Tech Team Joins Jobbuilding Effort

By Ivan A. Rodriguez
The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce’s technology and bioscience committee continues its quest to promote and grow the South Florida technology and bioscience industries through targeted seminars and what it considers high-quality networking events.

"We will be realigning our committee’s executive team structure to include representatives from the targeted industries outlined in the One Community One Goal strategic plan, expanding our annual Technology Leaders Luncheon, and broadening the range of topics covered in our quarterly events," said new committee head Ralph MacNamara, who is director of client services at Kaufman, Rossin & Co.

Participants in the session generated ideas to raise the region’s profile in the Technology sector, including bringing here the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Recommendations for helping raise the tech sector’s role in the region were also presented through a five-year plan called One Community One Goal spearheaded by the Beacon Council, which will have over 5,000 participants.

Part of the scheme is to target strategies to elevate Miami’s information technology infrastructure and entrepreneurial resources to meet the needs of professionals and companies in the industry.

Partnering with the global linkages committee, adding a focus on bioscience and live-streaming their events were among other aims the Technology and Bioscience Committee set at the ðïconference.

"Perhaps as part of our effort at the Tech Leader event or at the Stand Alone event is bringing in international folks here and really building South Florida as a hub of the technology for the region," said Mr. MacNamara in one of his suggestions to partner with the global linkages committee.

"We always talked about collaborating with other committees, so that when there’s an inbound linkage, maybe it links up to the same kind of tech leaders so that they can come. It grows the event and it grows it in a way that gets the word out," said Kevin Levy, stakeholder at the Gunster law firm who also specializes in representing clients in the technology sector and chairs the committee.

One attendee explained that the program’s expansion tends to focus mostly on technology, yet no focus seems to be added to the bioscience part of the title, something the chair said will change.

Due to the very different natures of the market area of bioscience and technology, the committee considered keeping the markets separated to get more nominees and more interest from sponsors.

Use of social media and live stream video was also discussed, with suggestions to record events to promote them.

"We did this with a Tech Leaders event. We launched it up on Youtube. So one suggestion is to set up our own tech-bioscience committee Youtube channel, which doesn’t take a whole lot of effort," said Alex Funkhouser, I.T. talent agent & president of Sherlock Technology Staffing and The Silverlight Group.

The committee will add a June 14 Business Continuity and Emergency Preparedness event that will present the new national hurricane center director and feature how FPL is using new technology to prepare and respond to disasters, as well as understanding the importance of developing a business continuity plan in the event of a disaster.