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Calling All IT HeroesCalling All IT Heroes

Our IT Hero Award will recognize enterprise IT communication/collaboration professionals for providing exceptional service, vision, and expertise.

Beth Schultz

January 5, 2021

3 Min Read
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The world took a collective sigh of relief as the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31 and the calendar flipped into a new year. Good riddance to 2020, a time so many of us would like to forget. But trying though it may have been, 2020 did have at least one thing going for it: the chance to shine for enterprise IT professionals overseeing their organization’s communications and collaboration strategies.

 

As offices, contact centers, and other corporate facilities shuttered around them, members of the No Jitter and Enterprise Connect user communities heard a resounding call to action: Keep the lines of communications open and the collaborative culture alive. Never mind that overnight, in many cases, hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of business users and contact center agents transitioned from working in the office to working at home.

 

Enterprise communications/collaboration managers had to pull out all the stops. Extending or spinning up brand new cloud telephony licenses, fast-tracking migration to team collaboration apps, deciding on and implementing video collaboration services …and the list goes on. And then, once that flurry of activity ended, they were left to rethink their strategies for the longer term and the dawning new reality of hybrid home-office work schedules.

 

At the same time, the clamor for social justice and diversity and inclusion reached an all-time high, and many across the enterprise communications/collaboration discipline took heed. We’ve heard pledges to make the hiring process less biased, to support diversity at the departmental and team levels, and to give everyone an equal voice in discussing strategic and technology challenges at their organizations.

Even without needing to contend with a global pandemic and massive social upheaval, enterprise communications/collaboration professionals are always part of the corporate bedrock — deserving of recognition for all they do to facilitate the conversations of everyday business life. Too often, though, their work goes unnoticed — only recognized in the wake of a problem. We’d like to change that, beginning with our new Enterprise Connect IT Hero Award.

 

With this IT Hero Award, we look to honor enterprise communications/collaboration professionals and teams who go above and beyond their day-to-day responsibilities to provide exceptional service, vision, and expertise to their organizations. Our enterprise IT heroes will have shown outstanding initiative and dedication in helping to make a difference inside and outside of their enterprises in the past year, whether that be in COVID-19 response, a call for equity, or in their every action. With this award, we look to bring these heroes to the forefront as a model to others.

 

We’ll recognize our IT Heroes at the Enterprise Connect Virtual event, Communication & Collaboration: 2024, taking place March 9 and 10.

We are now accepting nominations for the 2021 IT Hero Award; the deadline to enter your candidate/s is Friday, Jan. 29 (new date!). To be eligible, individuals or teams must work within an enterprise’s IT organization with a focus on communications/collaboration.

 

Please consider entering a hero or hero team you know and spread the word about this opportunity for recognition well-deserved!

 

About the Author

Beth Schultz

In her role at Metrigy, Beth Schultz manages research operations, conducts primary research and analysis to provide metrics-based guidance for IT, customer experience, and business decision makers. Additionally, Beth manages the firm’s multimedia thought leadership content.

With more than 30 years in the IT media and events business, Beth is a well-known industry influencer, speaker, and creator of compelling content. She brings to Metrigy a wealth of industry knowledge from her more than three decades of coverage of the rapidly changing areas of digital transformation and the digital workplace.

Most recently, Beth was with Informa Tech, where for seven years she served as program co-chair for Enterprise Connect, the leading independent conference and exhibition for the unified communications and customer experience industries, and editor in chief of the companion No Jitter media site. While with Informa Tech, Beth also oversaw the development and launch of WorkSpace Connect, a multidisciplinary media site providing thought leadership for IT, HR, and facilities/real estate managers responsible for creating collaborative, connected workplaces.

Over the years, Beth has worked at a number of other technology news organizations, including All Analytics, Network World, CommunicationsWeek, and Telephony Magazine. In these positions, she has earned more than a dozen national and regional editorial excellence awards from American Business Media, American Society of Business Press Editors, Folio.net, and others.

Beth has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and lives in Chicago.