The IT Executive Exchange (ITEE) is a forum for IT Executives and College of Business Administration professors at The University of Akron. Meetings take place every six to eight weeks to discuss pressing and leading edge issues.

The purpose of this forum is to have a healthy exchange of ideas that will be useful to all attendees. It is sponsored by the Center for Information Technologies and eBusiness (CITe) of the University of Akron’s College of Business Administration.

Come join us at the next IT Executive Exchange Meeting

Blockchain Technology: Critical Business Disruption, or Foolish Distraction?

Friday, May 11, 2018; 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Location: CBA Room 258, College of Business Administration

Moderator: Dr. Bill McHenry

Special Guest: Pete Martin, CEO of Votem

Sponsor: Center for IT & eBusiness (CITe)

Blockchain is a distributed ledger system made secure by cryptography. Its current reputation is somewhat shady due to its use in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (it may facilitate money laundering, illegal deals, and be subject to a major crash one of these days...). However, ventures capitalists have made a $1.7B vote in Blockchain’s favor for a wide variety of applications: reducing the cost of cross-border payments, securities trading, and compliance; “smart contracts”; automated decision-making; and ensuring authenticity and trust. Blockchain is being used today for electronic voting.

For this session of ITEE, we are privileged to welcome Pete Martin, CEO of Votem.

Votem is a blockchain mobile voting platform enabling citizens around the world to easily vote online with a level of verifiability, accessibility, security and transparency that does not currently exist. Founded in 2014 by CEO, Pete Martin, Votem’s mission is to change the way people vote and believes that mobile voting will lead to positive change in the world by providing voters with complete transparency, thus shaping the future of democracy. Having conducted 12 elections for both private and public clients with almost 8.5 million blockchain votes tallied, Votem has received praise and accolades from various institutions including the Cleveland Technology Awards and OHTech Best of Tech Awards.

What potential applications do you see for blockchain in your industry? Have you been asked to review or even start implementing this technology? Come to the next ITEE and discuss what could become a foundational technology for the future.

If you are interested in attending the meeting, please RSVP to Rachana Asapu at ra99@zips.uakron.edu

Previous Discussion Topics:
March 2018 Preparing the next generation of IT leadership: Is there a gap?
February 2018 Collaboration and the Complexity Paradox
November 2017 Deploying Visualization and Analytics Technology to the Desktop: Breaking the Stranglehold of Excel
September 2017 Industry 4.0: What happens when everything has intelligence?
May 2017 Your Biggest Threat is Not Who You Think It Is (or is it?)
March 2017 Is It Time to Blow Up the IT Org Chart?
January 2017 Are "Lean" and "Agile" a crash diet for IT? How to Get Long-Term Results and Drive Costs from IT and Other Business Processes.
November 2016 We, Robot? How are we shaped by technology?
September 2016 The Future is on Cloud Nine
May 2016 IT Talent Lifecycle Management in an Age of Rapid Change
April 2016 Chief Digital Officer: What is the Reality?
January 2016 Is Your Business About to be Disrupted?
November 2015 New Challenges with Mobile Technologies
September 2015 Reconsidering Outsourcing Decisions
May 2015 Are you ready for a Data Scientist?
March 2015 Security: Who will get hacked next?
January 2015 Do you know where your business rules are?
November 2014 Cybercrime – Are the criminals winning?
September 2014 Cloudy with a Chance of Services
May 2014 Disaster Recovery Revisited
March 2014 Windows 8 Deployment
January 2014 BYOD
November 2013 IT Portfolio Management
September 2013 Does CIO Still Mean "Career Is Over"?
May 2013 The Internet of Things
March 2013 Mobile Software Development
January 2013 Help and Service Desks
November 2012 Business Analytics
September 2012 Using Social Media
June 2012 IT/IS Talent Management Report Card: Where are we, and where do we need to go
March 2012 RAPM: Rapid Analysis Portfolio Management
January 2012 Striking the Right Balance: “Hard” and “Soft” Skills in IT and the Careers
November 2011 Going Rogue IT Style
September 2011 Delivering and Promoting Innovative Business Value
June 2011 Virtualization: Performance and Prospects
April 2011 The Consumerization of IT and Implications for the Organization
February 2011 The Collaboration Challenge
November 2010 Assimilating Mobile and Consumer Devices into the IT Infrastructure
September 2010 Is Your Company Ready for Windows 7 and Office 2010 Deployment?
May 2010 ITIL and COBIT
March 2010 Learning From Our Best and Worst IT Practices
January 2010 Managing IT Innovation (Summary will be available soon)
November 2009 Security
September 2009 New Communication Methods
June 2009 Leveraging Cloud Computing
March 2009 Open Source Software
January 2009 Effective benchmarks IT can use to gauge success
November 2008 What do new graduates expect from employers?
September 2008 Telecommuting
July 2008 Business Intelligence
May 2008 Mobility and Mobile Computing
April 2008 Social Networks
February 2008 Strategic Outsourcing
November 2007 Virtualization
September 2007 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: What have we learned?
May 2007 E-discovery: IT's responsibility for Information Retention and Destruction
March 2007 Collaboration Tools in Microsoft Office 2007
January 2007 Plans for Vista and Office 2007
October 2006 Strategies & Techniques for Making the IT Dollar Go Farther
August 2006 How to Market IT to Internal Business/Organization
June 2006 IT Skills and IT Education
April 2006 Data Modeling, Quality & Security
March 2006 Service Oriented Architecture
January 2006 Emerging Technologies
November 2005 IT Recruiting and Retention
September 2005 New Programming Methodologies
April 2005 Business Continuity Planning
July 2005 Project Management Office
February 2005 Portfolio Management
December 2004 Vendor Management
October 2004 IT Governance, Business Alignment and IT Vision
August 2004 Security