Author Archives: Andrew

Well the third day of EAC 2011 came and went. My talk went well. Despite the last minute scheduling change I got a decent audience, and once in front of real listeners managed to find my style and pace again. They seemed to appreciate it, but as none of the inveterate tweeters was in attendance I’ll have to wait for the feedback analysis to be sure.

This morning’s keynote was excellent, it’s just a shame that I had to leave early to set up for my own talk. It could have been subtitled “why ‘cloud’ means people trying to sell you stuff”, and was the most balanced discussion I have yet heard on cloud computing. The most interesting observation is that individual component reliability is very much subservient to scalability and “elasticity”, which has major implications for more critical applications.

The rest of the day’s presentations were a mixed bunch. Some were too academic, others very light on real content. The one exception was Mike Rosen talking about SOA case studies, which included both real successes and failures, and should be the yardstick for anyone looking to move to SOA.

One thing I have learned from this conference is a (arguably the) real purpose for Twitter. It’s a great way for a group engaged in a joint activity like this to have a shared background conversation. In many ways it’s the electronic reincarnation of the DeMarco/Lister red and green voting card system, but with wider and longer reach. It’s not without problems: it can be a distraction, some users can dominate with high volume, low value tweets and retweets, and Twitter’s search and the available clients (certainly on the iPad) are not optimised for hashtag-based operation. However, these are minor complaints.

The iPad makes a superb conference tool, and I was amazed by the number of them in use, for making notes, reviewing slides, and tweeting. Interestingly I think this trend will drive a move to standardise on PDF-format material: slides published this way worked very well, but some available only in PowerPoint format weren’t viewable.

My congratulations and thanks to the conference chairs and the IRM team for an excellent event. Time to start thinking about a topic for the next one…

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Falcon Rd,Wandsworth,United Kingdom