The month of May is an extremely busy time at Forrester as we get ready to welcome hundreds of attendees to IT Forum US in Las Vegas (May 26-28) and IT Forum EMEA in Lisbon, Portugal (June 9-11). For the third year in a row, I have the pleasure of hosting IT Forum EMEA. Over the next few weeks, I will be previewing here, interviewing Forrester analysts and our industry speakers about the great ideas that they will be presenting at the Forum, and keeping you up-to-date on the event.

The theme this year is “Business Technology Transformation: Making It Real.” We’ve been talking about this transformation – where every business activity is enabled by technology and every technology decision hinges on a business need – for a few years now, but this event is about putting the idea in practice. While transformation may be one of the most overused terms, it takes on real meaning as we work our way through the worst economic slump in recent memory. Think of the changes leaders face: customers and employees who are more demographically and geographically dispersed, creating new ways of doing business; myriad cloud-based or other lighter, fit-to-purpose delivery models becoming available; and of course, fiscal and regulatory pressures not seen in decades. Leaders outside IT need to engage more inside IT. As the clouds of recession begin to lift, business leaders want to move faster. This time the need for transformation is real, but it’s also a time for some soul searching in IT, a time to learn from past lessons and create a better way. Whether you are a CIO, Enterprise Architect or Security and Risk professional, the challenges posed by a transformational shift in the way IT operates are real and the more than 80 in-depth Track Sessions will dig deeper into the critical issues that you need to tackle to succeed.

Our industry keynote speakers are, as usual, some of the most successful and influential IT leaders in Europe today. The list includes Gianluigi Castelli (Executive VP ICT, Eni), Charlie Forte (VP, Global Operations and Infrastructure, BP), Peter Hambling (CIO, Lloyds of London), and Charles Newhouse (Head of Strategy & Design, Enterprise IT Services, BAE Systems). All of these great speakers have a compelling story to tell about how they led the transformation of their own organizations and tackled numerous hurdles along the way. In the coming weeks, I’ll post pre-event interview blogs with our industry keynote speakers, so stay tuned.

On the Forrester side, George Colony (Chairman of the Board and CEO), Andrew Bartels (VP Principal Analyst), Alex Cullen (VP Research Director, Enterprise Architecture), and Ted Schadler (VP Principal Analyst) will all be presenting bold new ideas and pragmatic, no-nonsense research on the main stage. One of those bold new ideas will be Alex Cullen’s keynote, “Planning And Delivering The Capabilities Your Business Wants.” As Alex puts it, “Business capabilities are the Rosetta Stone linking business goals, needs and operating models to the IT investments and service that enable them.” Alex wrote a great blog post recently on the topic and you can find it here.

If you have questions that you would to put to any of our speakers, please drop me an email at syates@forrester.com and we will either use them live and on-stage or in blog posts leading up to the event. You can also follow our Twitter feed at #Itfe10 and join the LinkedIn group to connect with other attendees.