Welcome back!

Here at the Ottawa-Outaouais Chapter, we’ve spent a bunch of time preparing for another amazing year with you. Our strategic planning full-day workshop in July was based on the balanced scorecard, helping us to view our goals and initiatives from several different perspectives and build out our plan for the next three years. We’re excited to share this with you at the September meeting.

Chapter Membership

This year, we’re committed to providing even greater value to our chapter members. Chapter membership is open to and free for IIBA Global members. All it takes is signing up with our easy form and setting your primary chapter to Ottawa-Outaouais. In return, you’ll have free access to a number of our events, a reduced registration fee on others, as well as an advance registration window for events that sell out quickly, such as our workshops and the BA Blitz hackathon.

Chapter Sponsorship and Friends of the Chapter

For 2020/2021, we are also increasing collaboration with organizations within our community. We’re very grateful for a renewed commitment from our long-time and very generous sponsors, Algonquin College Corporate Training and Sprott School of Business, as well as a new relationship with MNP LLP.

We’d love to chat with you about how we can create connections between your organization and our community of business analysts. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like to learn more about sponsorship opportunities.

Capital BA Day

You’ll notice that our professional development conference, Capital BA Day, has gone to an online format but it will still take place on October 30. We didn’t want to delay this opportunity to get together with you, learn some new skills, and expand your network, so we’ve moved the conference to the hopin platform.  Because the conference is now online, we’ve been able to reduce the price of registration, but you’ll still get all of the same great content… fantastic speakers, a variety of relevant topics, drop-ins with our sponsors, and many networking opportunities. If you’ve already paid for the conference, don’t worry, you’ll receive a refund of the difference.

Monthly Events

We’re looking forward to offering you a great lineup of events this year, beginning with our monthly meeting coming up on Tuesday, September 15. I hope you’ll join us to hear Mary Daly of Throughline Solutions talk about Optimizing Your Role as a BA with Strategic Thinking and Design. It’s an important topic for BAs as we see our role evolving in so many ways.

September also marks the start-up of our study group with Nancy Beatson and Pam Paterson. Both are CBAP certified and will guide you in all things certification and BABOK.

Into October, the BA Beginnings and Business Data Analytics BA Trailblazer initiatives are ramping back up with a great list of topics for you to share in. Got an idea for a new BA Trailblazer? Contact us at info@ottawa-outaouais.iiba.org.

I’m looking forward to sharing the 2020/2021 season with you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to any of the members of the Board of Directors for information about our chapter or to learn about volunteer opportunities.

Christina Abbott
President, IIBA Ottawa-Outaouais Chapter