Gartner, the global technology research firm, has a robust stable of events, producing about 54 per year. The event group accounts for about $100 million of the company's $1.1 billion annual revenues. This year, the group expects to grow another 15 percent, says Alwyn Dawkins, senior vice president of Gartner Worldwide Events. Attendance has been on the rise too. Dawkins says that it was up 60 percent year-over-year in the second quarter.

Some of that growth has been attributed to a new strategic shift in how the group produces its events. Starting with its flagship show, Symposium/ITXPO, a traveling, international event that attracts a global audience of about 10,000 CIOs, Dawkins moved from building his conferences around trend topics to focusing on specific executive roles. The Symposium, for example, tightened its program to market to the CIO-level executive. The new strategy, says Dawkins, helps support the company's effort to create "must-attend" events rather than "nice-to-attend" events—a key distinction in today's budget-constricted world.

Granted, the strategy was borne out of the economic realities of the last few years, but it's a direction the company will continue with for the long-term. Here, Dawkins [pictured] explains more about the new strategy and how his event team continues to build out its product platform.

EXPO: Why the strategic shift away from a topic-oriented production strategy to this new focus on attendee roles?

Dawkins: We made the strategic decision at the end of 2008 to move Symposium from being more of a broad-based, all-inclusive, all-encompassing type of technology conference to being very focused on CIOs and their direct reports. One of the reasons we did that was because we believe running an event for a specific professional role within technology gives you a much more stable, targeted market to focus on and, provided you can continually offer the hottest topics or the most important issues they’re dealing with, it gives you a chance to drive repeat attendance and to grow a loyal community around the conference. Ultimately our goal is to produce the must-attend kind of conference for the roles that we target.

EXPO: Is this a strategy you'll stick with long-term, or relax once your attendee budgets loosen up?

Dawkins: It’s a fundamental shift in our strategy for the long term. If you run conferences or trade shows around topics, and there are plenty of opportunities to do so in technology, the challenge you have is the topic can be hot, but it can quite quickly become cold. That's difficult to sustain for the long term. On the other hand, if you focus on a role or a profession, you can introduce hot topic or you can retire them and replace them with more hot topics as they affect that role. And that gives you a much more sustainable long-term strategy to continue to keep people coming back and to grow that audience within that professional role. It also gives you a much more scalable platform because, in theory, these roles are generally the same in multiple geographies, so you can repeat the same conference in multiple places. That’s much harder to do when you’re focused on topics.

EXPO: How does that follow through on the exhibitor side?

Dawkins: Many of the companies we work with have moved in that direction as well. Technology companies in most cases target CIOs, or if they don’t then the CIO is incredibly important because that’s where the budget sits in terms of buying technology. If you can produce and provide a great audience of C-level executives then there’s a huge draw there.

EXPO: How has this approach panned out for Symposium?

Dawkins: We had a 40 percent increase in CIO attendees last year and we anticipate another 29 percent increase this year. So that shift and that kind of change in the event structure and architecture has really had a dramatic difference. We have now taken that same concept and architecture and are launching that in other regions.

EXPO: Your conferences are international, with events in South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. How have you structured your operation to support this?

Dawkins: We have tried different things over the years to run a global business. We’ve had regional management structures and regional leaders that run mini businesses underneath our global organization, with full responsibilities from sales to operations to marketing. Actually, what we’ve found over time and what’s working for us right now is a much more global strucure. We run our business very globally, we have our head office here in Stamford [Connecticut] and I have a global head of sales for events, I have a head of operations for events, a head of markting for events, and a head of production for events. Those people then have teams working for them in each of those key geographies that we operate in. And so we’ve moved away from having regional heads of business to having this global reporting structure. The reason we’ve done that is we are very strong believers in sharing global best practices to avoid re-inventing wheels all over the place.