IT Strategy

The development of strategic and operational plans for effective provision of information services to support business objectives.

Feedback from ‘Best practice business information technology’ presentation in Townsville

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I’ve now received feedback for my session ‘Best practice business information technology’ presentation I gave to the Queensland Country Conference in Townsville on May 16 2008 (the second day of the conference).  Again in the interests of honesty, integrity and transparency I’m posting the feedback.  One of these days I’ll get some really negative feedback and the test then will be whether I post that :).

CPA Australia apparently aims for a rating of 4.2 (Very Good to Excellent).  43% of the attendees responded.

My overall rating was 4.20, with a ‘Technical Content’ rating of 4.20 and a ‘Presentation Material’ rating of 4.19.  All ratings are out of 5.

Comments made were:

  • The most beneficial session so far.  Can relate to speaker & he addressed core business everyday issues.  Very informative.
  • Information on IT strategic plan was very useful.
  • Very informative – great general technological advice along with specific planning procedures.
  • Certainly offered a higher level of overview and advice on the topic.  Which was very useful!

I’m pretty happy with that – particularly for the comment about ‘core business everyday issues’ – it can be very easy to fall into the trap of being too academic, so I work hard to give practical advice when I can (whilst still being robust).

By the way, here’s the Mercure Inn in Townsville – very nice and practical venue. 

While we were there there was a special function for Army Veterans, I believe – the place was packed to the rafters with khaki and blokes with assertive voices.  That probably shouldn’t be a surprise in Townsville, should it?

Best practices in information technology

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Today I presented to CPA Country Congress on Best Practices in Business Information Technology in Townsville.

Objectives

  • To provide an overview of what’s on the horizon in the next generation of IT for business, and how to prepare your business to take advantage of these future IT advances.

Agenda

  • Next generation IT – what’s on the horizon in the next 2 – 5 years
  • Managing risk and protecting your systems in a wireless and mobile environment
  • System selection for your business
  • Getting your systems right
  • Creating opportunities to develop your business
  • Maximising your return from your technology investment
  • Conclusion – meeting the challenges of IT

As always, maybe I’m delusional but I think the presentation went well.  If you were in the audience, please feel free to leave feedback in the comments below.

You can download the slides for this presentation from the link below:

 

Thanks for stopping by…

Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks

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As promised in my last post, I attach to this blog post my speaker’s notes for today’s session ‘Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks’.  This presentation was given at Ark Group Australasia’s Data Quality Conference, held on 30th April 2008 at Crystal Palaces, Luna Park in Sydney.  I undertook the presentation as a Director of Applied Insight Pty Ltd, my business systems consulting company. 

The brochure for this conference can be found here.

My speaker’s notes are available below:

For completeness, here are my slides as provided to conference participants (in PDF form):

As always, feedback from members of the audience, via comments or an email, is very welcome.  I hope it was an interesting approach at some level. 

I did at one stage think of going all Gordon Ramsey (he of ‘Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares’) on the audience – I’m a brand new fan, it’s just like consulting but with more swearing and nan bread! – but decided against it.  Perhaps next time, that’s what I’ll do – I’ll try good-consultant, bad-consultant.  Probably at least as good as my idea of having a 40-minute presentation with a single slide with four circles on it.  Maybe one day I’ll be able to combine the two approaches. 

By the way, I loved the venue – at least it will stand out in my memory, that’s for sure.  Here’s a photo I took outside:

I am fairly certain it is the only data quality conference ever held in a theme park.

Data quality conference: Data governance and data quality

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I seem to have missed blogging about the fact that Ark Group asked me to present a session at their conference in Sydney today (30th April 2008).  My presentation was entitled ‘Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks’.  I promised people in the audience that I would blog my notes to today’s presentation, which I will do as soon as I am back online (probably tomorrow around midday I’d say). 

Anyway – the taxi driver couldn’t find the address for the conference – the address is 1 Olympic Drive, Milson’s Point in Sydney.  The fun part?  This must be the first data quality conference in the entire world held in a theme park – 1 Olympic Drive is the Crystal Palaces in Luna Park.  I have to say – what an impressive venue!  A shame that the hot dog stands, the cartoonist, and the laughing clowns weren’t operating!

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I feel I got good feedback from various people after the conference in the audience.  I spoke at 4.10pm on the second day of a 2-day conference.  That’s always a tough call but hopefully I was energetic enough – it’s kind of hard when you had to wake up at 4.10am to give a presentation at 4.10pm (rather crazily, I asked Aimee Rootes of Ark Group to get me ‘the first flight down’ and ‘the last flight back’.  Which is why I have now been waiting for the flight for three hours at Sydney Airport now.

Talk about your lessons learned.  Anyway, I was glad to share a taxi with Suzette Bailey of Sensory7 and we got to speak the same language in the back of the taxi – there aren’t all that many people in the western world who actually understand the language I speak, so it was refreshing to do so.

Next post:  advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks. 

But this is a nice post on IT alignment…

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And of course what operating system one uses doesn’t really matter – it’s a matter of thinking about how business value can be delivered (still, hate that ribbon):

5 Tips on IT Alignment That Can Generate Profit

Matches nicely with the IT Strategy and methodology I’m developing in my ‘spare’ time…

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