The 2016 CIO 100 celebrates customer innovation
The theme of this year's CIO 100 is " Customers in control: The race to innovate." Image credit: One Year MBA.

The CIO 100, a symposium and awards ceremony that gathers CEOs, senior IT and business executives from the most relevant companies across the U.S, started yesterday at The Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. 

This year, the event focuses on discussing and examining industry innovations regarding customer service, with a series of panels, speakers, and interactive sessions.

CIO 100 will also grant awards to the most achieving companies, as well as this year’s hall of fame inductees.  IBM, Amazon Web Services, and cloud-based collaboration tool developers, Slack, are some of the companies sponsoring the event, and each is scheduled to have a showcase, according to CIO 100’s website.

The theme of this year’s CIO 100 is “Customers in control: The race to innovate” 

The symposium will last for three days and is expected to host over 300 attendees from numerous startups and major companies. A series of panelists and speakers are set to discuss the leading trends in customer services.

Dan Allision -VP of Dell Services- Geoff Belknap -Chief Security Officer at Slack- and Kevin Basconi -Executive VP for Domino’s Pizza- are some of the experts presiding the discussions.

The event also counts with interactive sessions that cover an array of topics such as enterprise mobility, risk management, social/collaboration tools, and Cloud.

A Gala will honor the most outstanding brands and CIOs 

Another highlight of CIO 100 is the award ceremony. 100 organizations were chosen to honor, from a pool of 500. The judging panel consists of major CEOs, VPs, and professors that selected the winners based on business value through the innovative use of technology.

Winners include the Cancer Treatments Centers of America, retail and healthcare company CVS Health, Domino’s Pizza, General Motor, HP, and broadband telecommunications multinational, Verizon.

Past recipients of the awards also include Harley Davidson for Cloud computing services, The Fedex Corporation for Enterprise Architecture, and AT&T for Business Process Managemen.

CIO 100’s Hall of Famers include executives from NBC and Cisco

The symposium features the induction of new CIO names to its hall of fame. Mike Benson AT&T Entertainment-, Stephen Gold -CVS Health-, and Randy Sloan -Southwest Airlanes- are part of the seven Chiefs that will be honored by the organization.

The second day’s agenda consists of a networking breakfast, followed by an opening Keynote about Business designing, and a series of panels throughout the day, as well as a leadership workshop called “Inspiring Crazy Loyalty” dictated by People Before Things’ Co-founder and CEO, Chris Laping.

The event will finish with closing remarks by CIO’s Editor in Chief, MaryFran Johnson, and a cocktail reception soon after. A full schedule is available at CIO’s official website.

Source: CIO