Guest post by: Lena von Senden
This year I was given an interesting task: organize the most exclusive event on Business-IT Management (BITM) for IT leaders from around the globe to gain first-hand insight on best practices to successfully support sustainable BITM. Ugh?
Since I’ve been working in the IT industry now for almost 3 years, I understand the challenges that the industry is facing but bringing together 300 CIOs and IT professionals from around the globe is something totally different.
Where to begin? They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery so I started with 2009 and our fifth annual planningIT eXchange event and decided to build upon that success. Obviously, I had a lot of questions but the most pressing, apart from where and how, was what? What are the challenges that IT professionals are struggling with and what information do they need to leave with to make attending this year’s event a valuable use of their time?
Of course there are the requisite buzzwords that everyone is talking about: cloud computing; mobile applications; reduce cost; increase efficiency; SOA; the role of CIOs; enterprise architecture (or not) and the list goes on. But, when you boil it down, what are the issues that we know our IT colleagues are facing. After much research, thought and internal discussion, we decided to provide answers to these 5 questions:
• How can I achieve technology standardization?
• What do I need to know to accurately assess and achieve compliance in a federated environment?
• What does the SWOT analysis for an enterprise operating model look like?
• How should I define my enterprise strategic plan and, what are the key elements required to ensure adoption?
• How do I carry out successful IT demand and supply management if we have outsourced to a service provider?
With this as our starting point, I then set out to find the most qualified, the most experienced speakers with real-world, hands-on knowledge on how to successfully answer each of these questions. And so, this year’s agenda is bursting with renowned speakers from global companies, such as Bank of America, Microsoft, BP Oil International, Deutsche Telekom, Generali and many more. Then, to round out the ‘official’ part of the day, Ian Campbell, CEO, Nucleus Research, will host a panel discussion dedicated to the financial value of Business-IT Management.
Once you have the fundamentals in place, the rest should be easy, no? Well, in a wonderful city like Berlin filled with cultural and historical significance there are many choices and this year we wanted to provided our attendees with a uniquely Berlin experience.
Where? eWerk. In the more recent past, ewerk “was thus one of the secret places from which the techno movement achieved peaceful dominion over the world.” But, ewerk has a long and multifaceted history, whose various strands converge in the center of Berlin at a particular place that is reflective of Germany’s destruction during World War II and the country’s postwar recovery and division, the changes that resulted from unification and the beginnings of normality in the early 21st century. ewerk’s history spans the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and today is a venue bursting with life in a dynamic cosmopolis, a place where people live, work and relax in a mutually beneficial and synergistic manner.
With the history of ewerk as our golden compass, we will be ending the event with a gala event, keeping with the style and tradition of ewerk. I will not confirm or deny where that includes techno or not.
If I don’t meet you on the 16th, I promise to tell you all about how it went.
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