What You Missed at VanWIT’s Fall Breakfast Speaker Series

Attendees arrived bright and early to VanWIT’s November Breakfast Speaker Series, excited to hear from Shari Wallace, the CIO from the City of Burnaby and to network with their peers.  The Beedie School of Business at SFU provided a beautiful venue to host supporters of women in tech as they learned how to become an intrapreneur to navigate a career path and achieve success within an organization.  Shari took questions from the audience and created an interactive atmosphere for a full house of women and men with good use of humour and sage advice.

After coffee cups were filled and following a quick introduction from VanWIT President Sandra Horvath, Shari jumped into her presentation covering topics including:

• The importance of leveraging business drivers for IT to add value for your organization
• Finding the right timing for projects and great ideas to set yourself up for success
• Speaking so your audience will listen with the simple rule of  online purchase of priligy “Be brief, be bright, and be gone” avoiding a “PowerPoint Striptease” with a slow reveal
• Talking business to techies and tech to business
• Following industry trends to adapt to tech disruption and being prepared for change
• Working with your team and building an internal network to achieve success within the organization
• Saying ‘yes’ to opportunities that present themselves and how lateral position moves can help in navigating a career path

Shari elucidated her presentation material by sharing stories about real-life projects and challenges in her career, and the audience was inspired by her humility in describing her personal career path to CIO.  She offered insight into the rapidly evolving world of IT in both the public and private sectors, and the importance of embracing governance, making impartial decisions, and focusing on driving value during the project lifecycle and beyond into operations.

If you were unable to attend, we look forward to welcoming you at a subsequent event.  If you have ideas for future events or suggestions for future speakers or topics, please reach out to us at events@vanwit.ca or start a conversation thread on our LinkedIn group.

As always, you can keep up-to-date with the latest happenings via our Events listings.