The Sourcing Interests Group event looks to offer a lot of value, though its value could be diminished by several factors.
If you’re not familiar with SIG, it’s a membership-driven organization started by a lone individual and focused on outsourcing in all forms. The organization hosts events around the year, but puts most of its energy into two conferences. The one taking place in October in Huntington Beach in Southern California is its 26th. It’s pricey, located in a resort setting and intended for an executive-level audience.
The fact that all forms of outsourcing are part of its purview means you’ll be sitting in sessions with people who care about facilities, call center, accounting or HR outsourcing and wouldn’t know data center benchmarking if you papered their offices in it. But since there are multiple breakouts taking place at the same time, chances are good you’ll find something to attend in any given hour of the program.
Also, the agenda shows signs of creative intelligence that you don’t see in the other events I’ve written about here. For example, this sounds like a compelling topic: “Designing an Early Warning System To Mitigate Offshore Risks.” Likewise, this one: “Can This Outsourcing Be Saved?”
Best, this conference includes plenty of speakers coming from the ranks of client sites: Shell US, Lufthansa, IndyMac Bancorp, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island, PPG Industries, ING US Financial Services, GMAC Residential and Wachovia. These are folks, presumably, who are in the trenches and willing to share the hidden gotchas they’ve run across in their projects.
This is probably the one I’d invest my training dollars in if I had them to spend right now.
