Pivot fast, pivot hard!

I am very lucky in that my job allows me to talk to people doing fascinating things with their businesses through the deployment of technology. They are giving their people better tools and data so they can do fewer low-value activities and focus on the things they really enjoy. They are connecting customers and supply chains in incredible ways, allowing their requirements to become more transparent so the whole system works better through being more informed. They are changing the culture of their organisations.

Millions of words have been written about how COVID-19 has changed the way we work. There was an almost immediate cliche - what made digital transformation happen in your business, the CEO, the CIO or COVID? Things become cliched because they are true and this is no exception. I witnessed my clients, my colleagues and my wider network deliver these changes in record time. I even spent time with other like-minded professionals creating and distributing a crowd-sourced guide to remote working (The Remote Work Survival Kit) as the likely impact of the pandemic became clear and people scrambled for information. Those documents were used by people and organisations worldwide and I'm proud of that achievement on behalf of everyone that worked on it.

But this is about my own organisation. Whilst we in the CIO Advisory team switched exclusively to remote sessions with our clients quite easily, for our colleagues in the events teams around Europe this was not so simple. How do you move from a series of physical events in hotels to trying to deliver the same value in a virtual setting?

The answer, it turns out, is that you get your head down and you work your ass off...! Our amazing team in the Czech Republic had a series of virtual events running within a few weeks. With every new event, we learned from the previous one. Every team in our organisation has built on those beginnings and they are doing things they would not have dreamed of at the start of the year.

As an organisation we had decided to pivot, and pivot hard. We wanted to deliver the best experience for our delegates and the best outcomes for our sponsors that we could, and we are still only at the beginning.

So, that's why I'm excited to be involved in the activities coming up this year with the big one being our CIO Summit in October. We have a brilliant advisory board who are helping us to focus it on the things that matter to the CIO audience and we are running peer connect sessions throughout the summer for all our registrants so that we can connect people from across Europe all the way up to the event itself.

Please join us at what I think will, because of our decision to pivot fast and pivot hard, the best CIO event of 2020. The summit is free for IT leaders this year, so register today

https://www.cvent.com/events/idc-european-cio-digital-summit-2020/registration-6f1b2d470e67436290e88dc3582e1ea9.aspx?fqp=true