In this season for giving thanks, I am more grateful than ever for you, our members, and our strong and vibrant IAOP community. With the unprecedented challenges we all face during this pandemic, I feel particularly blessed this year that we have made it through the last nine months – together.
 
During this crisis, we have seen our amazing IAOP member companies collaborate in new and creative ways to share content, best practices and lessons learned. Our thought leaders have joined with experts from other member and sponsor organizations to produce relevant and valuable webinars and virtual events. We’ve shared articles, podcasts, videos, blogs and connected on new platforms. We’ve laughed…and cried.

For the first time, IAOP hosted a completely virtual three-day event with GOV20 and can I just say, Wow! What great energy and interaction. The sessions on rethinking and transforming governance in this challenging environment and virtual networking were amazing. We filled the GOV20 Library with lots of useful content and recorded it all, in case you missed it live. A huge thank you to our key sponsors, SirionLabs and Avasant. (For more, see stories.)

It was so wonderful to have our members and friends come together virtually to share their thought leadership and expertise in this way and enter into our home-work environments. We loved it so much we’re doing it again with ISO20 and OWS21!

Don’t miss IS20 – IAOP’s first virtual forum focused entirely on impact sourcing – Dec. 8-11. We are grateful to the Avasant Foundation for partnering with us, along with supporting organizations – Global Impact Sourcing Coalition, Global Mentorship Initiative, Tent Partnership for Refugees and Business Process Enabling South Africa. (For more on IS20, see story.)

As an association, we continue to reimagine how to best serve our members and are looking to the future with great optimism. To that end, we are strengthening our focus on our core segments that make IAOP unique and deliver the greatest value to you. These include such relevant areas as impact sourcing, automation and digital technology, governance, and talent, where our members have incredible expertise to share. We also are pleased to continue to partner with other leading associations to help advance our mutual work. Stay tuned for more to come in 2021. 

We are beyond excited to have our IAOP community come together on Feb. 16-19 for our first virtual Summit, OWS20, focused on the timely topic of Change is Good: Transformation Through Technology and Business Services to Drive Your Organization and the Global Economy. Presented over four shorter days in real-time and simu-live along with live Q&A, this powerful networking and learning experience will be sure to inspire you and deliver content that will make a difference to your organizations and professions that is so needed now. (For more on the program, see OWS21Goes Virtual.  

We look forward to “seeing” you soon. Please stay healthy and safe. From all of us at IAOP, have a joyous Thanksgiving and holiday season! 

Stay safe and well, 

Debi Hamill, IAOP CEO