IT community from Central Asia: Global CIO

Ekaterina Lyasko, City — Tbilisi, CEO

About the Community

The Global CIO professional community was established more than 10 years ago with the aim of bringing CIOs, as IT professionals, together on a single platform for communication, experience sharing, and best practices. Over the past two years, we have been developing the Global CIO community, which actively operates in the international market. This is an interesting experience, as we begin collaborating with different countries, cultures, and IT implementation specifics.

We are curious to observe the development of IT and how companies solve emerging challenges. We create a platform for exchanging experience because it is important for all participants.

Events for Community Members

One of our priorities is the "Project of the Year" competition. We invite IT directors and IT service providers to present their successful cases implemented over the past year and share how they executed their projects, what was interesting and unique about them. Our competition has no jury — projects are evaluated by the community members themselves. The evaluation methodology is diverse and interesting. Last year, we held the first international competition, which was successful. Participants included Malaysian airports with large digitalization projects, as well as the Istanbul Metro, which fully transitioned to digital management.

This year, we plan to continue this practice.

Community Participants

Community participants — CIOs, CTOs, and other IT leaders — are responsible for digitalization within their companies, regardless of their job titles.

You can join our community for free through simple registration. Our content is designed for IT managers, not programmers. We focus on IT management issues at the client level.

We are open to collaboration and actively work with clubs, associations, and IT parks in Central Asia. We consider ourselves a platform ready to promote them for free and organize various collaborations.

How the Community Helps with Development

In addition to the "Project of the Year" competition, we also have the Top 100 IT Leaders ranking, which allows you to introduce yourself as a leader and your company. This provides an opportunity to highlight the individual and the organization you work for, as careers are often built within companies you like.

We also have the Global CIO Academy, where we conduct masterclasses and training on a wide variety of topics. We focus on management skills without delving into technical details. Our goal is to help managers develop skills that make them more effective.

We offer a lot of free content, as well as a closed subscription-based section where we gather materials for a narrow audience: cases, colleagues' experience, templates, and checklists that may be useful.

Currently, we are developing a separate direction related to HR. For example, we will host a meeting on how to find IT specialists in Brazil and Latin America, where there are specific features and nuances. In addition to Central Asia, we are focusing on other regions. These initiatives are also aimed at collaboration.

Successful Projects

If you look at last year's winners of the "Project of the Year" competition, you can see that their projects won due to excellent solutions.

In our plans is to create a separate story about career tracks to track how our community members develop their careers and reach new heights. Today, we have all the opportunities to announce our successes to the world, and it is free — such an opportunity is rare, and it should be taken advantage of.

Plans

First and foremost, this is growth. Over the past year, our community has doubled in size, and we plan to maintain this pace over the next few years. The more participants there are, the easier it is to exchange experience and build a knowledge base.

Secondly, we strive to be interesting to our target audience by studying new trends, including the use of artificial intelligence. We have a separate series of materials dedicated to this topic.

The most important thing is to inspire our participants to new achievements and support them, so that collaboration is engaging. Interest is the key factor that helps create successful projects and improves team interaction.

Contacts for Those Who Want to Join the Community or Propose Collaboration

You can join the community for free via this link. The project team will be happy to answer any questions at feedback@globalcio.com.