Registration and Morning Refreshments

Opening Remarks

Katie Savage, Secretary of Technology, State of Maryland

Keynote – EMBRACE THE SHAKE: Transforming Limitations into Opportunities

Success, especially in today’s fast-changing business environment, depends on our ability to make creativity and innovation a continuous process. Leaders want to know how their teams can rise above any challenge and succeed no matter what comes their way. Whether the goal is to embrace change, overcome obstacles, sustain growth, or take your success to the next level, leaders and teams want to learn how to “Embrace the Shake.” The term “Embrace the Shake” is coined from artist Phil Hansen’s personal story of transformation. After developing a career-ending tremor in his drawing hand, Phil embraced his “shake” both physically and metaphorically by redefining his limitation as an impetus for creativity. Phil not only restored his artistic abilities, but he also became a much more creative and innovative artist than ever before. Phil’s powerful message of finding creativity within limitations will inspire you to stop looking outside and start looking within for the resources that can transform your challenges into opportunities for success.

Phil Hansen, Artist, Speaker, Author and Innovator

Sponsored By: VMware by Broadcom | Carahsoft

General Session – From Project Management to Impact: Maryland’s New Theory of Change

Maryland has spent years building the infrastructure for digital government — now the hard work is translating that investment into measurable service outcomes. This session examines the state’s shift away from project-centric thinking toward a service delivery model that puts resident experience at the center. Speakers will address the IT master plan’s core pillars — talent, centralization, and design — and discuss the practical work underway: consolidating identity and access management into a single enterprise IAC solution, advancing open data federation, and embedding plain language and accessibility standards into how the state builds and procures digital products. Attendees will leave with a clear picture of where Maryland’s enterprise architecture is headed and what it means for their agencies.

Networking Break in the Exhibit Area

Concurrent Sessions

We Know What to Do — Now How Do We Do It? Implementation Tips for Digital Teams

Digital transformation strategies are written in boardrooms but live or die in the hands of the people doing the work. This session is for practitioners — the program managers, project leads, and agency technologists who are responsible for turning policy direction into functional systems and services. Speakers will share hard-won lessons on navigating procurement constraints, managing stakeholder expectations across agency lines, building internal capacity when budgets are tight, and keeping momentum on multi-year initiatives when priorities shift. Expect a candid, example-driven conversation with ample time for questions.

Building a Workforce Ready for What’s Next

The pace of change in government technology has outrun most training programs — and the gap between the tools agencies are deploying and the skills their people have to use them is widening. This session focuses on practical approaches to workforce development that actually stick: how to assess where your organization stands, how to build internal champions who can carry learning across departments, how to design training that reaches people at different levels of technical comfort, and how to make the case for sustained investment in upskilling when budgets are tight. The conversation draws on real examples from across state and local government and leaves room for attendees to share what's working — and what isn't — on their own teams.

Data Governance and Privacy: Building the Foundation for Secure Information Sharing

Nobody gets into public service because they love data classification — but the agencies that get this right are the ones that can move faster, share more confidently, and avoid the kind of headline-making incidents that set everyone back. This session cuts through the compliance-speak to talk practically about what good data governance actually looks like on the ground: how to get a real handle on what data you have and who should be touching it, how to build privacy protections that actually get followed, and how to make data sharing between state and local partners work without introducing new vulnerabilities in the process. Bring your messiest data problem — this is a judgment-free zone.

Lunch

General Session

Short Break

Please proceed to the concurrent sessions

Concurrent Sessions

Smarter Service Delivery: Lessons From the Front Lines of Constituent Engagement

Deploying AI in resident-facing services creates a different set of challenges than deploying it internally — the stakes are higher, the user base is less forgiving, and the consequences of a bad experience land directly on public trust. This session examines what early adoption actually looks like in practice: the implementation decisions that turned out to matter most, the outcomes nobody planned for, how staff responded when their workflows changed, and what metrics agencies are using to determine whether something is actually working. The conversation is grounded in real deployments across state and local government, with honest discussion of where AI has delivered and where expectations needed to be recalibrated.

Who’s Afraid of AI? Busting Myths and Clarifying What’s Actually Permissible

Across the country, the same anxieties keep surfacing: Is using AI for this task allowed? What if the output is wrong? Who’s liable? This session tackles those questions directly, separating fact from fiction on the most common misconceptions about what AI can and cannot be used for in a government context. Panelists will walk through the guardrails that have been established, the tools that are at our disposal, and ultimately explain state and local governments are evolving to make use of these technologies.

Bridging the Gap: Strategies for Statewide Broadband Expansion and Digital Infrastructure Planning

Closing broadband gaps requires more than funding — it requires knowing exactly what infrastructure exists, where it is, who it serves, and where new investment will have the greatest impact. That kind of clarity doesn't happen by accident. This session examines how state and local governments are building the data infrastructure, partnerships, and planning frameworks needed to make smart broadband investment decisions — how to map assets across fragmented systems, how to identify underserved communities with enough precision to act on it, how to align transportation, vertical infrastructure, and community anchor institutions into a coherent investment strategy, and how emerging tools are helping planners prioritize projects where public dollars will go furthest.

Identity, Fraud, and the Future of Digital Trust in Government Services

The fraud landscape facing government agencies has changed significantly: rings are more dispersed, identities are easier to fabricate, and the pressure points have shifted to corners of government that weren’t previously high-risk targets — including education benefits, where ghost student schemes have become an increasing concern. This session examines where fraud is heading across the full identity lifecycle, from enrollment and eligibility verification through ongoing account management and re-authentication. Panelists will discuss how fraud tactics are evolving, what detection capabilities agencies need to keep pace, and how identity proofing strategies can be strengthened without creating friction that drives away legitimate residents. Designed for agency leaders responsible for benefits administration, eligibility programs, and digital identity infrastructure.

Exclusive Briefing for Industry Partners

Networking Break in the Exhibit Area

General Session - Maryland Cybersecurity 2030: Critical Infrastructure and the Road Ahead

As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and the attack surface expands across state systems, Maryland is taking a long-view approach to enterprise security — one that goes beyond compliance and incident response to ask harder questions about resilience, coordination, and sustained preparedness. This session moves between presentation and open discussion, drawing on perspectives from across the enterprise: wastewater, electricity, public health, and emergency response. Attendees will work through real cross-sector coordination challenges, examine what tabletop exercises consistently reveal about gaps in readiness, and engage directly with the question of what it takes to protect systems the public cannot afford to lose. Come ready to participate — this is a working session, not a panel to watch.

Networking Reception in the Exhibit Area

Network with your colleagues and discuss technology solutions with the event sponsors.

End of Conference

Conference times, agenda, and speakers are subject to change.