I hope you are enjoying some downtime and taking a holiday break this month. Here at Smart Enterprise Exchange it’s been especially busy as we enhanced and migrated to the new community platform. Please take a virtual tour of the site and visit our new discussions, blogs, groups and content.

As you travel the site, you will find reports from our recent European live events in London; Mannheim, Germany; and Rome, as well as slides from our Bangalore, India, Live Exchange. This month we will host events in the U.S., including Sacramento, Calif., Phoenix and Chicago.

Additionally, be sure to tune into a recently conducted audiocast panel discussion on the topic of Optimal Automation with IT executives in the healthcare, human resources and financial services industries. Later in the month, we feature a series of video interviews with your CIO peers discussing collaboration trends. You will find insightful best practices from public-sector CIOs in Canada and private-sector executives in New York that reflect the global thinking of our membership.

In case you missed Tom Davenport’s July column on Optimal Automation, Tom offers a calm, practical voice in hectic times like these. He builds on the basics — process automation and knowledge management, for instance — yet finds new twists and approaches to adopt. His perspectives about corporate decision making should resonate with all business leaders who are struggling to make sound choices and plans amid uncertainty. In particular, his four-point call to action requires CIOs to become active partners in the decision-making process and provides tools to keep the company on the right path. For all these reasons, I’m pleased Tom will be available on the site to answer questions from members for a few days in September. Look for more details and dates soon.

If you’d like to participate more actively in Smart Enterprise Exchange, please join one of our existing special-interest groups — such as public-sector CIOs; members who are based in London or India; or anyone interested in mainframes, service management or Web 2.0. If you have other topics of importance, form your own group, ask a question, post a blog or download a presentation from one of our events.

As you can tell, there are many ways to get involved in the new Smart Enterprise Exchange, and we hope you’ll find it to be a uniquely vital business tool and a vibrant community resource.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange