The Agile Executive

By now I have “touched” and been touched by dozens and dozens of participants in the O’Reilly Velocity conference. I did not meet any business executive (other than various CEOs/CMOs who pitched their companies from the podium).

No doubt, the O’Reilly Velocity conferences (this is the third one) are geek events. Having said that, IMHO these conferences are extremely important to the business executive. If you don’t attend you miss up on four value propositions:

• Getting a sense of what the future in web operation holds.
• Grasping what forthcoming advances in web operations mean to your business design. See for example my post Ops Driven Dev from earlier today.
• Understanding the needs of a growing demographic sector that your business might not be able to access today.
• Getting to know the kind of developers and sysadmins that probably work in the trenches of your company.

You owe it to yourself to consider attending Velocity 2011 if terms like “sysadmin 2.0”, “darkmode” and “devops” and do not resonate with you. I can’t give you “your money back” guarantee if you are not satisfied with the conference, but I will gladly pick the bar tab when we meet there.