Seattle CIO Forum

If I was smarter, I'd have posted about this event BEFORE it happened not afterwards. On Wednesday this week (Oct 24, 2007) I hosted the first of what we, in a stroke of creative marketing genius, called the "CIO Forum". Pretty clever isn't it?

About a dozen CIO's from the Puget Sound area met for lunch in Bellevue. I'd actually tried to set something up years ago while I was still at PACCAR. The common thread was a desire to be able to connect with others in the same role. The industries varied from banking to health care to agri-business. Leslie Pentland, former CIO for a number of organizations in the area and now a PhD focused on organizational development, took an impossibly hard task ("Distill down the literature around developing exceptional leadership in the CIO's direct reports") and did an outstanding job of giving the group some key takeaways.

The group's consensus was to continue the forum as a key networking opportunity. I'm thinking of tapping a couple of friends who are or were CFO's to discuss the keys to a succesful relationship between CIO and CFO.

Special thanks to Janice Colburne and Barbara Purrington at Sierra Systems for sponsoring this get together....even to the point of being very scrupulous about avoiding the temptation to turn it into an infomercial. Thanks Sierra Systems!

Let me know if you are interested in joining us or forming something similar in your area.