I totally slacked off after leaving the conference on Thursday afternoon, spending the early evening at the Voodoo Lounge catching the sunset from 51 floors, then hanging around the Masquerade mezzanine watching the Mardi Gras show before turning in early enough to make that 7am flight home on Friday. So here it is, Monday morning, and I’m catching up on a week’s worth of blogging.
This was a relatively small conference, about 150 customers attending, but what an enthusiastic group! When one of the speakers talked about how ARIS had been abandoned on a project because of its complexity, there was clapping from the audience, and I don’t think that all of it came from Proforma employees. There were no breakout sessions, just a main stage, and almost half of the presentations were given over to customer presentations. Not only that, all of them were talking about what they’ve actually done with Proforma’s products, not what they plan to do, so had some pretty practical advice for the rest of the crowd.
The product presentations from the Proforma people were also pretty interesting, in part because I haven’t worked with the product that much so a lot of it was new to me.
More detail on the individual presentations to follow.
I also had a number of interesting conversations with customers, and I kept driving to the question of where enterprise architecture fits in their organization. For the most part, companies are keeping it under IT (which I think is a big mistake and posted about previously, not surprisingly when I was reviewing a Proforma webinar), and there seem to be a lot of conflicts in defining the roles of data, information, business and enterprise architects still.