BasicGov / BLOG

Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce event is earlier this year than most – August 30 – September 2, 2011.  Today is the last day for early bird registration in fact.  You can follow Dreamforce in social media at:

• Twitter at hashtag #df11 and at http://twitter.com/#!/Dreamforce
• Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/dreamforce
• Youtube http://www.youtube.com/salesforce#g/c/4F4339962AFB91B1
• Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/company/salesforce.com

As a Salesforce.com partner, we (BasicGov) attend this conference every year and I’m looking forward to being there again this year.

This year’s keynotes that have been announced so far are:

• Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO Salesfore.com
• Vivek Kundra, US government Chief Information Officer
• Marcel LeBrun, CEO and Founder Radian6
• Loic Le Meur, CEO and Founder Seesmic
• Jeremiah Owyang and Charline Li, Partners Altimeter Group
• Michael Fauscette, VP IDC

There will be these new areas at Dreamforce …

• Welcome to the Social Enterprise. You need to reach customers at every point of interaction—not just in your own products, but also through sales, services, Twitter, Facebook, Chatter, and community sites everywhere. @dreamforce will offer an intense focus on social media, the movement that’s reshaping the business world. Hear jaw-dropping secrets from leading practitioners on the cutting edge of the industry; they’ll share everything from the basics of setting a social media strategy to tracking metrics and going viral.
• Expanded expo hours. This was your top piece of feedback from last year and we listened: The Expo will be open all four days, for up to eight hours each day. This year, we’ll have 300+ cloud computing leaders on hand—in addition to the Salesforce.com Campground in the center of the Expo. With all these value-add technologies under one roof, you’re guaranteed to find the next must-have solution for your organization.
• Extended learning time. You asked for more time to take advantage of all Dreamforce has to offer. We’ve added a fourth day, full of content, allowing you to attend more sessions, get more hands-on training, and unlock even more value . . . Dreamforce ’11 is packed — Monday with pre-conference training and certification, and Tuesday through Friday with sessions, keynotes, networking events, expo time, and more.
• Technology deep dives. Looking for more information on all the new salesforce.com products? We’ve added plenty of sessions that focus on Heroku,Siteforce, database.com, and Radian6. Pick up all the details and training you need; then get started using them right alongside our experts.

Not sure if you should attend?

Check out “Justify your trip” here

Tags: BasicGov, cloud computing, Dreamforce, Dreamforce keynotes, e-Government, Gov 2.0

The NASCIO Midyear conference was this month in Washington DC.  The conference allows state government and corporate NASCIO members to discuss issues facing the information technology field.

Sponsors of this conference ranged from Salesforce.com, Cisco, EMC, ESRI to Accenture.  White papers by the sponsors are available on the website here.

I read an interesting white paper by Accenture – Emerging Stronger: The relevance of the CIO in challenging times: A look at the evolving role of the CIO and four areas where CIOs must focus to make IT an integral part of a high-performance government.

In Accenture’s white paper they list out these drivers of change:

• citizens’ increasing demands  for services
• new technology trends
• demographic shifts
• political change
• unfunded federal programs

Governments are responding to these pressures in many ways and one that is very smart is “collaborating across jurisdictional boundaries”. We, BasicGov, see this at the state and local level of governments.

In Accenture’s white paper they describe this as:

Local-to-state, state-to-federal and intra-agency collaboration opportunities abound for governments to take advantage of synergies, reduce duplication and create economies of scale in delivering services. Cross-jurisdictional collaboration requires CIOs to enter the dialogue and help adopt more synergistic approaches to break down the barriers of government culture and decision making. But the payoff can be significant. States can achieve tremendous savings when they find opportunities to leverage synergies and economies of scale in delivering IT across jurisdictional boundaries.

There is also a useful checklist for statewide IT governance in the white paper:

• Are you aligning enterprise IT initiatives with agency strategies and business goals?
• Are you selecting the right enterprise IT initiatives?
• Are you preparing realistic business cases for major IT investments?
• Are you enforcing accountability and transparency for performance?
• Are you defining IT and business governance structures, and are the associated processes working?
• Are you controlling costs and maximizing revenue opportunities?
• Are you promoting a citizen-centric service mentality?
• Are you managing IT projects well and holding them accountable?
• Are you identifying and rectifying problem, at-risk applications and infrastructures?
• Are you investigating and investing in new and emerging technologies?
• Are you seizing standardization, shared services and other cost-efficiency opportunities

Download Accenture’s white paper here http://www.nascio.org/events/sponsors/vrc/Role_of_CIO_FinalAugust2010.pdf

Tags: accenture + NASCIO, BasicGov, e-Government, Gov 2.0, NASCIO, state government, state government IT