President's Message: How’s Your Network Performance? Got Connectivity?

As IT professionals we all know the important of having a robust, healthy, responsive, and fast network with significant bandwidth. Maintaining, building-out, and improving our networks across the IT enterprise is something we contribute great time, energy, and $$$ to doing. If your network is broke, you have a crisis for sure!

 

There is another network that we need to nurture, expand, and focus resources on. That network is our professional network. A healthy professional network consists of colleagues, friends, peers, and contacts. Some we may know very well and others we may not know very well at all. Every contact, though, represents a source of future support and potential opportunity for you to help and be helped by. Interaction with those in our network may vary from face-to-face meetings, social media engagement, texting, e-mail, phone, or listserv. One of the consultants in my network beat me down for 11 years about this organization called GMIS. He told me I needed to join it. I finally joined to shut him up and connected myself to the most awesome network in the world!

 

Our network provides emergency 911 IT response when we have a critical technical problem or even a threat to our career. You never know when you may need to call your network into action. Your network can save you $$$. I saved my county $30K by attending a state meeting and learning from my network that a vendor I was ready to execute a contract provided a $30K discount to another agency on the same product. Funny how my vendor hadn’t mentioned that to me? On my way home I contacted my vendor and much to his surprise negotiated the same discount for my agency. Last year at the GMIS Newport Conference I won a website design from a conference sponsor valued between $35K-$50K. My agency now thinks I ROCK more now than ever! Sweet!  Never underestimate your network, never fail to assist your network, and never fail to seek help from your network when you need it most both personally and professionally.

 

We are few months away from our annual GMIS International gathering, which is in Atlantic City! If you’re not registered, consider attending and tapping into one of the best and most awesome networks we have! You won’t regret it and I promise you will reap immeasurable benefits! 

 

Looking forward to networking with you there!