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The IT Directors Community of Practice (CoP) is a Silicon Valley-based membership organization where members solve problems, share their business experience, and create actionable knowledge and opportunities. At CoP meetings the members share their unique talents with each other to help their companies prosper and grow. This pooling of resources often results in new business opportunities, specific problem resolution and valuable contacts for all members. There’s no better resource than another Director or a network of Directors.

In these difficult business times, it’s essential to have all the knowledge and experience you can find. IT Directors in similar roles face similar problems even though they are in different companies. This is true regardless of whether the roles are in the infrastructure, applications or relationship management organizations. It may be surprising, but it is also true across different types of companies. Some examples of problems addressed: Shrinking budgets, doing more with less, changing technology, personnel recruitment and retention, and managing a global workforce.

More specific issues you may have encountered are:

• Offshore development – What are the risks, rewards, and challenges? What are the critical success factors?
• Partnering with the business – What is the value IT provides for the business units?
• Portfolio management – What and how to set priorities for projects that the business wants?
• Enterprise architecture – What are the effective and efficient methods to keep projects in line with the architecture standards? How do we develop architectural standards for our enterprise?
• Social networks – How do we effectively have employees use them without loosing productivity?
• Cloud computing – When and how do we employ it in our business structure?

If these issues sound familiar, you are not alone. Other Directors are facing these challenges too. The common set of problems faced by IT personnel, combined with the pressures of today’s economic climate, create an opportunity for directors to come together to share their problems and jointly explore these issues to find the best possible solutions. This process is called a Community of Practice.

Purpose
The Community of Practice exists as a non-competitive forum for the free exchange of ideas and information that can be helpful to all members in addressing the problems they face daily in their organizations. Global Gateways has organized Communities of Practice for IT Directors, CIOs and VPs of Engineering. These groups have shown the effectiveness of information sharing and the proactive development of best practices.

Benefits
The IT Directors Community of Practice (CoP) is in its 9th year of continued operation.We believe that our continuous upgrading of our services makes the CoP easy to participate in, builds stronger interpersonal and inter-company relationships, and creates a stronger learning community than ever before. The Community of Practice provides its members with many benefits. These include:

• Subject matter experts as presenters

Member Quote: “The CoP has been akin to attending a masters class on being an effective IT leader. The quality subjects, diversity of the group, and the enlightenment that is shared has proven to be invaluable to both our company as well as myself personally. Using the knowledge gained from our sessions I have enhanced my ability to effectively communicate the importance of IT as a business partner in a language that is understandable by the business. The CoP has also allowed our company to implement several cost saving strategies that have been affirmed by other members of the group.  – John P.

• Networking
• Exchange of best practices and ideas
• Confidential web site for information sharing
• Social and professional connections
• Attend remotely from anywhere in the world
• Meeting summaries from each meeting
• Dinner included in each meeting

Member Quote: “The CoP is uniquely structured by it’s participants to maximize the benefits of collaboration. I can point to several occasions where I’ve personally leveraged the tips-and-tricks and lessons learned from my peers which became game-changers back at my shop. One example: A CoP member shared the straightforward ‘segmentation’ design strategy he used on his Data Center build-out project to stay under costly code and inspections thresholds. By borrowing this play from his run book, I was able to save my Bank close to $500K and a load of consternation dealing with compliance regulations.” – Matthew P.

Have you ever wondered how some of your peers are dealing with some of the same problems you are facing? Have you ever wanted to be able to bounce some ideas off another professional before implementing them? Have you ever had a solution to a problem and thought that it could help someone else with the same problem?  Then the Community of Practice is for you.

If you’re interested in more information, please go to our activites page. If you would like to apply for membership or just test-drive one of our upcoming meetings, please contact John Moran at john_moran@global-gateways.com.