President's Message & Press release

What an eventful week for PMI Buffalo!  On Saturday the Board of Directors held our annual strategic planning meeting which included our incoming board members that will start their terms on January 1^st, 2025.  During the full day session, we reviewed progress against our 2024 milestones, discussed membership feedback, conducted a SWOC (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & challenges) exercise, and initiated operational planning for 2025.  This year’s session was particularly exciting with so many new voices bringing great ideas to the table, experiencing their first time being a part of the leadership team!   I am very enthusiastic about this team and what they will be able to accomplish over the coming years.

Furthermore, we held our September dinner event on Tuesday night at Big Ditch brewery in downtown Buffalo, featuring speakers from PCA Technology Group who educated us on Cybersecurity and their sophisticated process for conducting risk assessments.  I think we all took something valuable away from the session. For me it was that I will never be joining public WiFi again due the relative ease of replicating false networks that hackers can deploy in an effort to gain access to your devices and data. 

To cap of this exciting week of activity, I am writing this month’s message on my flight as I travel to the 2024 North American Leadership Institute Meeting (NA LIM) in Los Angeles, California (not on the WiFi 😊).  I’m excited to meet some of my peers in person for the first time and participate in a host of different educational breakout sessions.  If you’re reading this and will be there, let’s connect!  I’ll be sure to include some key takeaways from the LIM in my next message.  I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Regards,

Dan Augustynek