Yesterday, at the New England Chapter of AIIM, we held an event that focused on Cloud Computing. It was a great event, featuring Laurence Hart, CIO AIIM giving a general introduction to cloud topics. Laurence was followed by himself, talking about his experiences moving AIIM’s data processing into the cloud. We had a pretty nice crowd, including a few people online who were willing to watch as I learn the finer points of streaming a live meeting. We also had a few people who had no interest in Cloud Computing – whaaaaat? That’s true, but guess what, they still learned something.
One of the people attending over the live stream was a woman that works with me. She doesn’t really have an interest in the cloud, but she enjoyed being on the stream. She said to me after the meeting: “I’m taking away from his presentation, how important it is for systems to talk to each other.” Laurence had made the comment that this requirement is important, regardless of where the systems are running, but that it complicates or gets complicated by cloud-based services that only offer rudimentary API’s. My Systems Analyst took that to mean “I have to think about how future systems will talk to the stuff we’re building today” – I like that. She learned other things, but if that had been the only take-away from this event, I would have called it $15 well spent.
If you’re looking at a learning opportunity, don’t stop at the tag line, or the brochure. Take a look at the people who are speaking and think about what they might be able to offer. Laurence Hart, a.k.a. @piewords could probably offer something of value to almost anyone, while speaking on almost any topic. If I hadn’t already known that, all I would have had to do is read a few entries on his Word of Pie blog. Training and travel budgets being what they are today, it’s silly to not investigate every opportunity you have, especially low-cost opportunities like an AIIM Chapter event.
Another opportunity you should think twice about is the AIIM Conference. I’ve seen at least one person that said that it seemed focused on Big Data and Mobile so they decided not to go. The tag line might be Volume | Variety | Devices, but you can’t say “those three things don’t interest me” and write off the entire conference. Look at who’s speaking; read the abstracts, this conference is going to be awesome, just like it was last year and you will be able to take something, multiple things away from this experience, trust me on this one.
#AIIM #piewords #learning #AIIMConference #cloud