COMMON POWERUp 2024

You have a wealth of experience and expertise. Have you thought about sharing your know-how by speaking at COMMON? Speaking at COMMON is fun and a great way to get involved with other members as well as the organization at large. Come join this Question and Answer discussion with members of the Volunteer Excellence Committee. Let's talk about your questions, ideas for sessions or whatever is on your mind. We will share experiences about what it is like to speak at COMMON, successful speaking techniques, preparation steps, etc. You may be the next outstanding speaker at COMMON!

Learning Objectives:

In today's hyper-competitive world, we're all striving to be the best employees we can be. We want to impress our boss, finish that big project on time and under budget, and earn that big promotion with a hefty raise. If you work in IT, it's very likely you report - directly or indirectly - to your company's CIO, or perhaps CTO. How can we best enhance and leverage that relationship to support your company's IT initiatives, and advance your career?

The first step is to understand your CIO's role. The role of the CIO or CTO may seem mysterious and overwhelming at first, but it's critical for all IT employees to understand the big picture in order to better support your boss, and become a superhero to your CIO!

Learning Objectives:
We'll cover:
- What is your CIO responsible for? We'll discuss the practical elements as well as the strategic decisions of the job
- What does a day in the life of your CIO look like?
- What are the differences between a CIO and CTO?
- Who does your CIO communicate with? Who is he or she responsible to, and for what?
- What pressures does your CIO deal with every day, and from whom?

Are you intimidated by spreadsheets? Do you use Excel for the basics, but know you could be so much more productive with it if only you knew how? Do you cringe when other business people within your company ask for data in spreadsheet form? Excel is a wonderful tool, especially when paired with the IBM i! It's incredibly powerful, and can save you lots of time.

This session will begin with the basics and then progress through more advanced Excel topics such as functions, pivot tables, and array formulas. Using real life examples, you'll see how these new skills will help you in your career. Finally, we'll review powerful methods of pulling data from your IBM i directly into Excel spreadsheets! You'll even leave with sample code you can leverage within Excel to give you one click access to run an SQL statement from your desktop and have the results returned in a spreadsheet.

Learning Objectives:
After participating in this session, attendees should have the skills and techniques to:
- Understand the benefits of using Excel
- Use spreadsheets to improve your own productivity as well as that of your company
- Pull data from your IBM i directly into a spreadsheet in a variety of ways