really means, and offer prescriptive guidance around decluttering the enterprise, security, culture and rediscovering your innovative roots. With AWS cloud, organisations become more agile, more efficient, and are better equipped to keep pace with constant change.

Key takeaways: how to achieve growth without burdensome accumulation, success without slowness, and constant innovation.

Building a successful tech company (or even career!) requires a lot of determination and commitment. However, that determination is a waste if you’re only focused on surviving each day. As women entrepreneurs and innovators, we must set ourselves up for success by creating a long-term plan—and we must do it today. During this session find out three ways to plan for the long-term.

Key takeaways: How to identify your purpose, how to create an MVP, what to do to scale your team and people.

The prospect of talking to your leader about diversity can be a bit daunting, especially if he is male. Did you know that 56% of women leave the tech industry mid-career? One major reason women give for leaving is lack of support from their manager. Wouldn’t it be great to know that you had his/her support? But how do you get the conversation started? In this talk we’ll look at ways you can approach the subject, and things you can do to help your manager support you. Key takeaways: Why talk to your boss about it at all?  Discuss tactics for getting your boss onside. How to make sure the conversation doesn’t end there.

With 20 years’ experience in technology and the capital markets, and being part of WiseTech Global’s growth from IPO unicorn to $5bn listed company in 2 years, Gail knows a thing or two about the importance of truth and valour in challenging the status quo. These, more than any gantt chart, will set you on a path of high-speed, highly-valued innovation.

Key takeaways: Learn characteristics of innovators who can really deliver, the environment that supports them, the importance of truth and valour to build valuable, trusted businesses, and the ‘power of no’.

Inês will share insights on how digital and technology leaders can deliver sustained business growth in the age of digital disruption. She will talk about three key transformational strategies—wisdom, experience and agility—and how these combined with relentless customer focus unlock business model innovation and customer loyalty.

Key takeaways: Explore the power of asking the right questions to drive sustained business growth, learn what powerful combination of principles, methods and focus unlocks business agility, find out the key capabilities of the emerging class of responsive digital leadership.

“Fuelling your Life” is taken from Facebook’s Fuel program which incorporates Vision Writing. The belief that you can have an exceptional career and personal life. Vision writing challenges you to identify what would make an extraordinary work and personal life and write it down in extreme detail – as If you’ve already achieved this. 

Goals are 42% more likely to be achieved if written down. Vision writing incorporates your personal life, business life and community service. This is a tool that helps you achieve the biggest goals you have. Allowing you to take action and find a balance between work and life.

As we are living and working in an age of longevity, careers are more fluid than ever before, there is a much longer timeline and exponential opportunities. From the earliest stages of your professional life, you must make deliberate choices to author your Career Story, that is consistent with your goals, aspirations, and authentic self in order to have a successful and satisfying career path. Flavia D’Alo will be sharing insights, tips, and stories on how you can become the author of your Career Story line.

Key takeaways: Seizing the Opportunity when it strikes, using Design Thinking for your Career Story, making Transitions into the next step in your career.

Sheila will concentrate on a few areas and how we can work towards a more inclusive workforce. She'll discuss the role that women are now playing in the future workforce, how the workforce is changing (– more automation, less transaction, more strategic), the importance of D&I and feeling inclusive and how this is being supported through the opportunity for female students to receive sponsorships to take up more technical subjects at University. Sheila will end with comments on the recent statistics for women representation and targets set by many firms to achieve a specific percentage by 2020 (e.g. big 4 consulting firms and the % of female partners).

What goes on in the mind of a web developer when they are assigned a bug and how they solve it. We will go through the steps of what happens when you get a bug and how to break it down and find the point of failure.

Key takeaways: How to assess a bug and recreate it, a look into the tools that can help you find the bug, how to use the tools to find the bug.

SAFe 4.5 reflects the latest in Lean-Agile thinking, more visibly incorporating scalable DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline. It demonstrates advancements in configuration, implementation guidance, and enhanced capabilities for improving the user experience and accelerating time-to-market.

Key takeaways: Digital Transformation, Dev-Ops Integration, Innovation.

Forrester’s The Sorry State of Digital Transformation in 2018 reports that in 37% of companies, CIOs lead digital transformation projects, the largest cohort out of the C-Suite. Why is such an important process in the evolution of the company still in the hands of the CIO alone, when it is clearly a critical component of the broader business strategy and its success?  The modern digital era now demands that technology leaders become product owners and business executives understand how technology can be a key driver of how the business operates, delivers and grows.  It’s within that tight integration that the transformative magic of digital can happen and add value back to the business and its customers.

Key Takeaways: Fiona will draw on her first-hand experience leading very complex transformation agendas within the banking, insurance and telco sectors to share how leaders can learn from technologists and why mindset needs to be at the heart of an organisation’s value creation.

For a long time we’ve been saying a diverse and inclusive workforce creates better businesses but there hasn’t been much statistical evidence. Now we have the data to prove it.

In a panel event hosted by VMware, leaders from Australia’s most successful businesses will discuss why diversity and inclusion in the IT workforce makes good business sense.

Using data to confirm genuine ROI, the conversation will examine how a strong diversity and inclusion program can make a major impact on an organisation’s success, from cultural engagement to brand-building, to attracting top talent and more.

This session highlights how networking and collaboration benefits both the individual and the company. When departments break down the silos and start to integrate we can get our product to market faster, problem solve more effectively and learn about new opportunities every day.

Key takeaways: Benefit your organization, enhance your own personal development, make your job easier.

There are times when you look around the room and you feel like you don't quite fit into the mould of a typical tech employee. June will share strategies she's used in her career to show how to thrive whilst being different.

Key takeaways: How to find your own strength, ensure you are always learning and keep learning, understand 'business'.

McKinsey research has shown that a gender parity in the workforce can add $12 trillion to global productivity by 2025. Obviously, your company wants a part of that! With only 16% of STEM roles occupied by women, there's no question that somewhere along the way, something is going wrong. So, how do we attract and hire women in tech?

Key Takeaways: Why diversity makes a company more innovative and productive, the blockages to achieving gender equality, how can you review your recruitment process for gender inequalities.

So you've identified the need to innovate within your business or organisation, but don't know where to start? Or perhaps you've already started but have hit a plateau and need to ramp things up again? Unlike entrepreneurs who launch startups, intrapreneurs are employees in existing companies who develop projects and explore new ideas using an entrepreneurial mindset. In this session, uncover what it takes to innovate from within a larger organization and discover just how, and when, to pitch your ideas up the chain.

Key takeaways: Tips to inspire you and your team to innovate, discover traits of an intrapreneur, uncover tips to pitch credible ideas.

You've probably heard this: never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. But as citizens, do we have enough tools and resources to make the change we want to make? Join us to hear about how technology and design can help us re-design citizenship in the 21st century.

Key takeaways: Gain insight into what it's like to do purposeful work in difficult contexts, see where you can use your skills for good,  re-think how citizens can redefine democracy in the 21st century.

Learn from our experts' discussion

Do you to get closer to the customer and create brilliant customer experiences? Do you want to explore how to prepare, get started and thrive on your agile journey? We will discuss what launching into Business Agility in your organization for success can look like. This is the session you are looking for! 

Key takeaways: Learn how to get started, thrive and scale your organization to support Business Agility, understand key decision and culture check points to look for in your organization’s Agile journey, find out what success looks like after you have progressed along Business Agility journey.

Apache Kafka, is it a pub sub messaging system, a combination of producers and consumers or messages running around in a zoo? How can one handle data flowing from different directions? How can one easily scale out a messaging system and make it fault tolerant at the same time? This session will have us walk through Kafka. It will help us understand its capabilities to solve these problems and also give us a peek into producing and consuming messages using it.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once said “Our Industry does not respect tradition, it only respects innovation”.Technology Innovation is disrupting every industry and every job function across the world. In this session, Vajira will look at strategic technology trends, why you should care and how you can prepare for them. This session will take you through a journey of exciting technology trends and explore how we should be prepared as leaders. Vajira will also share learnings from his book, Motivating Mavericks – The Secret to High Performing Teams, what type of teams we should look to build for enabling Digital Disruption and Innovation.

Key Takeaways: a glimpse of the Strategic Technology trends shaping our society, how we should prepare for these and how best to orient our teams to drive innovation.

The Agile Manifesto describes a preference for people and working software. Traditionally, Architecture has favoured big design up front, wordy Architecture tomes full of use cases, and processes to limit change.

On the surface, Architecture is the antithesis of Agile. But, Architecture too has evolved. Join me in breaking down the Ivory Tower.

Key takeaways: Are we redundant? Find out how Architecture fits in with today’s Agile world, learn about how to engage with teams to develop collaborative emerging Architectures, explore Governance: influence vs command and control.

The rate of advancement in digital is unrelenting and accelerating. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and others, offer unprecedented opportunities to reimagine and profoundly improve our businesses, the way we work and our lives.

Key takeaways: Learn what top emerging technologies are poised to change the world?, how emerging technologies are being used today across industries? and what are the human and ethical considerations for emerging technologies that leaders must consider?

Azure Stack brings the agility and innovation of cloud computing to on-premises environments. Organizations can now build modern applications across hybrid cloud environments with the right flexibility and control. The consistency is key. Developers can build applications using a consistent set of Azure services and DevOps processes and tools, then collaborate with operations to deploy to the location that best meets the business, technical, and regulatory requirements.

Key takeaways: Understand why consistency of the cloud matters in the world of Hybrid, learn about the concept of Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge, secure the data at the location of your choice.

Teresa believes that your Net Worth is only as good as your Network. Teresa will share practical strategies used by herself and by hundreds of young women that have attended the award-winning STEM Sista girls mentoring program that she created.

Key takeaways: understanding your brand and what you have to offer, the secrets to body language at networking events, the power and importance of follow-up.

In this session Amy covers:

- What makes a leader Inclusive? – The leadership behaviours that foster belonging

- Why fear doesn’t motivate - Creating psychological safety is the key

- Why follower-ship matters - The benefits of encouraging learning from diverse perspectives

Katharine's address will focus specifically on encouraging women to look within their network for the mentors they already have, but don’t yet realise. Exploring how we can get rid of the idea of mentor or mentoring programs as a formal arrangement; something that requires huge investment and commitment from all parties, Katharine will share how she created a ‘Speed Mentoring’ program at Oracle of which enables ‘mentoring moments’ and why she has seen huge success.

Key takeaways: encourage you to identify your own mentoring moments and how to use your network to access more mentorship than a program ever could.

The combination of data explosion and exponential computation growth over the past fifty years has opened up whole new challenges for us to work on and solve together – challenges we never could have tackled or even foreseen in the past. This “digital disruption” is transforming the world around us. This presentation will help you to consider five innovations that will change our lives in the next five years.

Key takeaways: insight into the role leaders need to play, explore the advancements in technologies like AI, blockchain, lattice cryptography and quantum computing, understand your role to play here.

In this session, I will share my experience in Cloud computing. It will include introduction to building microservices and how an existing  business can be migrated to the Cloud. I will share important learning bits to avoid common mistakes while working with managed services. In the end, I will take you through the latest cloud offerings and how they will help in exploring current and future technology trends.

Key takeaways: Microservices, migrating existing platform to Cloud, future tech trends using Cloud.

You've heard that DT is the next competitive advantage for innovation. Do you want to know how to include or embed Design Thinking into your agile sprints? This talk will demonstrate how Design Thinking paired with agile is a powerful combination and why it’s the next competitive advantage to deliver products that your customers need and will love.

The session will cover common practices across DT and agile ways of working with a summary of why the agile mindset is key to success.

Key takeaways: Design Thinking, what it is, when and how to use it with Agile, dispelling common agile myths and it's application beyond IT, how the DT and agile mindset is key for long term transformation success.

A career in technology has brought Bethan Timmins all the way from the rain-soaked Welsh valleys to the coast of Australia, where she now heads up Equal Experts Australia. This is her story so far (and what she’s learned along the way).

Key takeaways: Why you don’t have to have come from a coding background to be in tech, Life takes you in full circles - how to embrace them, why men should be PART of the conversation not THE conversation.  

Details coming soon...

The reality is that AI is still at its minimum viable product but the speed in which it is growing means that simply looking six months ahead the industry may well be unrecognisable. The top challenges for AI is getting access to adequate data sources in order for the algorithms to learn, and how this is used to improve payments overall for the greater good. This session would discuss how data science is the game changer for payments, and how women are best positioned to realise the full potential of it as a solution.

If we want to improve diversity in the world of work then we have to look to our education system and examine:

 • Who is teaching our children 

 • What they are teaching our children and 

 • What effect this might be having on student skills, aspirations and biases

Key takeaways: explore options to volunteer as a mentor or guest speaker on STEM at schools in your local area, find out if it is possible to get school groups in to tour your workplace and see what is happening at the coalface of technology, if you have children then campaign to have STEM programs run in their schools, support any teachers who want to drive these initiatives and drive any positive links you can between industry and K-12 education.

Coming to Australia few years back, I began from step one and slowly stepped up the ladder with immense learning opportunities. You might have been a superstar previously, but coming to a new place often requires a fresh beginning. I shall share some vital learnings that may show the light to immigrants and locals seeking new opportunities.

Key takeaways: Why Down under is 'the land of opportunity,' how to shape your profile that shines out of hundreds, why learn like you're just starting out.

Writing good code is hard, but that doesn’t mean that we should never tend to that mythical abstract of `fun` and sustainable code. The goal of this talk is to help you understand the concepts behind functional programming like lambdas, recursion, higher order functions and more. We will go through a few examples in Kotlin and try to think functionally to write cleaner and more maintainable code.

Key takeaways: Understand basic functional programming principles, Use Kotlin to apply these principles in your everyday work, Learn a functional way to write concise and maintainable code.

I selfishly believe in continuous improvement. The more time I can save you, the bigger, better and more energy you have for your next big idea that will change the world. I’ll showcase several projects; the processes, the thought and the technology behind them.

Key takeaways: Learn about the double diamond design map, learn to love the problem, not the solution, people before process, every single time.

Cloud computing environments can be very dynamic, autonomously shifting the scale and composition of infrastructure in response to demand. This dynamism introduces different risks and vulnerability considerations.

This session will expose the security challenges with Cloud Computing at scale and discuss innovative and intelligent security detection and remediation technologies.

Specifically, this session will discuss potential cloud security events and their impact, explain how AI/ML and intelligent security controls work in cloud and provide a technical demonstration of security controls and continuous compliance on AWS cloud at scale, offer tips, tricks, and tools to use for effective and automated cloud security.

Key takeaways: gain a greater awareness of top security threats in a cloud environment and practical, automated mechanisms to detect, respond, and prevent threats at scale.

Have we forgotten the customer when we explore and get excited about the latest tech? How to go from swiping right to wedding bells to win the hearts and minds of customers.

Key takeaways: know how organisations are using the latest tech to engage customers - not just for tech sake, the customer cannot be bought with one swipe, how to navigate the future of engaging customers.

The Elastic Stack helps thousands of organizations ensure quality of service and improve infrastructure performance and reliability. During this session, learn how to:

· Eliminate potential blind spots by converging all data without limitations on size, source format, or artificial ingestion rate caps.

· Increase system reliability, performance and stability by proactively identifying and alerting users to potential issues, before they impact end users.

· Reduce time to resolve issues by having a highly performant way to search, explore and analyze all relevant data.

This dynamic workshop will be a combination of demonstration, presentation, hands-on exploration, and group discussion.

Audience: Technical audience – This session is designed for developers, development managers, devops, infrastructure engineers, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), NOC Specialists, and project managers seeking to drive efficiency in managing their infrastructure. No previous experience with elasticsearch is required.

Type of session: Tech, hands on, learn a new skill. Attendees must bring their own laptop to join in.

Amazon is a company of builders. Our Culture and Leadership Principles empower us to be owners and innovators while maintaining our customer centricity.

This workshop will share our insights on culture and mechanisms that drive customer obsession, long term thinking, and invention on behalf of customers.

Learning outcomes:

• How you can formulate data-driven, customer-centric ideas, turning them into features and services, and getting them to market quickly.
• Learn about the culture and mechanisms used to drive the rapid pace of innovation at AWS that you can implement straight away.
• Join our hands-on Ideation session “Working Backwards from the Customer” using convergent and divergent thinking.

Intended audience:

Product managers, Technology professionals and leaders, Innovation and Strategy leaders, Digital professionals.

Please note this workshop is closed to media.

Do you know how our code languages came to be, or what they are best used for? This educational session explores the history of coding and how it has evolved to the different programming languages we use today. The session will also look at opportunities that the future of coding presents.

Key takeaways: The history and evolution of coding, an overview of coding languages and their benefits, use cases and commercial applications, exploring machine learning and artificial intelligence as the future of coding.

We’ve seen the results proving companies with females on boards are stronger, and workplace environments with female leaders are safer. So why in 2018 do we have just under ½ of males feeling uncomfortable to work with women 1:1? What will happen in the future if males are left behind on this journey of empowering females? Benjamin Green, Business leader, innovator, entrepreneur, and Apple ambassador, will take us through his realization of how mentoring and sponsoring women can change the future of a workplace.

Fiona is passionate about innovation and technology that makes a real difference in the workplace. Fiona will share her journey beginning with limited technology experience to now leading the technology function for the largest service line in EY Asia Pacific.

Key takeaways: Find your sponsors to help your professional journey, thoughts to consider when building a high performing team, including across cultures, how to find and take opportunities as they present themselves.

Most companies come up with lists of features when doing their 90 day or yearly road mapping. They measure success based on output rather than outcomes. Teams deliver features at a fast pace, often forgetting to take the time to understand the customers' problems and make sure they're building the right thing. This session will be an introduction to creating a roadmap based on goals/problems and the benefits of this approach. 

Key takeaways: Find out how this type of roadmap helps teams be more focused and helps the PO/PM bring back the teams to the initial goal if they diverge, discover how by involving teams in solving the business problems will help them get more engaged with the product, learn that problem/goal based problems encourage innovation.

Have you ever heard of Xamarin, C# and MvvmCross? If you want to know more about cross-platform mobile development, join me in this session where I will give you an overview how to build a Cooking Recipes App running on iOS and Android integrated with the latest Cosmos DB technologies.

Key takeways: Xamarin, C#, Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Cosmos DB, MVVM pattern with MVVMCross 6.0.

Google Glass. 3D TVs. Microsoft Zune. Sony Betamax. Crystal Pepsi.  What do these products have in common?  They were all commercial failures.  Why? Not a single one solved an actual customer need. Human Centred Design gives us insight into customer needs, and with it, the chance to create successful products that solve business and everyday problems.

Key takeaways: Learn what is Human Centred Design, why is this approach useful, how can you use it at work and in your life?

Data is now the most valuable asset of a business, and with that comes the threats in keeping the data secure and usable. While we speed ahead further into the digital age, what does that mean for data security? What is the new normal for IT Security?Specifically, what role will IT providers play with the shifting focus onto data security. 

Key takeaways: The rise of the specialised Security Practise, why more and more companies will turn to outsourced IT providers, collaboration will be king, IT providers finding synergies and partnerships, and an open ecosystem between vendors.

How do we learn from our mistakes? How can you start to implement and put things into action, even if your company is a Dinosaur?

Stacey shares her experience of always being on the back foot to putting ideas into action that actually receive traction, to being at the forefront of change.

Key Takeaways: Discover how you can put those ah-huh moments from this conference into action. Why should you action, what’s in it for you. How actioning new ideas can become the norm.

The Jury is out on the future impact that Blockchain will have on our lives. I believe it will become a fundamental part of the economy and social system and I want to be part of it. We are living in an extremely unique and exciting time, especially if you are an engineer in technology. Blockchain may be the final drop in the wave of Digital Disruption.With the current explosion of projects and trials it is more important than ever that women have a seat at the Blockchain table. Are you?

Key takeaways:  understand the current blockchain landscape, stepping out of the comfort zone without compromising our true nature, going fast & slow to find opportunities in new tech.

Creative coding is at the intersection between art and technology. Code can be used to create music, graphics, interactive sculptures and more. This can bring more girls into coding by showing them how technology can enrich the interests they already love. We will discuss how creative coding can engage more girls with technology design and creation.

Key takeaways: What makes creative coding a space where girls can thrive in, The importance of respecting students’ individuality, How to get started with creative coding.

Changing a career path in IT as a woman in her late 30s is not easy. Add to it the factor of wishing to do it in a new country and having 2 kids under 3 without relatives to assist you. Don’t think “it’s too late, if I would have done it differently”- it’s there, waiting for you to grab it.

Key takeaways: Tips and tricks in fast tracking your career path as a women immigrant, career vs life balance -  the compromise and how to manage it, women managers to woman immigrant – how we could help each other?

How can you use data to make informed decisions about your product and help your customer make the right decisions? We will see how to identify our customers and users, using a real product example, and learn how to use different data sets and product management techniques to build meaningful and innovative products that help the Customers achieve their goals. 

Technology is changing faster than ever before. Concepts and solutions that worked yesterday become limitations to innovation and disruption tomorrow. Specialization and linear career paths and experiences while still important are giving way to generalists who bring diversity of experience and thought to teams and organizations.

With proportionally lower numbers of women entering STEM secondary and tertiary education, what’s the experience for women from diverse backgrounds and non-linear career pathways in today rapidly changing technology ecosystem.

Key Takeaways: Why diversity of experience is key to true diversity of thought, how diversity of thought is key to solving the problems of tomorrow in new, creative and innovative ways, the diverse pathways today that women enter technology and are a key part of the future a rapidly (and accelerating) changing technology landscape.

Some people have the misconception that design is just creating ‘pretty pictures’. This is not the case; there is a science to creating the right ‘pretty picture’. Companies need to immerse design across their entire organisation to avoid becoming yesterday’s news.

I will talk through case studies and tools that will help any member in a development team to ensure the product is ‘on brand’, ‘user-centric’ and why this is important to ensure the success of your product.

Key takeaways: Business Analysts and Quality Analysts will benefit from understanding the finer details of design, Developers will gain empathy for design and how to work better with designers, Quality Analysts will leave knowing how to quickly notice problems with a design before release.

Mandi will take you through her background and what led her to launch Babyology, which became Australia's largest digital publisher for parents. She will talk about the journey from launch all the way to exit with all the many ups and downs in between. She will let you know mistakes she made and how you can learn from them.  

Key Takeaways - Provide you with an honest and personal account of what it’s like to start your own business and be a female entrepreneur in the digital space, identify common mistakes that are often made and how to learn from these mistakes, advice to guide you on your journey.

Charles Darwin once said that “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”. Change is all around us, in everything we do, from the way we pay for our morning coffee, maintain our fitness regimes, to the way we operate in the workplace. For many change in uncomfortable, confronting and overwhelming – and often we avoid change wherever possible – but in an ever disruptive world – change in inevitable – so how so we best adapt to this environment, and more importantly survive!

Key takeaways: Where the future of work is heading through technology innovations, how to get ahead of the curve and lead the change, how to succeed in a constantly changing world.