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Great Content and Contacts Increase Conference Attendance
By Jerome W. Mapp, DISA Corporate Communications

“I really think we were hugely successful with the conference this year because of great content and great contacts,” said Roberta Stempfley, DISA’s deputy chief information officer and vice director of strategic planning.

“We ran 192 track sessions, and every day there would be a [message] saying, ‘This session is full; we’re working on scheduling another,’” Stempfley said. “Just the ability to bring the people together to talk about the issues that happen is why the conference has grown year after year.”

Stempfley said word-of-mouth has done more to spread news about the conference than an advertising campaign.

“It’s not like we’ve got this great advertising campaign,” she added. “We have people [conference participants] talking about the value of the conference to their friends, to their co-workers. The plenary speakers were just amazing.”

“Today, it’s more of a joined discussion versus an us-and-them discussion. So, the whole tenor has changed as we continue to listen to each other,” she added.

Stempfley said that the conference theme, “Imagine One Force…Connected,” resonated throughout the conference.

“One of the things we heard from the plenary speakers and others was about our theme. It really is a partnership, and it’s all about how to be commonly focused around a goal. So, I was really surprised to hear such consistency from everyone as they went forward [at the conference].”

She said that another reason for the conference’s continual success is because participants know that the track sessions, the plenary sessions, and the networking are aimed toward enabling all participants to more effectively support our warfighters.

“It’s still all about getting the right information into the hands of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. This is what we heard from everybody, including our coalition partners who joined us on stage.”

Like any organization, DISA faces both short- and long-term challenges. According to Stempfley, among those challenges is the ability to combine DISA innovations with industry innovations and to rapidly deliver capabilities and services to the military services at home and abroad.

 “There are great innovations happening all over the place,” Stempfley said, citing the Maritime Domain Awareness group as one example. The MDA initiative is an agreement between the U.S. Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security to establish a command-and-control system for monitoring all ports, coasts, and navigable waterways within the United States.

Stempfley believes that having the coalition partners on stage reinforced the theme of “Imagine One Force … Connected.”

“So, what I loved about this year’s conference was the fact that our coalition partners joined us on stage,” Stempfley said. “We don’t fight wars alone and we don’t do humanitarian assistance alone. They [coalition partners] are as much our customers as they are a part of us.”

The 2008 DISA Customer Partnership Conference was a huge success, but DISA is not resting on its laurels. Work is already under way to make the next Customer Partnership Conference in Anaheim, Calif., April 20 to 24, 2009, bigger and better .

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