Conference recommendation for public sector IT

During my career in IT, I moved up from a systems administrator managing Unix systems at a small company, to managing teams and directing infrastructure at a Big Ten university, to leading IT strategy in county government. At every level in my career, I found conferences to be a great way to recharge and pick up new ideas.

Supporting leadership

For the last several years, I have enjoyed attending the GOVIT Symposium. I started attending when I served as a CIO in government. I really liked that GOVIT was not a “vendor” conference, but one led by attendees. Sessions were focused on what challenges we face and the interesting projects we’ve worked on this year. I always came away full of new ideas.

I also presented at GOVIT, sharing the exciting work my teams were working on in county government, and leading strategic thinking workshops on topics including open data when that was still a new idea in local government, and disaster recovery planning in the years before cyberattacks became too destructive.

It was because of that experience that I later joined the GOVIT Symposium on the steering committee, helping to shape future conferences. I continued on the steering committee even after I exited government to become a consultant. I’m really proud of our work in the GOVIT Symposium to keep it focused on attendees, and expanding the session tracks to support emerging leaders as well as current organizational leaders.

GOVIT is geared for leadership at all levels of an organization. As you might guess from the “GOVIT” name, the primary audience is IT leaders such as CIOs, directors, managers, and supervisors. But the conference also attracts folks from other parts of the organization, including HR, finance, legal, and project management.

Leadership summit

This year, the GOVIT Symposium is “changing gears” slightly. After merging with the Public Technology Institute (PTI), GOVIT is now the GOVIT Leadership Summit & Symposium. The Summit & Symposium is divided into three days: one day for the Leadership Summit, and two days for the Symposium.

This year’s GOVIT Leadership Summit will be a collection of mainstage panel discussions with national and local leaders who will dive into the strategic issues regarding topics like AI leadership, building a thriving IT organizational culture, building strong cybersecurity defenses and workforce development. In addition to these conversations, participants will be able to choose from among several topics to have facilitated roundtable discussions. Topics include AI, IT culture, cybersecurity, and government IT.

The main conference, the GOVIT Symposium, includes tracks and breakout sessions covering cybersecurity, digital government, innovation, leadership and emerging leaders, project management, and IT governance. I’m leading just one session this year, “Writing gooder - step up your communication skills”:

Effective communication will get your message across to those who need to understand it. And written communication is part of the job, whether that’s writing a strategic plan, drafting a summary for your Board, or documenting a process. In this hands-on session for all levels, leaders will learn how to write better for the executive level, and staff will learn how to create more effective documentation for their teams.

My session will be on Thursday at 9:45am. I’ll see you there!

See you there

If you’ve attended the GOVIT Symposium before, the venue has changed this year to the JW Marriott Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota.

I’m really excited for this year’s GOVIT Leadership Summit and Symposium! If you’re in public sector IT—including government, higher ed, and nonprofit—I encourage you to attend. The GOVIT Leadership Summit is November 19, and the GOVIT Symposium is November 20 and 21.

Register here