I am collaborating with Chase Zander to set up an IT Directors’ Forum for later in the year. Rather than focussing on technology issues, our idea is to focus on the nexus between IT and business, something that I am obviously interested in given my background.

In the IT and change projects I have led, I always prided myself on going an extra mile to understand user requirements. One way in which the group of us organising the seminar is trying to get such user feedback is from LinkedIn.com and specifically the CIO Magazine group (you will need to be a member of LinkedIn.com and the group to view this).

The question that I posed there is as follows: –

I’m looking for business-focussed topics for a CIO / IT Director forum that I am helping to arrange. I would be very interested in what areas are at the top of people’s priority lists.

The forum is for senior IT people, but it is not going to be focussed on technology (there are enough SOA seminars out there already). Instead possible areas would include:

• Managing the ever increasing pace of business change
• IT / Business alignment; IT Governance / prioritisation
• Managing IT in the current economic climate
• The interplay between IT strategy and shorter-term tactics
• Increasing the influence of IT at the board level.

Of course some of these overlap. The seminar is meant to be a forum for discussion between delegates, not just presentations. If you were to go to such an event, what topics would you like to discuss? Thank you in advance for your help.

Peter

There has been a lot of very interesting feedback to this question, showing once more how helpful the on-line community can be in addressing issues.
 

 
UPDATE: The results of this survey are now available and may be viewed here.