It's that time of year again for the annual Nevada IT Symposium.

The day started off with a keynote from Sunny Grasso titled "Let's Make Happy Work!". Sunny opened by talking about brainstorming goals to find our motivators. Taking those motivators a step forward, we can determine what about pursuing those goals promotes happiness. Sunny continued to draw a correlation between externalizing goals versus focusing on introspection to understanding what sustains happiness. She further discussed her philosophy in reference to her experiences and corporate culture at Zappos.com.

Next, I attended the Healthcare panel breakout session. It was very interesting hearing about the IT challenges of a post-Affordable Care Act world and the challenges responding to implementation. The panel discussed issues with adoption and management of electronic medical records and cyber security threats.

After that session, I decided to put all my time into interactive panels, as all of the other breakout sessions seem heavily vendor-dominated and are most likely sales pitches.

The 11:00am panel is of local area leadership discussing the implementation of SecOps and was very interesting. There was a very interesting discussion about information sharing of threat intelligence.

Our lunch speaker is Sy Esfahani the CIO of MGM Resorts. The presentation was a comprehensive Gartneresque Death-By-Powerpoint. Lots of busy slides and linear directives. There's a focus on shifting operational costs to fund "transformational" activities. It's an interesting concept. The "Bi-modal" approach to transformation. He refers to Samurai vs Ninja modes. One is highly structured and inflexible (Samurai), while the other is highly adaptive and unstructured (Ninja). He suggests marrying the two principals and finding a balance between agility and predictability.

Cheers to another interesting convention!