Professional Development Summit 2023

PDSis a volunteer, community-led conference, leveraging local expertise to support the growth of our region’s ICT workforce focusing onTechnology,Innovation,ManagementandLeadershiptopics.  It is jointly presented with our five Partner Associations:Project Management Institute (PMI),International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA);Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS);Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC); andDigital Nova Scotia (DNS).

Professional Development Summit

An event that is a collaborative approach to increasing our region’s competitive advantage: a highly skilled ICT workforce!

Saint Mary's University

Tickets are not longer available for this event.

<p>The Professional Development Summit, is an event that is a collaborative approach to increasing our region’s competitive advantage: a highly skilled ICT workforce! PDS is a volunteer, community-led conference, leveraging local expertise to support the growth of our region’s ICT workforce focusing on Innovation, Technology, Management and Leadership topics. It is jointly presented by five organizations: Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS); Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC); Digital Nova Scotia (DNS); International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA); and the Project Management Institute (PMI).</p>

Agenda

Registration, Breakfast & Networking​

PD Summit Welcome - Michelle Murray PDS Chair

Opening Address

Keynote: Shawn Kanungo - Strategy in a World of Disruption

Refreshments/Networking

Keynote Workshop: Shawn Kanungo - The 'Disrupt Yourself' Competition

Lunch

Travel Time to Breakout Sessions in Classrooms

Session 1

Travel Time/Networking

Session 2

Session 3

Network Cocktail Reception & Door Prizes

Employer Panel

Today's highly competitive job market has made talent acquisition more challenging than ever before. At the same time, simply attracting qualified talent is proving to not be enough. How do you engage your teams to amplify performance, and hire for diverse perspectives, skills, and potential? How do you move from talking about the lack of qualified candidates and the labour shortage to how to onboard the most qualified and diverse candidates that will add to your culture? Juliet will combine her 30 years of experience in IT staffing architecture and her EDI&A experience to answer these questions by providing real-life scenarios, case studies and Canadian data. Moving the conversation from the questions of “why” to “how”; Juliet will provide examples of how organizations have been “consciously inclusive” in the hiring process, hiring for “culture add” versus culture fit, as well as building more diversity into their leadership while mobilizing stakeholders to enable sustainability.

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Accessibility in Talent Architecture

Privacy and cybersecurity is a must, both from legislation and public expectation. In a world where awareness is growing and fines are increasing, it's vital to understand how privacy laws and cybersecurity governance affect your business and your relationship with your clients. This talk will cover the different types of privacy legislation you need to look out for (in Canada and abroad), what the consequences of an incident could be (it's far more than fines!), and how to address specific risks to individual privacy that you may not have ever considered.

Cybersecurity and Privacy Governance

As technology continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, organizations are increasingly looking to digital transformation to stay competitive and meet the evolving needs of their customers. However, in the midst of this rush to adopt new technologies, it is important to remember that people are at the heart of any successful digital transformation. Organizations must prioritize building a culture of digital fluency, empowering employees with the right skills and mindset to effectively utilize new technologies and drive innovation.

Digital Transformation & Innovation

Learn how Builder Studios as a technology-focused innovation strategy, helps organizations create an environment and path for technology innovations from within. Utilizing deep understanding of the intersection between technology and human capabilities, like problem solving and imagination, Builder Studios develop custom solutions to bridge the gap between existing technology infrastructure, resources, and ideas to create change that matters, what may have been unimaginable. But how important is a centralized space where teams can brainstorm, share knowledge, imagine a difference through technology? Or is culture and environment more important to what is essentially a human endeavor – the experience of creating value through innovation.

Fast Tracking Technological Innovation through Builder Studios

Atlantic organizations are leading the charge to increase the number of women in tech through a collaborative approach to community building. Gain insight on programming and resources actively driving the attraction and retention of women to our region’s growing technology sector. This panel will highlight both organizations and initiatives that continue to support the advancement of women in tech-related careers.

Women In Technology Panel

Storytelling is a powerful, effective, and science-backed communication tool that excites us, inspires us, and helps us build lasting connections. We all have plenty of practice telling stories in our personal and professional lives, but how can we harness the power of story to enhance our leadership presence? This session will discuss the storytelling skills, strategies, and structures leaders need to project authenticity and confidence. By pulling from advanced writing and presenting techniques, listeners will be introduced to narrative-based approaches that serve executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders at every stage of their careers. Participants will learn about the most effective kinds of storytelling by drawing on each other’s experiences in leadership and, of course, each other’s stories. Storytelling provides a powerful opportunity to make our visions, ideas, and perspectives not only heard but truly felt by an audience, making it an essential tool for every leader.

Leadership Presence: Transforming Communication Through Storytelling

In this session, Robert will introduce a new acronym (HIVEMIND) for categorizing wastes for knowledge workers. He will also demonstrate how the fundamentals of Lean apply to knowledge workers, with a behavioral science twist

The 8 barriers that are ruining your team's productivity

Explainability is often proposed as the principle means of achieving AI model trust. However, there are many means of determining whether we can trust AI, and explainability is not always the best one. This lecture will lay out a framework to understand when explainability is needed, and when it is not, as well as its appropriate uses, limitations, and alternatives.

How can we trust black box AI models

To optimize your on-prem to cloud transformation, it's important to align your IT and business goals, have a clear strategy and roadmap, and utilize a solution provider with full cloud expertise. This will ensure operational efficiency, resilience, security, compliance, scalability, and cost optimization. It's also important to view cloud not just as public cloud, but as a way of efficiently consuming and creating resources, regardless of location, to support business objectives.

Optimizing your On-Prem to Cloud Transformation

Come to this session to hear ideas on agile from experienced agilists. Through a panel discussion, we will share knowledge on how we have dealt with challenges with agile and suggestions for those who wish to expand on their agile journey.

Agile Panel

In this session, Graham will explore how the design-thinking framework can be adapted for almost any situation to help teams work together effectively in order to develop a shared understanding of a problem, creative ways to solve it and have fun in the process!

How Design Thinking can help teams collaborate better and build better

In recent years, provincial and federal privacy regulators, as well as their international counterparts, have emphasized the importance of the â€˜accountabilityâ€™ privacy principle, which states an organization is accountable for the personal information under its control. Best practice guidance in this area is focused on the concept of a Privacy Management Program. Privacy Management Programs (PMPs) define how your organization will manage its unique privacy risks and meet its obligations under privacy laws and regulations. They are a best practice, effectively demonstrating accountability for the personal information under the control of your organization, including the data processed by your external service providers. Developing and implementing a strong PMP can help your organization maintain ongoing trust with your customers and prospects.

Managing Privacy Risks, Ensuring Legislative Compliance

Technical Data is one aspect of any project/organisation that is often misunderstood and overlooked. Many assume that success comes from the talent of the workers, but that success will be limited if the backbone, the technical data, is mismanaged, misaligned, and has no integrity. Many organisations fail to realise the importance of proper data management, and what is "good data" vs "bad data."

Data integrity, and the importance of not treating it as an afterthought

So you got a job as a data scientist at a large organization. But most data scientists work solo, and many organizations are just beginning their AI journey. So how do you build data science capacity? We all know how this ends up- you were hired to build data science capacity in your department, but you are not given well defined business use cases to solve, so you end up building AI prototypes in search of a business problem. And being one of the few data scientists in your whole organization, they assume you can just utilize their antiquated analytics stack, and you find out quickly your prototypes don’t leave your desktop, as there is no way to deploy your ML models at scale.​

Building Data Science Capacity at Your New Job as an Enterprise Data Scientist

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Professional Development Summit 2023

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