Statistics Canada IT Conference
sduford on Apr 05 2007 at 2:16 pm | Filed under: Miscellaneous
Yesterday Jeff Kempiners (our Canadian CTO) and I, did two presentations at the Statistics Canada IT Conference. The theme of the conference was “Enterprise Architecture and the Three R’s (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) We did session on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Domain Specific Languages (DSL), and the sessions were well received. Most of the attendees were government architects and managers and almost none of them are doing SOA at this point, but many of them are hoping to jump on the bandwagon soon.
The most interesting part for us was the lunch break, when Jeff and I had lunch with a Gartner Analyst. At the end of the lunch break we also had a presentation from Dr. Goodnight, Founder and CEO of the SAS Institute. He had an talk on the growing importance of analytics in business and government.
The conference had about 300 attendees and was reasonably well organised. We did have a couple of difficulties though. The first was that they translated our slide decks and had two laptops and screens projecting the English and French slides at the same time. However, the translators had messed up the build animations on the French deck, which caused the two laptops to get out of synch all the time. Another issue was that they had no mobile microphones, only a single podium-mounted mike. This was an issue for two reasons: both Jeff and I like to move around as we speak, and it is hard for two guys to do a presentation with one mike! Another issue was that the session were too short (45 minutes) and back to back with no break, leaving no time for attendees to move from session to session. So needless to say, the whole conference got behind schedule real fast.
Overall though it was a positive experience, and another chance to get the Avanade name out there.
