Beyond Budgeting’s 9th Annual Conference will start today in Dallas at the Omni Park West Hotel.

This year’s conference features the largest group of hands-on implementers ever assembled. These practitioners include Nevine White of tw telecom and John Hrudicka of Elkay.

White and Elkay join an expanding roster of deployment practitioners, including Bjarte Bogsnes from Statoil and David Cooke, formerly of Park Nicollet Health Systems. It’s great to hear how these companies are transforming into forward-looking, Future Ready organizations.

The conference’s theme is “Future Ready: Seeing through the Fog.” When I originally selected the title, I figured that we would be either be slogging thought a lingering recession or trying to see forward as we emerged from it. That foresight has turned out to be fairly close.

What I didn’t envision was that my coauthor, Steve Morlidge (with whom I am scheduled to jointly present both the opening presentation in Thursday and a three-hour workshop on Friday), would be stuck in the UK with thousands of other travelers.

The reason? Heavy clouds of volcanic ash the spewed from Iceland’s volcanic eruption. The eruption has grounded most transatlantic flights for more than a week. The economic loss for the airlines stretches into the billions. I wonder how many of them had a scenario anticipating this?

While my financial pain from this unexpected external event is not nearly as burdensome, I still need to figure out how I can satisfy conference attendees who had hoped to see two Steves instead of one.

I spent much of the week scrambling to make sure that we are ready. High-definition recording technology and Skype have made that easier than ever before. If you happen to be in town, come by and see us; if not, the video will be available after the event. ###