By: SHARE EXECUforum Committee Members

Recently SHARE’d Intelligence asked a couple members of the EXECUforum Committee how they would best encourage people to attend this year’s EXECUforum event—and their responses, quite simply, were this: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

In other words, for those who have questions about the mainframe in the digital age and wish to engage in conversations with peers on the latest trends, this is certainly a can’t-miss event on the calendar.

These days, without management buy-in and understanding, the value of our platform can often be overlooked. That being said, the two days of information sharing and peer networking that can be experienced at this year’s EXECUforum event—March 6-7, 2017 as part of SHARE San Jose—is priceless when it comes to helping maintain the relevancy of the platform.

For those who have yet to experience an EXECUforum event, we can say that what you should expect is a gathering of enterprise IT leaders where critical business conversations are taking place. Two days that are chock-full of a deep dive on all that is impacting the mainframe today—from Big Data/analytics, to the latest in productivity tools to mobile/security to DevOps—and even conversations about the mainframe skills gap. What comes of it all is new insight to help build a better organization from the top down.  

EXECUforum provides to the leaders that attend a first-hand understanding of the value and importance of SHARE to their respective organizations. It provides them the reasons needed for to want to send their managers to SHARE so they can become better equipped to meet the challenges of the fast pace changes taking place in technology. It also provides their managers networking opportunities and gives them a front row seat to some of the best experts in the industry.

If the past is any indication of what to expect this year, attendees should be very inspired by the types of connections that can be made in just a short amount of time. Since 2010, executives from more than 40 companies have attended EXECUforum to engage in strategic business discussions on technology topics, address key business challenges, and share corporate strategies around business direction. IBM, Ford, Marist, CA Technologies, Dell EMC, Nationwide—this is just a sampling of the companies that have been a part of previous EXECUforum events—and this year the lineup promises to be just as exciting.

We are really looking forward to the networking that occurs during EXECUforum. We get the chance to meet leaders from different companies and hear them share concerns and challenges they are facing which usually are very similar in nature to ones we also face.

In this month’s issue of SHARE’d Intelligence, we highlight a few of the presentations that are scheduled for EXECUforum. Our staff caught up with a few of the speakers for Q&As on their particular topics and the key takeaways that attendees can expect.

We also encourage you to view past videos and presentations from previous EXECUforums, reach out to previous attendees or to members of the EXECUforum Committee with specific questions. Word of mouth is always one of the best ways to encourage and draw in new attendees.

We believe we speak for all of the EXECUforum committee members Rebecca Levesque, Gail Bymun, Rosalind Radcliffe, Buzz Woeckener, Ed Jaffe, Harry Williams, Warren Harper and Donna Hudi, when we say that we are most looking forward to the interchange of ideas and experiences as they relate to improving and enhancing the platform.

And now you know.