What is your greatest IT concern? If you’re like most senior IT leaders, it’s analytics and business insights.

The Society for Information Management polled nearly 500 senior IT leaders for its 2013 IT Trends Study and showed how their worries compare with the areas where their organizations are investing the greatest resources.

Concern and investment don’t always line up, the results show. But at SHARE, we believe a little training can go a long way toward helping to overcome the gap if an area doesn’t get as many resources as you think it should.

Only one topic in the SIM survey among the top five aligned exactly: Analytics ranked No. 1 for both concern and investment.

After that, things aren’t quite so closely matched. Security is the second greatest concern for IT leaders, but it ranks 14^th in terms of investment. Disaster/recovery comes in third for the level of worry it prompts but makes it only to 11^th place for investment. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, cloud computing ranks pretty evenly for both factors—it comes in 4^th for concern and 3^rd for investment.) BYOD rounds out the top five concerns but comes in at 21^st place for investment.

While there can be a disconnect between concern and investment, the skill-boosting technical sessions Aug. 3-8 at >SHARE in Pittsburgh are an economical way to help address some of these issues. Over just one week, attendees can choose from hundreds of intensive, expert-led sessions geared toward furthering their capabilities across dozens of topics, including the ones named as top concerns in the SIM survey.

Robert Andrews, co-founder and CISO of Mainstream Security, will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 5, entitled “Security Trends—Looking to Future Threats.” Security issues will also be discussed at length during sessions such as “Good Enough Security? Deep Thoughts from a Simple Detective,” “Real Life Cybercrime from the Trenches: Ask the Experts” and “Dealing with the Uncertainty of Big Data Security.”

On the analytics front, attendees can take advantage of sessions including “Predictive Analytics and IT Service Management,” “What’s Happening on the Mainframe? Mobile? Social? Cloud? Big Data?” and “Big Data Strategies with IMS.”

SHARE in Pittsburgh also offers several sessions on the topic of cloud in the enterprise, including “Overcoming the Challenges of Running Linux and the Cloud on System z,” “z/OS Connect: Opening up z/OS Assets to the Cloud and Mobile Worlds” and “How Does Cloud Computing Impact the Data Center?”

If you’re a manager who has early-career professionals attending the event, suggest they take advantage of the zNextGen track. Sessions geared toward younger employees include “Introduction to Virtualization,” “Introduction to Mainframe Networking” and “Introduction to GTF trace—Swiss Army Knife in the MVS Professional’s Toolbox.”

And of course there will be plenty of opportunities for peer-to-peer learning as enterprise IT professionals network and connect with one another over the course of the week. No matter what corporate pressures you’re facing in the office, SHARE in Pittsburgh can deliver a one-stop shop for enhancing your team’s skill set.

Learn more about SHARE in Pittsburgh and register now.

Can't make it to Pittsburgh? Stream the sessions through SHARE Live!