CIPS Ontario Blogsite

Apologies to all those who wanted to hear from me in January.  It was a busy month what with vacation, and the downturn in the financial sector.  Anyway, here I am and lots of things have happened over the past 8 weeks.

Many of you may have read the article in Backbone MAgazine last year (http://www.backbonemag.com/Press_Release/Items/press_release_06270801.asp) And I’d like to announce that CIPS has been formally approved to introduce a new certification, the Information Technology Certified Professional of (ITCP).

This Certification will have equal standing and equivalence to the I3P IITP certification.  This means that holders of the new certification will be able to be measured on a par with those professional members of IT & IS societies from the US (IEEE-CS), Australia (ACS), South Africa (CSSA), the UK (BCS) and rest of Europe (CEPIS), Korea and Ireland, with many more countires lined up to get on-board.

The executives, councils and committes of all the sections across the country are beavering away at getting training material and exams in place so that as the Certifications are ready to be applied for the Criteria for obtaining certification, and the method to ensure that criteria is met and can be proved is available.

Closer to home here in Ontario we had the first meeting for a long time of all the senior executives of the Sections of Ontatio, the Provincial Board and the Chair of the Canadian Council for IT Professionals (CCITP) Greg Lane.  This was a working session where each section got to hear what the impacts have been since the huge governance changes across the societies last year, what our hopes and aspirations from a provincial perspective were.  Additionally, and in my view more improtantly, the Ontario Provincial board got to listen to the issues, and needs facing the sections, and also some of the tremedous success stories.

I am going to be working with Cameron McKay, the Toronto Section President to help him provide to the rest of Ontario some of the benefits that have been achieved by the Toronto section, in the hope that the model they have implemented can help bolster the exposure of CPS across the Province.

I have also had a meeting with the British Computer Society coutnerparts here in Ontario, and they have requested that we notify our members of their meetings, and that their members be allowed to come along to ours.  I therefore implore you to ensure that any meeting you have is either posted on the Provinical website or you can send it to our Membership committee here in Ontario.

This is one of many steps in having a worldwide Certification that recognizes IT & IS professionals for what they are, and the high levels of skill and professional ethics that maintain.

More can be read about the certification on the National CIPS website at (http://www.cips.ca/ip3) or at the United Nations’ IFIP website at http://www.ifip.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=32&Itemid=185.

At the end of this month I will be speaking at a Governance, Risk Reduction and Compliance Lunch, hosted by CIPS Ontario, sponsored by Oracle and supported by Deloitte.  The target audience are senior members of the Critical National and Finance Infrastrcuture (CNFI) organisations.  The primary goals of the meeting are to promote the need for professionalism in these recessionary times as well as identifying why organisations needs to hedge their bets when it comes to enterprise security management, where professional services are the highest cost of deployment.

The next few weeks are going to be tremendously busy, as we have budgets and projects to prepare.  I am hoping to get blogs from our other directors to let you all know how we are proceeding with improving the benefits for our members, supporting the career aspirations, and advocating the need for CIPS certified IT & IS professionals to organisations big and small across the Province.