News release Brussels, 4 February 2016
This morning the international Agile MarComs chapter was launched during the opening of the Agile Leadership summit in Brussels. Jeremy Curtin, director of Digital Experience at Liberty Global and chair elect of the chapter, held a brief statement with the chapters vision and mission and layout of first activities.
“With this chapter we’d like to contribute to a shared collaboration philosophy of IT, Business and Marketing Communications so that the professionals in these fields really start working together. And by doing so enhancing the overall effectiveness of the consumer engagement of their organizations.”
He stressed the necessity for such a platform by pointing to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous characteristics of organizational environments these days: “In order to preserve and increase our organizations’ competitive advantages, we need to engage with consumers in a collaborative and adaptive way. Agile practices based in empiricism provide the tools we need as Marketing and Communication professionals.”
This also explains the foundation of a specific professional chapter. “Whilst Agile from an IT perspective has evolved and seeks to solve scaling issues these days, MarComs professionals are still discovering Agile methods and are more occupied with questions like ‘Can we too use these practices?’ and ‘How do we apply them best in our professional domains?’.” The founders of the MarComs chapter committed themselves to organize knowledge sharing through (net)working groups, to organize events and to expand certification processes for the Marcoms profession.
The Agile MarComs chapter is founded by Jeremy Curtin (Chair/Director of Digital Experience at Liberty Global), Misha van Hamersveld (Boardmember/Project Manager at Talmark), Marielle Roozemond (Initiator/Agile marcom consultant and lecturer Rotterdam University) and Roald Tichelaar (Boardmember/Online business consultant connected to SRM and NIMA). Yacht, a Randstad company, stepped up to become the first MarCom partner and committed to certify their MarComs professionals in Agile Foundation Marcom. A certification process for MarComs professionals started by Agile Consortium International in 2014.