President's Message

At the June 21, 2007 Annual General meeting for our chapter, I was honored to accept the Presidency of this remarkable organization for the 2007/2008 year.  It is a privilege to play a role in guiding the direction of this chapter and I am excited about all the great things we have in store for you this year.  I feel well-supported by the incoming leadership team to undertake the many tasks, challenges, improvements, and oversight required to run a chapter of nearly 400 members spanning geography from Tallahassee, FL over to Lakeland and down to Ft. Myers.

Our 2007/2008 officers are:

Erik Friebolin – Vice President and Education Programs director
Terrence Okus – Secretary and Membership director
Daniel Ruggles – Treasurer
Ana Valdez – Board member at large
Ryan Mackie – Board member at large
Joe Corsi – Past President

Our 2007/2008 Committee Chairs are:

            Pierre Joseph – Academic relations committee director
            Dr. Joe Joseph – By-laws committee director
            Johan Lidros – CISA review committee director
            Kate Mullin – CISM review committee director
            Steve Kupersmith – Webmaster
            Ed Tobias – Newsletter editor

Each of these professionals gives their spare time – time they could be doing other things – but they choose to spend some of their cycles to give back to their profession.  I am sure you have heard the old adage about the definition of commitment.  When you look down at your ham and egg breakfast tomorrow morning, know that the chicken made a contribution but the pig made a commitment.  This chapter is in need of both chickens and pigs.[1]

Raising your hand to help out with the chapter does not have to mean taking on an overwhelming, time consuming role.  There are myriad opportunities to contribute without becoming a pig, such as submitting an article for our newsletter, speaking at an event, volunteering to teach a module for the CISA or CISM review courses, inviting a non-ISACA member to one of our events, asking if your company can sponsor or host an event, taking the member survey, nominating and voting in the annual board election process, writing a test question for the CISA or CISM exam, and many others.

Our goal is to provide a valuable membership experience for each and every one of you in the upcoming year. Our educational events are geared to offer timely and relevant topics presented by the best speakers in the industry.  Last week’s session on Incident Response Handling and Digital Forensics presented by Barry Fawthrop of ISSCP (http://www.isscp.com/) was interesting and informative to the attendees. 

 Here are a few items on the horizon for the fall season:

• Networking social to be held on September 13 from 05:30pm – 08:00pm.  This event will be held at the Centre Club in the Westshore area of Tampa.  Watch your email for more information coming soon.  This event will be a special “Buy One, Get one Free” event.  For only $30, you can attend and bring a friend for FREE!  This is the perfect time to invite a friend, fellow member, or a non-member to attend.

• New technology and web site initiative.  The web site will be changing to improve the user experience and incorporate some of the suggestions from the recent members’ survey.  The next few months will bring other technology enhancements to make our job of providing the benefits and services you expect easier and more streamlined.  There will also be a new event registration service, called Acteva, which allows concurrent registration for multiple events, better choices for specialized meals and marketing promotions.  The email marketing program we are using, Constant Contact, will allow you to forward the emails to non-members who may be interested in attending our events or getting on our mailing list.  It also has the option of allowing you to opt-out of receiving emails from ISACA if you wish to do so.  A lot of these processes were manual and took excessive volunteer time and resources.  By improving the technology, we hope to improve your experience with the information you receive from the chapter.  Rest assured, we will never sell or distribute your personal information or email address and are adding a new privacy policy to the website just to make sure you know.  Steve Kupersmith, our webmaster, will be busy making changes over the next couple of weeks, so bear with us while we change and improve.

• Speaking of the member survey;  thank you to all who responded.  The winners of the $100 American Express gift cards were Isaac McKinney and Richard Sands.  Congratulations to our winners!

• The October 9 & 10, 2007 session will feature Gordon Smith of CanAudit on the topic of Control and Security of Enterprise E-Commerce.  This two-day event, beginning at 08:00am each day at the Quorum Hotel in the Westshore area of Tampa, will deliver valuable content and 16 CPE’s for only $300.  See the web site: www.westfloridaisaca.org for more course information.

• Each year, the chapter leadership participates in the Eastern Region Leadership Conference, also known as the President’s Council Meeting (PCM).  Two of our board members, Erik Friebolin and Ana Valdez, will be representing our chapter in Quebec, Canada in October 2007.  You may remember last year our chapter was the host of this annual event which was a great success. This event provided leadership learning opportunities for four of our board members and an opportunity for our CISA coordinator, Johan Lidros, to share his secrets for running a successful CISA review course with over 25 ISACA chapters from the Eastern United States.

• Speaking of CISA and CISM review courses, we will again provide review courses for both the CISA and CISM for the December 2007 and June 2008 examinations.  Our chapter has built a superior review program for each of these valued certifications.  As new Department of Defense and other professional requirements become effective, these certifications will be even more in demand and there is no better way to prepare for the exam than by leveraging our cost effective and results-proven review courses.  Keep an eye on the web page for more info.  Registration will begin soon.

• An upcoming seminar on November 12, beginning at 08:00am will feature a convicted felon, Sam E. Antar, who some of you may remember from the “Crazy Eddie’s” scandal in the 1980’s.  Sam, a former CPA and CFO of Crazy Eddie’s in New York, will tell us how he and his colleagues perpetrated one of the largest white collar fraud crimes in SEC history.  More information can be found at his web site: www.whitecollarfraud.com.  In addition to Mr. Antar, we will have representatives from Carnegie Mellon’s CERT Coordination Center on the same day giving us information on how to recognize and mitigate insider threat activities.  More information on the Insider threat work can be found at: www.cert.org/insider_threat.  This one-day event, to be held at the Quorum Hotel in the Westshore area of Tampa, will provide 8 CPE’s for only $175.

• December 6, at the Tampa Club in downtown Tampa, we will host another Networking social beginning at 05:30pm.  More details to follow.

 As we move ahead in executing the necessary plans to make these events successful, we must also be mindful of our goals as a chapter and as representatives of ISACA national.  You will see more in future newsletters about the strategic direction of ISACA and our chapter contributions in carrying out these goals.

Your chapter leadership remains committed to make the most of our influence in the short time that we are empowered to make the tactical decisions necessary to move forward while setting the stage for longer-term strategic planning.  With your help and support, I am confident we will make significant progress.

Sincerely,

Lisa Young, President