Making IT & business work - Executive briefing with ThoughtWorks' CTO, Rebecca Parsons

Abril and ThoughtWorks invite you to an afternoon of networking and thought provoking conversation.ThoughtWorks' leading innovators have created advances in software and IT practices followed by IT leaders world-wide. Our ideas are the distilled insight and experience of over 1700 of the world's leading, skilled technologists, project managers, and consultants.

Few Businesses today can thrive without significant technology investment and rapid technological transition. Cycle-time reduction of application delivery is key. The times when only one or two releases of new software a year are gone.

In this talk, Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks CTO, will leverage her 20+ years' application development experience to describe a variety of techniques to allow companies to release software more rapidly and cope with the fast pace of change. Successful approaches incorporate not only technology practices but also organizational strategies.

These techniques include continuous delivery - an evolutionary approach to enterprise architecture, and more effective use of software metrics. Rebecca will also discuss how leaders can manage the organizational structure of IT to influence the ability of an enterprise to extract maximum value from their technology investments.

About the speaker

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 20 years' application development and computer science research experience. She has extensive experience leading the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. She received a Director's Post Doctoral Fellowship from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Prior to returning for her Ph.D, Rebecca worked for Caterpillar Tractor Company, Thomson Components Mostek, and Amdahl Communications. Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.