Our annual GTEC conference, exhibition and distinction awards wrapped up at the end of October and by all accounts it was another successful event. However, what strikes me is that we’re still missing our business colleagues in the conversations and the celebrations that take place over the three and a half days.
Perhaps stating that GTEC is the “primary forum where government and private sector communities gather to exchange ideas and advance the business of ICT in government” is not a broad enough brush and we are too narrow in our messaging. The fact is we want to be open and inclusive, to bring business and IT together to discuss key challenges facing the public sector across all jurisdictions.
This isn’t to say that GTEC hasn’t had success in attracting business to join the conversation. In fact, this year, working with experts in our community, we successfully brought business and IT together in sessions such as “From Information Management to Open Information: The New IM” and “Destination Enterprise: Designing GC Inc.” Both sessions involved stakeholders beyond IT and were attended by a representative cross-section of the business.
The dialogue in both sessions centered on non-IT subject matter, the first led by the premise that information is the fuel of business growth and that mobility, open, and digital are really more about people’s motivations for using and sharing information than they are about technology and tools. The second addressed how the shift toward enterprise management affects all business transformation efforts – no mention of IT whatsoever.
Over the past 22 years we’ve earned the reputation as Canada’s leading government technology event, and while we are proud of this acknowledgement and will still deliver the latest technology trends and solutions, we will continue our efforts to engage our business colleagues in the dialogue.
