While it may not occur to us on a daily basis, there is a widespread cultural tendency toward quick decisions and quick action. This pattern has resulted in many of society’s greatest successes, but even more of its failures. We have begun to reward speed over quality, and the negative effects suffered in both our personal and professional lives are potentially catastrophic. Pontefract proposes a return to balance between the three components of productive thought—dreaming, deciding, and doing—combining creative, critical, and applied thinking. “Open thinking” is a cyclical process in which creativity is encouraged; critiquing leads to better decisions; and thoughtful action delivers positive, sustainable results. Get tips and techniques to use in your organization!

Hayes surfaces ideas on how the world’s biggest and most innovative companies transform customer and employee experiences. Learn how the best and brightest organizations take a human-first approach to finally meet the transformational promise of Big Data by delivering moments of clarity to employees and customers alike through engaging digital experiences.

Becoming information-driven enables key stakeholders within an organization to leverage all available enterprise data and content to gain the best possible understanding of the meaning and insights it carries. Connecting enterprise data along topical lines across all available sources provides people with the collective knowledge and expertise of the organization in context. Parker discusses the challenges preventing data-intensive organizations from becoming “information-driven” and the current state and future possibilities of insight engines.

Join Real Story Group founder Tony Byrne for a strategic tour of the new, employee-centric digital workplace. Where does Office 365 fit in this new paradigm? How should you plan your investments for 2020 and beyond? Come and gain a fast-paced and provocative assessment.

Learn how we are leveraging Office 365 to deliver an award-winning modern digital workplace. The approach is unique in that was “governance-first”—with a cross-functional team gathered to align on vision and business objectives that provided a framework for the design and deployment of the intranet and team collaboration services. We describe how we did it, show you where we are with several demos, and share the templates and web parts we are using to adapt for your solution.

Office 365 is designed to provide an “out-of-the-box” experience for your colleagues, but what if the default settings and approaches aren’t the right fit? Join a noted Office 365 guru to understand your options for optimizing information architectures and user experiences across the platform.

The need to collaborate and communicate effectively with colleagues, customers, and partners has never been more paramount than now. In fact, the ability to adapt and evolve has become a competitive advantage. The high rate of innovation coming from Microsoft has many heads spinning as to how to enable end users to leverage these tools to their fullest potential. In this session, we discuss common collaboration and communication scenarios inside and outside the organization, and how Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, One Drive for Business, and Outlook Groups all fit together. Key takeaways include discussing the pros and cons for each workload in Office 365; understanding options around security and sharing content inside and outside the organization; and gaining a better understanding of how to support user groups to leverage these tools.

For those of you unfamiliar with this format, the concept is simple: Bring your toughest, thorniest, most intractable O365 conundrum or challenge and a team of experienced O365 gurus will compete to offer you the best advice in 2 minutes or less. But there’s a twist … we use noise-canceling headphones to make sure the gurus can’t hear the answers that the other panelists give. Come and get insightful, likely controversial, and sometimes entertaining answers to your most pressing questions. The person deemed to have stumped the consultants the most will go home with his or her own noise-canceling headphones!