2007 Planview Horizons Annual User Conference

Most successful user event ever

350 attendees, 9 partners, 25 customer presentations, and 235 Meet the Expert sessions add up to Planview's largest and most successful user event to date. Held November 5-7, 2007, in Austin, Texas, the Planview Horizons User Conference is the single largest forum for customers to learn new skills, share information, and discover best practices and techniques to maximize the business value of Planview solutions in their organizations.

The keynote address was given by former royal marine, renowned sailor, and adventure author Pete Goss. Attendees attended breakout sessions from three tracks: Performance Management, Project and Portfolio Management, and Power User. Topics included IT transformation, generating business value through IT portfolio management and governance, improving productivity, starting up a PMO, driving effective and global user adoption, and best practices and the power of portfolio management reporting.

Attendees also benefited from extensive product training and education, including reporting and analytics, migrating to Planview Enterprise 9, and an introduction to the Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager. There were also a series of extended, hands-on training classes following the conference and many opportunities to network with industry experts, Planview customers, executives, and partners at evening events and sessions.

Customer Presentations

25 customers, including ADP, Great-West, Deutsche Bank, and Synovus, presented at the conference.

Scott McGlaun, CIO of Synovus, did a presentation entitled “The Journey to Becoming a Service Organization. He spoke on taking an IT organization with an inflexible infrastructure, limited and siloed resources, need for standardized processes, and need for better customer focus to a strengthened infrastructure, improved resource mix and empowerment, standardized processes across business lines, and a focus on the customer to deliver value constantly.

Rich Murphy, CFO, Global Technology and Operations and Support Divisions, at Deutsche Bank, spoke on "Managing the Business of IT." He told of how his group transformed from a cost provider to a business by doing such things as instituting strong management discipline, tracking, and accountability, significantly reducing costs, and investing in their reporting infrastructure.

Planview Leadership Award Winners

At the conference, Planview announced the winners of its second annual Planview Leadership Awards for achievement in and commitment to the field of portfolio management. The awards recognize customers who best exemplify performance management leadership overall, with individual honors in Vision, Innovation and Achievement.

The 2007 Vision Award goes to WellPoint and recognizes success in developing and moving towards performance management leadership. WellPoint's integrated IT Performance Management vision is driven by the alignment of practices and processes for strategic planning, project and resource management, and management of their technology portfolio throughout the enterprise.

The Planview Innovation Award recognizes organizations with demonstrable results from improved performance that drive innovation both within and beyond IT. This year, Planview honored TSYS and Qwest with the 2007 Innovation Award.

The Achievement Award recognizes an outstanding implementation process. The 2007 Achievement Award goes to Great-West for delivering more while spending less and for receiving improved internal satisfaction ratings.