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The Key Fundamental - Community
The Key Fundamental - Community
Hello Everyone,
This is the continuation of a series of emails I am sending as a prelude to our national meeting.
Before I begin, let me tell you a bit about myself. I joined the Houston Chapter in 1986. At that time I was still a "mainframer". The Houston Chapter was huge! Probably around 400. I was very comfortable with the group. Why? Most everyone there was an MIS department "mainframer" just like me. We were a happy community of "mainframers", and life was great.
But then I began to notice the "slide". As I look back at that time, I now realize that as PCs and client/server computing began to take hold, our renewal rate was going down.. and down.. and down. Many more specialized organizations began to appear, each of them focused on a narrow technology or product. These were little communities of technology specialists, and they were attracting our members. We finally stopped our chapter's bleeding at 150.
Many other MIS organizations did not fair as well as DPMA.
Several notable MIS organizations in Houston were gone by the early 1990s. Our Chapter continued to enjoy success with our stabilized membership, but I was distressed by the slow membership decline the association was experiencing nationally. I enjoyed my involvement on the board (I was active enough to make it to the "gold award" level), and our meetings were excellent. Life seemed to be great again - even though we were a bit smaller.
For about seven years, I was an IT consultant with Ernst & Young. The firm sent me to many U.S. cities to work on development projects for a year at a time. I remained active with the Houston Chapter, but I attended the meetings in my assignment cities in order to get my monthly "DPMA fix". During this time I had the pleasure of attending meetings in Kansas City and Charlotte, for a year each. I attended the "Mile High" meetings in Denver for two years. These chapters were all doing an excellent job, and I took notice of their unique DPMA cultures.
I didn't realize it then, but I do now, these chapters were great because they truly represented the IT "communities" within their respective cities. They each had varying degrees of balance between the following four groups:
- The corporate IT professionals
(The implementers and supporters of IT in companies)- The IT vendor representatives
(The folks selling and supporting IT products)- The IT consulting and placement firms
(The people telling the others how IT should be done, or just supplying the resources to get IT done)- The academic IT community
(The folks who are figuring out how IT really should be done, training our future staff members, and supporting our student chapters)I learned that a successful, vibrant chapter must have representatives from all four of these IT groups to apply the AITP "community glue" which really holds. I believe that even a small to mid-sized city can have a great chapter if they simply draw representatives from all four of the groups.
Think about it. Each group needs the others to be successful. It is in everyone's interest to have some contacts within each of the other groups just to do our jobs effectively. We all need to know and support each other. When you begin to focus on this concept, you take the first step from just having an "IT Club" to creating an "IT Community".
To put it another way:
A successful chapter is simply a city's IT community (represented the four groups) deciding they all want to see each other once a month, network, hear a great speaker, and maintain relationships between each other. If the group is strong enough they can even become pro active by sponsoring seminars, job fairs, and conferences within their own communities - creating super glue!
My advice from this:
Stop thinking about yourself as AITP - instead think of yourself as your city's IT community. AITP is the organizational structure which makes these community gatherings possible. Use AITP for this purpose. I believe that our most successful chapters already have this mind set down cold.
With the fast pace of technology change today - and with an increased interdependence between companies, vendors, consultants, and educators - the need for organizations like AITP to provide this meeting opportunity on "neutral ground" is now stronger than ever. The cities with successful chapters understand this dynamic already, and they communicate it locally to their memberships:
"We are the IT community for this city."
As a chapter leader you have to see it, tap into it, and make the opportunity occur for your own local situation. Your future membership is out there waiting.
More to come...
