TRACKS & TRAILS 2024

Building Business Capability features 7 conference Tracks and 5 Trails to help you navigate the wealth of content.

Tracks Trails Features

TRACKS

- Building People Capability
  
  The world continues to change at an ever-increasing pace and businesses are under immense pressure to keep up with and adapt to these changes. The ability to adapt and successfully enable change requires leadership, interpersonal skills and human capability development. Today’s practitioners are expected to be nimbler, to work within shorter delivery cycles and to organize and run effective teams in remote and hybrid modes. People-centric actions play a prominent role in achieving these milestones. The journey can involve training for emerging skills and competencies, behaviour and cultural assessments, organizational adjustments, and new role assignments. Sessions in this track are designed to equip and lead you to organizational success.

- Building Product Capability
  
  Critical to all businesses today is to be in market with the products and services that resonate with and delight our customers. After all, that’s what they are paying for. Clear accountabilities for assuring we have the right products of sufficient quality is not new. It has been a mainstay of physical product organizations for over 50 years. Alignment from top line of business executives to product developers to operations in a virtuous lifecycle has been the norm. Today, however, we are challenged by incredibly short times in market and pressures on time to market as we digitalize what we offer and do. Adoption of sound product management principles, practices and responsibilities is making it’s way into our virtual and omnichannel based products and we need to get it right to satiate impatient customers. We must assure that a feature of a software solution in a development effort is completely in line with the larger interests of marketing, operational, financial and legal/compliance executives and that accountability in design choices is in sync. This track will tackle the needs, approaches and responsibilities in order to be confident that all contributors are on the same page and focused on product and service success in market.

- Building Data Capability
  As an obstacle to the success of your initiatives, data is often the proverbial iceberg – 90% of the problem is out of sight and often out of mind until it’s too late. What kind of initiatives? Data is central to just about everything happening these days:
  - Digital transformation
  - Metrics and business intelligence
  - Start-ups
  - Mergers & acquisitions
  - Integration of value streams
  - Excellent product design
  - Satisfying customer journeys
  - Compliance
  - And more …
  What challenges with data do you face? Data quality is often a big one, followed by data sprawl, lack of accessibility, and poorly thought-through design that ultimately fails for decision-makers at all levels. Misunderstanding and miscommunication about data abounds and often lies at the heart of many other issues that professionals face.
  
  There are really no technical fixes for most of these challenges. Real solutions lie with professionals ensuring the right business acumen ‘hits’ while products and architectures are in ideation and design. Data literacy needs to be an integral part of your skillset, not an afterthought. You need to understand how to define data, design it, and manipulate it into the shapes that business people and executives need.
  
  These days, data is simply too important to be left to specialists. This track will show you how to ensure data is an enabler of your success rather than a looming and largely invisible obstacle.

- Building Knowledge Capability
  Explicit knowledge is the hidden energizer for all things digital and all things transformative. We’re living in the Knowledge Age, but many of us are woefully unprepared.
  - Do you know what sources of knowledge you have?
  - Where that knowledge is located?
  - What questions the knowledge can answer?
  We need to be looking at tools and techniques to bring knowledge to bear when and as needed. People need to be connected in pinpoint fashion to relevant knowledge in real time, whether in operations, decision making, or products.
  New technologies such as ML, AI and NLP promise to help, but how much is hype? Meanwhile, there are too many knowledge vacuums, little black holes, in our organizations. Some symptoms:
  - Your organization seems at a loss when workers move on to new responsibilities or jobs.
  - It’s hard to trace and change the business logic behind repetitive decisions.
  - Your process for developing, deploying and retracting business policy seems ad hoc or frayed.
  - You’re left wondering whether someone, somewhere has already defined the business term you need.
  These days you can Google just about anything, but sometimes we can’t find the simplest things in our own organizations. Imagine if we could harness our knowledge directly in our product designs and where appropriate, even support self-service for our customers and business partners.
  
  Come to this track to find out how you can energize your initiatives by leveraging new knowledge practices in your organization.

- Foundational
  
  Core concepts that underlie the smooth running of customer service, product development, knowledge retention and deployment are key components in delivering competitive advantage to best-in-class organizations. The Foundations Track brings you up-to-speed on the state of the art in many of these business essentials.

- High-Impact Techniques
  
  A wide range of techniques is available to help professionals do their jobs. Knowing which techniques have proven best-in-class is key in leading your organization toward business excellence. Hear what practitioners who have mastered the techniques have to say and find out which techniques can help you leap ahead. This Track engages attendees in critical assessment of available techniques, related practices, and their applied results.

- Practitioner’s Chat
  
  Timely issues kicked-off by a world authority, then opened up for attendees to share experiences, questions and solutions with peers. Face specific challenges? Wondering about best practices? Proactively get answers!

TRAILS

- Business Analysis
  
  Business analysis is about enabling change in an organizational context by defining needs and recommending solutions that provide value to stakeholders. It is a disciplined approach for introducing and managing change through unknown and unmapped territory allowing for a realization of benefits, avoidance of costs, and the identification of new opportunities. The effective use of business analysis ensures that an organization improves the way they do business.

- Business Architecture
  
  Most organizations today are undertaking some form of Business Architecture to be better able to convert their strategic intentions into actionable plans, to realize the ability to be more responsive and agile as a business to reduce time-to-market and improve customer responsiveness, and to better deal with digital transformation. Understanding the critical sets of moving parts that make up a robust business architecture, such as data, processes, technologies and people is essential. Knowing how they interconnect for a purpose is critical to be sure all of our investments in change and designs of capabilities are aligned. This trail will make sure we know how to connect the dots from beginning to end, ensuring our teams are on the same page and our value chains aligned.

- Everyday AI
  
  The Everyday AI Trail explores the fast-paced introduction of AI tools into the day-to-day hands-on tasks and responsibilities of knowledge workers. This Trail is specifically designed to showcase how some AI tools, requiring no advanced programming or development skills, can be applied in everyday work.
  
  Join us to explore practical use of AI, with insightful case studies, spotlight lessons, and discussions that can enhance your professional work products.
  
  Discover how you can harness the power of Everyday AI and take your professional capabilities to the next level.

- Business Design
  Whether you are designing product, a GUI, a system – or even an enterprise – good design has certain common elements. Among them are structure, cohesiveness, minimalization, appeal, and above all, achievement of goals. This BBC Trail explores best practices of design with a capital “D”. Find out about the practical art and engineering techniques that you can apply in your everyday work.
  - Products: function, appearance, quality
  - Engineering: form, fit, function
  - Visualization: hierarchy, balance, scale
  - Systems: quality, timeliness, cost-effectiveness
  How do you encourage creative problem solving across the board? How can you hone design skills for your particular area of responsibility? What’s been tried and what has proven successful? Hear would leading thought leaders and practitioners world-wide have to say about this crucial concern.

- Business Leadership
  
  Analysts, designers and architects must have the abilities to unearth and articulate specific knowledge about the business required to communicate and transform business capabilities. Models alone, however, are insufficient to gain adoption for innovative solutions or to achieve buy in from senior staff or front-line workers. The more there is a potential change in what we will do and how we do things, the more we have to call on the leadership skills of professionals and managers. As we grow in our careers, it is the leadership acumen that will take us forward and assure business results and personal success whether we are in formal management roles or not. This trail will feature the competencies we can develop as we take on greater responsibilities for assuring business change and as we more and more guide others in their quest to grow.

FEATURES

- Digital Transformation – permeates the entire conference
  
  Organizations need to fully embrace digitalized products and services and ways of interacting in order to stay relevant and seize efficiencies. Going digital requires a different strategy, one focusing on creativity, experimentation and end-to-end experience. So how exactly is a digital business different? Digital business capabilities need to be tackled in the context of an omni-channel world that can involve human and robotic agents, AI, and business analytics. You’ll need to think in terms of new or alternative value propositions. High-quality, integrated ways of working and extremely high data integrity is a must; traceable and explainable results a big plus. Stay with us on this fast-moving journey! Find out about the latest at BBC.

- Women in Tech (WiT) – part of the Building People Capabilities Track
  
  Only 25% of the professionals in tech are women. And they get paid some $7,000 less annually than their male counterparts. We’ve heard the stories. We’ve read them, we’ve lived them. Now, let’s change them! In these sessions, learn from women in senior management who share their journeys and insights. Learn how to get that seat at the table. Discuss with your peers the issues, challenges, solutions and opportunities you face.
  
  BBC Women in Tech (WiT) continues beyond the week of the conference. In 2020, we started the BBC WiT Mentoring Circle. The goal of the Mentoring Circle is to provide an environment to share, grow and learn together. The Mentoring Circle meets every 2 weeks. Each session is led by a mentor covering topics such as personal branding, receiving/giving feedback, dealing with conflicts, powerful presentation, confidence building, dealing with conflicts, negotiation, job search. and interviewing skills.
  
  The aim of WiT is to build a community for support and growth. It all starts here!