IBDG Releases Results of its Top IT Directors Strategy Meetings 2009 and looks ahead to the IBDG programme for 2010
Analysis of IBDG’s most popular topics reflect the business conditions affecting European businesses during the year, and analysing the annual changes in IBDG’s IT Directors Strategy Meetings provides an excellent barometer of emerging trends and issues within the profession.
The European strategy meeting specialists IBDG (the International Business Development Group) have a full year of top level European IT director strategy meetings planned for 2010, commencing Tuesday 9 February 2010 in London, and followed on Tuesday 13 April 2010 with a meeting in Frankfurt.
Meanwhile prominent IT experts drawn from IT directors and CIOs at organisations including O’Neill Europe, Aegis Media Group, Network rail, Tulip, Esselte, Dairy farmers of GB, BBC, ITV, HJ Heinz, Cummins, LCH Clearnet, Blacks Leisure Group, BT, Agfa Gevaert, Allen & Overy and BT, met at The Radisson SAS Portman Hotel in London to review the latest thinking in areas such as Security, Outsourcing, Green IT, ROI and Efficiency.
The team also reviewed the most popular IBDG IT topics of 2009, these including: Positioning IT as a valued business partner as well as a service provider, Managing through crisis: The role of the IT director in guiding the business through an uncertain financial outlook, Realising the cost and practical benefits of bringing IT and operations under common management, Aligning IT strategy with the needs of the business, Equipping mobile workers in the 21st Century, Changing the board-level role of IT: securing executive buy-in, Can you really do more with much less? Using innovation to drive your business forward, The CIO evolution – how to become the IT leader of tomorrow, and Demonstrating the benefits of operational excellence to the bottom-line of the business
It is clear that IBDG’s most popular IT topics reflect the business conditions affecting European businesses during the year, and plotting the annual changes in IBDG’s IT Strategy Meetings provides an excellent barometer of emerging trends and issues within the industry.
IBDG has also unveiled plans to double in size by Christmas 2010. Staff at the firm’s London offices increased by 50 in 2009, and that figure is set to rise by a further 75 by June 2010. In addition, new IBDG offices have opened in Amsterdam and Berlin, with Frankfurt and Oslo set to follow. The plan is then to establish an IBDG presence in Italy.
IBDG has grown due to its pioneering development of top-level peer group strategy meetings, established at a time when demand was either unsatisfied or based upon outmoded models centred around conference and exhibition formats that had not changed fundamentally since the 1960s. The skills and experience present at IBDG offered the ability to invent and develop some fresh methodologies providing what was to prove a much-needed alternative. That methodology was based upon the creation of what IBDG calls ‘special interest groups, formed around particular strategic challenges and each facilitated by a peer. Each group consists of board members only, purely from top 750 companies, thus creating an opportunity for participants to connect, share experiences, network, explore and discuss future strategies around their own personal ‘take’ on the topics of the moment.
It was, as IBDG chief executive Mal Donnelly recalls, ‘A simple concept that proved to be very complex to deliver, requiring a great deal of effort and investment’. But once created, that ‘simple idea’ grew from a dozen or so meetings involving 80 participants, to what is now a programme linking around 800 key participants in the IT profession. And it’s a similar story in IBDG’s other specialist fields.
It is the wealth of market intelligence and planning within IBDG that the Business Development division was able to call upon, together with its contacts at the highest levels throughout specialist fields such as IT, HR, Law, Finance, Pensions and Marketing that enables IBDG to deliver the series of strategy meetings in the UK, Germany and The Netherlands. The meetings allow board members from Europe’s top companies a unique opportunity to come together to discuss big issues in a ‘peer group’ manner totally unlike that afforded by any conference platform.
Understandably, news of the original meetings soon spread throughout the corporate world and IBDG’s original modest plans soon grew exponentially, patronised by IT bosses from the world’s top businesses. This organic growth has also provided opportunities for specialist staff from a wide variety of backgrounds and age groups to make their mark on IBDG’s expansion, enjoying personal and professional progression and the financial rewards that reflect their contribution to the business.
Contrast those modest beginnings with the fact that 2010 will see IBDG doubling its number of events; and the establishment of new discussion groups in Learning and Development, Wealth Management and Sustainable Investment joining IBDG’s established Legal, HR, IT, Finance, Marketing and Pensions forums resulting in more than 1,000 roundtable discussions already scheduled throughout Europe, on such diverse topics as ‘The Role of the Finance Director in Crisis’, What’s Sexy About Managing Defined Benefit Pension Scheme Risk’, ‘Positioning IT as a Valued Business Partner as well as a Service Provider’
There’s even an IBDG Strategy Meeting entitled: ‘Retaining and Developing Talented Key People’ – a topic about which IBDG clearly knows a thing or two itself!
Notes:
For more information on the strategy meetings programme for 2010, for sponsorship opportunities or information on careers at IBDG see www.IBDG.co.uk http://www.IBDG.co.uk
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