Alexandria

SoTec, or Southland Technology Conference, is a conference in Southern California, put on by a coalition of project management, software quality assurance, and IT professional organizations. I’m a member of (and was for several years on the board of) one of the organizations that puts it on. It started as a one day conference, but has expanded to two days. On Friday, October 28, and Saturday, October 29, 2011, I attended this conference. I’ll blog notes on individual sessions I attended (along with, I haven’t forgotten, my session by session notes on a completely unrelated conference that Joel and I went to earlier this month), but for now, an overview.

The first thing to note is that, if you’re taking the 710 to Long Beach, and are, like me, literal-minded about following written directions, you’d best turn on your smart phone GPS and let it dictate the directions to you. The written directions said to take the 405 north to the 710 south, and then take the 710 south to the Broadway exit. This is literally true, and what you’d get by looking at a map. If, however, you actually drive these directions, what “take the Broadway exit” looks like operationally is “There will be a fork, where you want to be in the left lane on the 710 and follow the sign that says “Long Beach Aquarium and downtown only,” and then you’ll see the sign that announces the Broadway exit.” Being literal-minded and looking only for an exit that said “Broadway,” I wound up on the wrong side of the 701 for this fork. This meant driving over the two tall narrow scary bridges in Long Beach, then driving back over the two tall narrow scary bridges to get to my destination. I do not advice making this mistake, particularly if, like me, you have a fear of heights.

But you’re probably more interested in what I saw and heard at the actual conference. The good news, here, is that, since I started out from south Orange County two hours ahead of the first key note address for the conference, I had plenty of time to take my wrong turn, get back, go through registration, grab my Continental breakfast, and still make it to the opening key note address, by Peter McGarahan on “IT Technologies that will change the way we work,” with a special accompanying presentation by Jake Henderson, Director of Computer Services at Mater Dei High School, on their rollout of 2,200 iPads for faculty members and students.

Peter McGarahan: “In the beginning, God created the world … and the only reason God was able to rest on the seventh day is that God didn’t have any legacy infrastructure to deal with.”

The IT technologies he focused on were mobile phones, iPads, the cloud, and social computing, with an emphasis on their impact on the workplace: the consumerization of IT, as increasing numbers of workers use their own mobile devices at work, rogue or shadow IT, raising issues of standardization and security, as well as the need for IT workers to continually change and update their skills. He also talked about the need for workers with a hybrid of IT and business skills.

Jake Henderson: First, the personal story: Small town Utah boy starts at local junior college, and eventually makes his way to a position as head of IT at Mater Dei, the oldest and largest Catholic high school in Orange County, and the second largest Catholic high school in the US. (My husband Joel, when I told him about the talk about Mater Dei rolling out iPads to all their students, said, “Well, they can afford it.”) Reasons why Mater Dei is cool: 99% of their students enroll in four year universities, and they give scholarships to maintain a high level of diversity. Lots of stuff about how they went through each stage of the iPad rollout, from selecting the iPad as what their students would use, to distribution, training, etc., complete with a bent iPad to show us when he told us their loss rate (which is actually not too bad so far). This was a fun talk, but I’ll save all the iPad details for their own post.

There were four tracks: one for project management/business analysis, one for quality assurance/ITIL, one for personal development/social networking, and one for strategic technologies, and I decided to go to one of each on Friday (Saturday I had just three choices, and left off the personal development/social networking).

Project Management talk: Robert Handler, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Inc., spoke about Why Perfectly Rational Governance Processes Fail And What We Can Do About It. (I studied social psychology at Stanford, so it struck me that I was listening to an alternate career path, social psychology meets IT, that I could well have taken.) This talk involved listing different biases, individual and group, from illusory correlation to social proof, and discussing how we can combat these biases through awareness or leverage them to persuade.

Quality Assurance/ITIL talk: Steve Gladstone, of Panasonic Avionics, talked about “Innovation and Organizational Maturity: How to Effect the Right Kind of Change.” I thought this was going to be about how to be sure the changes and innovations you were effecting were the right ones rather than the wrong ones, but actually it was more about how to get CEO/CIO/CTO/CFO (“C-level”) support for your changes.

Next key note address: Faith Gaudino and Beth Wheat, a senior VP and director respectively at Experian, talked about “Creating a Client Centric Organization / A Strategy for Sustainable Success.” Employee engagement! Not a program but a transformational movement! The talk reminded me a bit of a sales kickoff in its emphasis on engagement, though there was also a little reference to technical stuff (social media like Sharepoint 2010, Agile methodology).

Strategic Technologies talk: Nick Ross, of Applied Computer Solutions, spoke on Dehumidifying the Cloud. What is cloud computing? Why use cloud computing? What do you need from the cloud? Ross countered concerns about cloud security with the argument that you’re better off having your security done by people who know how to do it (including an anecdote about how passwords can be social engineered out of people with “Whoever has the best password gets a free iPod). Big cloud benefits: elasticity and agility.

Personal development/social networking track: Lori Duff, the “Linked In Diva” of Integrated Alliance (and collector of some 30K Linked In contacts), talked about “The New Rules of Engagement on Linked In,” both for company profiles and for personal ones. Part of these rules of engagement involve making a profile that appeals to search engines by having the right terms, but the bulk of the talk was about having a profile that’s interactive and tells an engaging story, rather than, for a company, a dull web page, or, for an individual, having a profile that’s just a resume.

Saturday, I gave myself less driving time, but the guidance of Google Navigator, and again arrived in time for the opening key note.

Opening key note, by Abizar Vakharia, Director of Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft, on “The Role of Planning and Product Marketing in Innovation”: Interactive Entertainment = XBox. This talk, interspersed with XBox clips, was about the XBox and the introduction of Kinect.

Quality Assurance track: Fumi Matsumoto, of uTest, spoke on what the program notes called “10 Tech Trends Altering the Testing Landscape,” but the Powerpoint called “Top 10 Disruptive Technologies You Must Understand.” Once again, we got mobile devices, the cloud, etc. (along with others I haven’t mentioned yet, such as NoSQL), but this time with examples of how each technology affects software testing.

Project Management track: Mark Layton, President of Platinum Edge, spoke on “Agile QA’s Game Changing Impact on Project Management.” Agile methodology, mostly Scrum, is the big thing these days in software development, replacing the older waterfall methodology. The basic idea is that, rather than doing all your requirements, then all your design, then all your development, then all your QA (which generally meant that QA was pressed for time as the other phases ran over schedule, and bugs were found only long after they had been introduced), you do shorter sprints in which you implement fully working sets of particular features, the highest priority ones first (with each sprint having its own requirements, design, development, and QA). The talk began, as most talks on Agile software development do, with why Agile is better than waterfall, and then moved on to talk about Scrum, Test-Driven Development, pair programming, etc., and what all these things mean for project management.

Structured Networking: After lunch, we did structured networking. This involved sorting ourselves at tables, according to the signs posted at the tables announcing topics. I went to the social media table: Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, and Plaxo. At this particular table, almost no one (just two of us) was on Plaxo, only about half of us were on Facebook and Twitter, and everyone was on Linked In. Obviously, this ratio doesn’t carry over to the net as a whole; I think it’s because the table was mostly people whose interest in social media was professional, and Linked In, not Facebook, is where IT people try to set up their professional presence. (The same does not apply to the marketing people at our companies; my company has a Facebook page and a Twitter account as well as a Linked In profile.) Those of us who were on Facebook tried to keep our Facebook life separate from our professional Linked In profiles.

Views of the meaning of Linked In contacts vary widely, and so, for instance, one of the people at our table, at the other end of the spectrum from the Linked In Diva with her 30K contacts, wondered whether Linked In had jumped the shark, with too many people accumulating as many contacts as they could. He felt that your contacts, properly, should be people you could professionally vouch for. An old high school friend who was a bus boy might be an appropriate Facebook friend, but not a Linked In contact. I said I’d accept the bus boy; my feeling is that my Linked In contacts are people to whom I’d be willing to pass on information about job openings, or coworkers and colleagues with whom I’d be willing to exchange information relevant to our profession. So, I might refuse a connection from someone I think would be a really bad hire, but not from a former high school classmate who’s fairly representing his credentials and just isn’t in my field or is less successful than me; that would surely be someone I’d pass on job leads to that would fit his qualifications. (FWIW, I now have slightly over 300 Linked In contacts, more than the choosy guy at my table, but not up at LION levels – LIONS being people on Linked In who announce to the world that they’ll accept all connection requests, whether they know you or not.)

Strategic Technologies track: Andrea Hoy, President and Virtual CSO of SenseiSecurity, spoke on “CyberSecurity Data Breaches: All Those Bits and Bytes.” How secure is your data? What do security breaches cost? What are the latest threats? Here we heard about hackers for hire, phishing, pharming, smishing (phishing by cell phone message), and ways to protect yourself.

Closing key note: Ginna Rauhauge, Vice President of IT at Cisco, spoke on “Learning to Surf: Economic Volatility and Relevant IT.” How Cisco responds to everything from the recession to Arab Spring to the Japanese earthquake.

Notes on individual sessions will follow, but gradually (and interspersed with notes from the completely unrelated DBSA conference I mentioned at the start of this post).

Tags: Agile software development, cloud, cyber security, IT, mobile phones, project management, Scrum, social media, software quality assurance, SoTeC, Southland Technology Conference