Inside ASI-AP

On Thursday 24 July we hosted our 2nd IT Round Table event in the Melbourne office. This is an invitation-only event for the IT managers of our largest customers and customers in the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program. It followed on from the Executive Forum we ran for the same group of customers earlier in the year (for the Exec Forum the invitations are for COO's and senior executives). I posted some notes on our preparation here.

Based on feedback from the IT round table last year we are going to run these 1 day events every 6 months. The next one is scheduled for November and we will move to Sydney for that event.

We had 12 customers in attendance and the ASI team was myself, Mick, Jay and Shearne. We started a little earlier this year to give more time for open discussion and networking. We also had a hands-on session in our training room for the first time.

After the opening introductions, the first session was presented by Marty Rabenovets on video conference (Skype) from his home in the US.

Marty on Skype video (right) and Webex for his presentation (main screen)

Marty presented the Product Development Outlook (PDO) document, a new document for ASI that outlines our product development plans for 3+ years. The PDO is currently only being made available to selected customers that attend the round tables so that we can gather further feedback on the document and it's contents before making it more widely available later in the year. Our larger customers had been requesting this type of document for a couple of years now so that getting it to paper and having Marty do an overview was a significant achievement and well received by the customers.

The other sessions through the day were split between Jay and Mick, with Shearne and I in the training room taking the hands on iMIS session "101 things you know you should know".

Shearne conducting the hands-on session

Jay covered the topics of integration to iMIS, the content management framework of iMIS 15.1, and world-class websites. Mick presented on process - including Process Manager and iMIS Taskcentre. And then I hosted the final hour of Q&A open discussion.

There were some nice synergies between both Jay and Mick's sessions. Firstly in the integration session Jay showed how easy it was to write iBO for .NET web pages that could do a new member join, an event registration and add an activity. In the process session Mick kept the new member join theme going showing how both Process Manager and iMIS Taskcentre can be used to manage and automate the various steps in a new member joining and association.

Jay in a group discussion on world-class websites

My closing session reinforced the iMIS Value Cycle and encouraging the IT manager role to play a greater part in their organisations' management teams.

Dinner was a short walk to the Bluestone restaurant where networking amongst the customers and ASI continued until late.

Dinner at Bluestone

The iBEF exec forum and IT round tables are highlights of my annual calendar and I felt that this was our best one yet. I'll wait to see the feedback from the customers that attended to see if everyone agreed.

Note - the presentations from the round table have been uploaded to the iBEF e-community (staff or customer advsol.com login required). The feedback report has been posted here (insideasiap.com staff login required).