What a great week we had at SHARE in Anaheim! This event marked our best attendance in three years. The energy and dialog was as strong as ever. We’d like to extend a special thanks to our keynote speakers, Anjul Bhambhri, Dayton Semerjian, and Sandy Carter who provided interesting and timely information to our attendees.
For the third time, we webcast sessions live from SHARE. For those who could not travel to Anaheim but still wanted to participate in SHARE, we presented 22 sessions over the web during the week. If you missed both SHARE and the live webcast, you can still access the sessions. By purchasing access to the recorded sessions, not only can you see what you missed, you can also share the content with others in your company.
SHARE in Anaheim marked our first ExecuForum. We offered a special program for IT executives of our Member companies. These participants had the opportunity to interact with IBM executives, discuss issues of concern, and share ideas with peer executives. This was a highly interactive and energized group that explored social business, managing mobile devices, encouraging teams to exhibit leadership, and addressing the skills gap. We will be planning another ExecuForum for 2012. If your IT executive did not have a chance to participate, please encourage them to join us next year. We will continue to keep the program compressed into two days, with an option to participate in other SHARE activities for an additional three days. Not only will we have new topics and new issues, we will also be evaluating new benefits associated with this program.
As part of SHARE’s role in influencing the industry, we recently completed a survey of our Member companies to assess our needs for academia to provide programs to train the next generation of IT professionals. A majority of Members report that they depend on the educational sector—universities and colleges—to provide graduates with specific IT skills in enterprise programming languages and mainframe administration skills, as well as business skills such as problem-solving and communications abilities. However, few companies are entirely satisfied with the readiness of graduates coming out of campuses. The full report is available, as a Member benefit, on our web site.
Also as part of our efforts to encourage young professionals in enterprise IT, SHARE awarded its second Academic Award for Excellence in Anaheim. This year’s winners were John Noel and Regina Robbins, recent graduates of North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, for their work on 'Wiki: A Systems Programming Productivity Tool.' John and Regina described their project to attendees at SHARE in Anaheim.
We are already starting to plan our activities for SHARE in Orlando. In the meantime, continue to watch for year-round activities from SHARE. We will be hosting webcasts, and will be establishing an online community. So, while I look forward to seeing you face-to-face in Orlando, I also plan to be exchanging ideas virtually. See you soon!!
Janet L. Sun
SHARE President