If you’re a communications/collaboration specialist working in enterprise IT, your technology challenges — considerable as they are at this moment in time — are almost being outpaced by the problems brought to you by macro issues like the chip shortage, supply chain problems, and the Great Resignation. Yes, you need to develop a strategy to provide collaboration tools that support hybrid work — but first, you need to get those tools in end users’ hands and have the people resources on your team to make it all work.
As we’ve built out the program for Enterprise Connect 2022, we’ve developed several sessions that I’ve started informally calling our “IT pain points” sessions — the resourcing, procurement, and management issues that increasingly may be getting in your way. These issues originate beyond the scope of our industry, and their solutions are difficult to find solely within the industry. More likely, each enterprise will make progress against these pain points through resourcefulness, savvy, and persistence on the part of individual performers and teams within IT.
As you’ll see
here, our conference program, as always, emphasizes technology and market issues. But these IT pain points are what a conference, with peer-to-peer sharing, is ideally suited to help assuage. So we’re leaning into this aspect with a number of
peer discussion sessions, in which a facilitator leads a discussion on a focused topic, encouraging participants to share ideas. (We used to call this type of session “Birds of a Feather,” but apparently that term doesn’t always resonate with the, shall we say, younger folks.)
Besides adding these sessions, we also believe we can provide some small balm for IT pain points with a couple of award programs we’ll be featuring again this year, each aiming to recognize outstanding individuals or teams within enterprise IT organizations.
Our
IT Hero award is presented to individuals or teams that went above and beyond to help their organizations succeed in the last year. Given everything that communications/collaboration professionals have dealt with, from pandemic-driven disruptions to the aforementioned macro challenges that emerged in the wake of those disruptions, my bet is that just about every enterprise has multiple IT heroes in their ranks. If you know such a person — a colleague (if you work for an enterprise IT organization); a customer (if you work for an industry vendor or service provider); or yourself — I hope you’ll go to the
Enterprise Connect website and nominate one or more of these heroes.
Our other recognition is the
Spotlight award, which we present to outstanding women in communications. During the pandemic, we’ve seen that women have borne an outsize burden when it comes to managing all of the demands of work, family, and community. This comes on top of the historical underrepresentation of women within IT. So, we’re eager to recognize women who led the way in inspiring their colleagues in the past year with their hard work and dedication and the skill and leadership they brought to their jobs. You can nominate a woman for the Spotlight award
here. Again, we’re seeking employees of enterprise IT organizations for this recognition.
The last nearly two years have been incredibly taxing. As we navigate towards the new ways of working and living that the pandemic is leaving in its wake, challenges persist for many folks. I hope you’ll help Enterprise Connect recognize the individuals in enterprise IT organizations who have made (and continue to make) a positive difference. The deadline for entries is this Friday, Dec. 3, so I hope you’ll consider nominating someone for the
IT Hero and
Spotlight awards to help us share the light that our most outstanding colleagues and peers have brought into this time.
