One of our most recent posts, a retrospective by our longtime member Fred Cotton, covered how HTCIA got its start and how we got to where we are today. This post is about where we’re headed in the coming year, and beyond.
Our strategic plan
In July, a small group of HTCIA leaders gathered to map out a strategic plan, a vision and a road map for where HTCIA would need to go in order to continue to serve its membership. Following a careful assessment of our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, we devised a new, clearer and more succinct mission statement:
Provide education and collaboration to our global members for the prevention and investigation of high tech crimes.
In addition, we developed goals for education and professional development, membership services, communications, organizational governance, and financial resources. Some of the initiatives we are taking include:
- a newly redesigned website and logo
- a High Tech Crime Investigator Certification
- improvements in the way we help form and support international chapters
- development of member benefit programs
- many other actions
Community involvement
Another strategic initiative is to partner with other groups. This has already been happening to some extent at the chapter level, as a few of our chapters band together with those of other associations to hold joint training events. (This is, in fact, one of the reasons SoCal won Chapter of the Year.) However, we want to make it something we do more consistently across all our locations.
At our conference in Indian Wells we unveiled our nascent partnership with the SANS Community of Interest for Network Security (COINS) program, which allows us to help even more chapters offer local events jointly with a great educational resource. Already we’ve seen the debut of SANS360 offered jointly in DC with our Mid-Atlantic chapter, and in February, Mark Gonyea will be teaching Computer Forensic Investigations-Windows In-Depth in Los Angeles. We also hope to work with SANS on virtual events, like our free webcast in October.
In addition, we announced that our International Board of Directors voted to join the Consortium of Digital Forensics Specialists (CDFS) as an Organizational Member. We believe that in this way we’ll be able to help shape the education and training of this particular facet of high tech crime investigation, which is just one of the many our membership serves.
Finally, we’re looking to get more involved with our communities on Facebook and Twitter (and we’d love it if you left more comments here on the blog, too!). Polls, Twitter chats and continued conversation with our members and supporters will be part of what we’re doing.
Get involved! Become a member (guidelines at http://www.htcia.org/membership.shtml) and subscribe to this blog, our Facebook and Twitter pages to find out the latest.
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