Just over one year ago, I came on board as ISACA’s first chief technology officer. I knew I had an exciting challenge in front of me. ISACA members are extremely sophisticated technology professionals, and I needed to make your experience with us elegant, quick and on your terms. At that time, I made a promise—that one year from then, we’d be in a very different place, and that we’d touch every single foundational system.
I am proud to say we’ve reached that goal of envisioning the future and backing up into ambitious milestones throughout 2020.
To get to this point, we needed to consider all three critical elements when making tech improvements: people, process and technology.
To that end, I began my time here by bringing on the right people with the right capabilities, including enterprise architecture, cloud and cybersecurity.
From a process side, we adopted Agile and DevOps, reducing deployment times substantially and allowing us to make more frequent deployments to better serve you.
From a technology side, we started with the goal in mind to build the One ISACA digital experience platform. We’ve made quite a few improvements with many more to come:
- A brand-new face of ISACA—a new website built on Sitecore that we continuously build and improve upon.
- A new learning platform, ISACA PERFORM. With the selection of our vendor BenchPrep, we pivoted from a very traditional and transactional approach to an experiential approach. We chose a learning experience platform to provide engagement, improve performance and help ISACA become a modern learning organization. The platform soft-launched late last month, and additional features are being added regularly.
- A shift to a single platform, Salesforce. This has been our biggest project to date. After conducting a gap analysis, we realized we had a mix of updated and antiquated systems—and there were a LOT of systems. Now, using a number of Salesforce modules, the entire organization will operate from one platform, giving us a 360-degree view and improving our ability to serve our professional community. We engaged with Salesforce in January and deployed Sales Cloud in June. In late November, we’ll deploy Service Cloud. We’ll be fully operational with Salesforce sometime next year.
- A new association management system, Fonteva. This system is built on the Salesforce ecosystem and will launch in summer 2021.
We engaged with Salesforce in January and deployed Sales Cloud in June. In November, we’ll deploy Service Cloud. You won’t see any changes on your end, except perhaps a different and more comprehensive format when you receive a response to your question, but the back-end experience will be more seamless and efficient. We’ll be fully operational with Salesforce sometime next year.
The goal of the IT team is to be a catalyst for business transformation and sustained innovation, and while our work is not done, we are well on our way to making that a reality. I’m so grateful to our team and so thankful that I have an incredibly supportive executive team and CEO. Technology can’t be successful without business sponsorship.
My job is to make our technology invisible—to remove all the friction so you can have the best possible experience. We will never stop trying to improve upon that.
