We are living in a digital era, where change and innovation take place almost daily. Keeping up with the latest developments can be difficult. Using shared knowledge, experience and expertise (our collective brainpower) is key to staying competitive.
For us, sharing knowledge is important for several reasons. Content is key when you are a consultant, and sharing knowledge helps this content to grow. Sharing knowledge enables Itilians to grow and develop. It also breaks down silos and increases involvement. But as important: sharing knowledge connects us with our customers so that we can truly understand their challenges.
Hence, we put a lot of effort in sharing knowledge. We organize numerous activities, both within our organization as well as outside of it. One example is the roundtable dinner. During this session we get together with a small group of customer executives and discuss a relevant topic, such as; data science or cloud governance. By hosting this discussion in a confidential and informal setting, participants can talk openly about their views, challenges, and experiences to learn from each other.
We also organize several hackathons per year. Each hackathon revolves around a data science use case. The data is often based on a real-life anonymous customer case. Hackathons are open to data scientists from both inside and outside our organization, and where possible we invite customer analytics teams as well to explain the case and, of course, participate. In a friendly competition, teams are challenged to solve a case using techniques such as image classification or clustering. These events are a great way to not only share and increase knowledge, but also to meet new like-minded enthusiasts.
