Summit EMEA 2017: UK AXUG chair says learning value is event focus

James Fleming is Executive Vice President of IT at Element Material Technologies, a London-based testing and certification laboratory. He's by no means just the "IT guy," he was named by Microsoft as both a Dynamics AX MVP and as Business Visionary Leader of the Year at the Microsoft Convergence 2014 EMEA event. He has also spent four years serving as the AXUG's UK chair.

He told us about his vision for AXUG UK, and the vision behind the upcoming Summit EMEA 2017 event.

MSDW: You were on the organizing committee for Summit EMEA's inaugural event in 2016 in Stuttgart.

I was, and it was a great event.

Summit is hugely important for all different people who use the systems, not just the technical people but the functional people who work in whether it's finance or manufacturing. If they can get to events like this they just take so much out of it - how you can get better use of the systems, because they're not inexpensive to implement. I'm a CIO, and I'm constantly told and constantly remind people, This is a business system, as well as an IT system," so we need to get as many people involved in understanding what these products can do. They're fantastic products. But, we always need to drive adoption, drive usage of more functionality.

So I think these events like Summit, where you can get groups of people together are fantastic, especially after Convergence, which I always thought was a great event. It makes people like Dynamic Communities more important, we really ...