The Nerd, The Suit, and the Fortune Teller

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Originally Created: 2004-07-27

I just had to alert you to a recording of The Nerd, The Suit, and the Fortune Teller which was amongst the finest sessions of the Architecture track at TechEd Europe 2004. As the track owner, I can't say I was overly confident that this skit would work since the speakers, Clemens Vasters (the Nerd), Rafal Lukawiecki (the Suit) and Pat Helland (the Fortune Teller) had only the bare bones of an outline and some cue slides to help them navigate a potentially humongous space of concepts and ideas. All of this in front of an audience of more than 1,500 people. But, with superstars of such caliber, I should never have doubted the outcome.

The friendly synopsis is:

The Suit and the Nerd begin with the conflict between the businessman who is struggling to see the value he is receiving from his technology investments and the technologist who is confident in his use of the latest technology in implementing the solutions his boss has requested. As the tension between them unfolds, the fortune teller arrives to describe the ways in which service oriented architectures offer hope for meeting the needs of both the businessman and the technologist as they both strive to meet their goals. This session offers a light hearted and fun exposition of the latest technology trends in enterprise computing.

And the official synopsis we wrote for the TechEd agenda goes like this:

Object Orientation promised to deliver us from all IT evil and to ensure longevity and reuse of software. With today’s business requirements changing faster than it takes to compile an application and an ever-present call for integration, even that approach does not seem to work. However, it seems that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Operational Service Orientation of IT departments (MOF, ITIL), Service-Based Interoperability (WS-Guidelines) and Service-Based User Interfaces (messenger, wizards) are quietly converging onto a new paradigm in IT. For the lack of a better name, we call it “Service Oriented Convergence”. Come to this session and see if this concept has any merit and value to you. Rather than endure a typical PowerPoint presentation, you will observe a discussion between: an experienced developer, an unforgiving businessman in charge of IT and a visionary technology innovator. On your behalf, they will battle out their differing points of view and leave you with useful guidance on ways to handle this very important issue that will affect your job, work and future. Oh, and we hope this session is unlikely to be boring.

Catch the video on Pat Helland's site under the videos section. Oh, and that's 'yours truly' doing the short intro, but don't let that put you off!

If you need the direct link it is here.

UPDATE: This slide show is well-worth viewing. Many thanks to Bjarne Gram for making this available.