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Sponsors:
Hedrick Associates |
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 CPR |
 Profitable Growth Partners, LLC |
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| New Sponsor:
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| Bill's
Corner Meeting Fundamentals Question: How are the ITMA monthly meetings formatted? Who can attend? |
| Answer:
A member company can send as many of their staff members to a meeting as they deem appropriate. The typical Monthly Meeting agenda is as follows: 8:00 – 8:30 Registration, Networking & Breakfast 8:30 - 8:50 Welcome, Updates and Introductions 8:50 - 9:05 Member Profile 9:05 - 9:15 Sponsor Profile 9:15 -10:00 Content Expert / Featured Speaker 10:00 - 10:15 Break 10:15 – 10:50 Content Expert / Featured Speaker 10:50 – 11:20 Member Presentation or Breakout Groups 11:20 – 11:45 Open Discussion or Part II Breakout Groups 11:45 Lunch and Ad Hoc topics
This of course is modified if we don’t have a member or
sponsor profile, or member presenter. If we have a national
speaker such as Bruce Rogow or Rick Swanborg then we turn the
meeting over to them about 9:00 and follow their agenda. In
any case members always have an opportunity to suggest Ad Hoc
topics for the lunch discussion. |
|
Question:
How are the Leaders Club meetings formatted? Who can attend? |
| Answer: The Leaders Club meets quarterly and is designed for the person in charge of IT and / or their next in command. The meeting format is an open facilitated discussion of topics selected by the Leaders Club members in advance. There is also an “open question” time set aside at the end of the meeting. When practical we will schedule a Steering Committee Meeting following the Leaders Club Meeting. Leaders Club members are invited to stay if they wish. The typical Leaders Club /
Steering Committee agenda is as follows: |
| Next
Issue: How monthly topics are selected |
1595 Galbraith Ave. SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49546
info@itma.net
ITMA
on the Move
It has been a busy
spring season for the West Michigan chapter of ITMA. Quite possibly, there
has never been a more exciting time to be around ITMA than right now.
With all the new members and initiatives, we are hard-pressed to keep
up with all the developments ourselves. So, what’s ahead in this
issue?— New members from large IT shops, new alliance with ICEX
(Rick Swanborg/ Bruce Rogow), emerging educational curriculum, new value
propositions, cutting edge topics and more.
| New Members | |
| We are pleased to announce the addition of several new members to ITMA since January 2008: | |
| •
MPI Research • Greenleaf Companies • Perrigo • City of Battle Creek • Montcalm Community College |
•
Peckham • Alticor • West Michigan Heart • Fifth-Third Bank |
| We want to extend a warm welcome all of these new members as we seek to further establish ITMA as the valuable regional asset that it is. | |
New Sponsor
A special thank you to Microsoft for becoming a new sponsor of ITMA. ITMA sponsors play an important role in providing leadership and services to our members. ITMA encourages members to consider our sponsors products and services.
Jerry's Tee Box
Well, it's still summer and I'm enjoying what else… golf, family, and ITMA. We have had an incredible couple of months of new member development helped in large part by the efforts of Mark Vanden Berge. Mark, a former consultant with CPR, has been heading up the marketing effort, with messaging, thought leadership and a new member campaign. This has been very exciting to see, and ITMA wishes to recognize his efforts. Way to go, Mark!
We have a great lineup planned for the Fall ITMA meetings. I just have a few other thoughts I wish to share with you as you think about making the most of your ITMA membership opportunity.
1. |
Please consider sending a key staff person or two to every meeting, especially if you cannot attend. Our new, emerging mantra is that ITMA is a regional asset base of peer knowledge and sharing. ITMA is the perfect place for your younger, perhaps less seasoned staff to learn about real world applications. |
2. |
Don't forget to invite guests. We want to start getting the word out that ITMA is “the place to be” for IT professionals. New guests often turn into new members and this keeps us vital and responsive to new trends and best practices. |
| 3. |
Check
the meeting schedule in the newsletter and posted on our website
and add the fall meeting dates to your calendar. |
4. |
Make suggestions for future topics. Since ITMA was built from the inside out, our members keep us in close touch with current needs and relevant to the technology marketplace. |
5. |
Think about what kind of day-long educational programming or perspectives your team would benefit the most from. Our new national partners, ICEX, have extensive experience with leading discovery/ contextual-based educational modules. Please consider how you might utilize such a service were it to become available on a more consistent basis. |
| 6. |
Finally,
keep your head down and don't forget to have fun! We'll see you all again in the fall. |
- Jerry
Spring Meetings
We had terrific attendance and response to our March, April and May meetings from both participating members and guests. Maybe it was the long winter, but the explosion of interest among IT professionals who want to learn from their peers is noteworthy. During March, we offered a session on planning and budgeting that was very well-received and included the attendance of several company CFOs which was a welcome team work exercise for those who took advantage of the forum. (This kind of executive "sharing" could be a bit of a trend as companies look for more enterprise alignment with corporate strategic direction — see Oct. scheduled event).
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April’s
event, Deploying a Successful Intranet, saw an informative session
from one of our sponsor’s, Crowe Chizek, only to be followed
by a cutting-edge panel presentation from leaders at Steelcase,
Kent County, Bissell and National Heritage Academies. The 50 plus
attendees left with some solid ideas for how to make internal
communications a more effective part of their corporate strategy.
What's more, word on the street has it that several companies
brought their staffs together to actively collaborate on a rollout. |
 April 2008 meeting |
The May meeting was perhaps a watershed occasion for ITMA with a visit from the head of ICEX (click here for more info on ICEX), Rick Swanborg, who spoke on the Metrics of IT Value. ITMA hosted a smaller dinner forum for CIOs the night before the seminar, which was well-attended and truly remarkable for the amount of fellowship/ lingering these leaders demonstrated while interacting with Rick and one another. The seminar the next day proved to be as stimulating and informative as we billed it to be (if you don’t believe us, just ask one of the 50 or so attendees of the meeting). After Rick’s high-level presentation which was rife with practical tips for helping measuring corporate value of IT (as an asset to their company vs. just being a “cost”), members broke into smaller groups and participated in break-out sessions to discuss their challenges more in detail with Rick or with each other through facilitated roundtables.
2008 Calendar
Below are the remaining monthly meetings and leadership meeting scheduled for 2008.
| Monthly Meetings: | |
| Thursday,
September 11 - Grand Rapids (combined GR/Kzoo meeting) |
Web 2.0 |
| Thursday,October
16 - Grand Rapids (combined GR/Kzoo meeting) |
Bruce
Rogow, ICEX – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 |
| Tuesday,
November 11 - Kalamazoo |
Internal
Security |
| Thursday,
November 13 - Grand Rapids |
Internal
Security |
| Leaders Club Meeting: | |
| Thursday,
September 18 |
Grand
Rapids |
| Steering Committee Meeting: | |
| Thursday, October 23 - W.K. Kellogg Foundation | 2009 Topic Discussion |
Evaluations - How are we doing?
No surprise to say that we earned some of highest marks ever from your evaluations after the ICEX/Swanborg event (4.7 out of 5). Indeed, all of the spring events received good marks, averaging out around 4.3. Yet, with the strong feedback from the ICEX event and interest from ICEX in the West Michigan model, ITMA decided to capitalize on the moment by entering into negotiations for a strategic alliance with Rick, Bruce and company. What is the gist of this budding partnership? Read on...
ICEX in our future?
As you may have read about ICEX and Rick Swanborg, ICEX has been working with Fortune 100 companies to establish these peer- to-peer exchanges for the past ten years. They have seen great value from this type of business model (in some cases saving companies millions of dollars) which is a real-world “Lessons Learned” approach at the heart of peer-led or private exchanges. ICEX has seen in ITMA West Michigan the same kind of value proposition, albeit more on a regional level and on a smaller scale; and, for its part, ITMA sees in ICEX the ability to leverage our group “buying power” to gain access world class thinking and practical knowledge for our members here in the heartland.
The partnership — IT Learning Institute
The proposal on the table is this: ITMA and ICEX will collaborate several times a year, sometimes as featured speakers as we have seen them do before. Yet we are also in the process of reviewing a curriculum (for 1-day, twice a year seminars) and teaching method used in some of the top business schools called Facilitated Education, or sometimes called “Appropriate Practice.” The net effect of this type of instruction is that you and a designated group of your team will sit through presentations of IT practices and principles and then the instructors guide you through a set of contextual exercises specifically aimed at the concerns and real world practices of your company. The joint deliverable we aspire to after our IT Learning Institute is to impart knowledge and tactics all of you can take back and begin applying immediately to your jobs the next day. A bit audacious? You bet, but we are committed to taking ITMA to a whole new level, and our partnerships with you all and ICEX are going to get us there.
Tell Us What You Think
If there's something you'd like to see in the next newsletter, we'd like to know. Click on the following link to send us your suggestions:
info@itma.net.