ITP Techblog

What an amazing couple of days it has been.

I'd like to start off thanking Conferenz for the tickets. OMGTech! is a charity, and as a charity, being able to rub shoulders with these large multi-million dollar budget corporates is a breath of fresh air. You get such a unique perspective, just what is life like on the other side.

I spent most of the time in the plenary sessions, and took the time in the breaks to go around each of the stands and chat with the sponsors. I can say this about you tech sector: a soon as I mentioned who we were, you'd think that your sales people would immediately turn off. Instead all I found was camaraderie and solidarity with our mission. Y'all recognise that we all have to work together to fix the digital divide and introduce the next generation of kiwi kids to this tech that we all know and love.

As this is the ITP blog, before the editor starts using his red pen, I'll give you some of the highlights and takeaways from the actual conference. But if you didn't catch me there, or you want to hear more about what OMGTech! does, HMU… I'm always on twitter (@vivster81 or @omgtechrangers) or LinkedIn.

If you're like me though, and think that this blog is entirely too many words, check out the Twitter moment I just curated.  it has some of the highlights of the two days including the bits I missed.

The overall theme of the conferences was all about digital transformation. It was whether you were doing it, will be doing it, don't even know what it is, or why what you did failed.

The opening keynote, Joseph Pucciarelli, set the scene well. He is the group vice-president IT executive advisor for IDC in the United States. He took us through some case studies which showed best practice and the best in tech.

Including a step through on how to make a 150-year old brand cool again… did you know that Oreo cookies have more than THIRTY flavours, AND you can get them on Amazon?!

The other major highlight of day one was Michael Henderson, a corporate anthropologist. I love it when a person who works adjacent to the industry speaks at these things. Henderson's perspective as an anthropologist that works on the internal culture of companies was a unique take on why some teams are successful and why others fail.

I particularly liked his analogy of an arrow striking the target. If Strategy is your arrow head, and the shaft is your team's performance, the most important part is the fletching at the back. Without the feather fletching, your arrow won't fly.

Unfortunately, you'll have to check out Twitter or LinkedIn for the highlights of the gala dinner… but I was back bright and early on day two, just in time to catch Loic Tallon talk all about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When I met him briefly on day one, I admitted that all I knew about the Met was what I had seen on Ocean's 8. His talk, however, wasn't about how to keep Sandra Bullock and her team out of his museum, but rather how to come to terms with new technology and how that affects the consumption of content.

One of the key realisations for his team was that they had to bring things back to the overall mission statement. How many times have we done things, just because it has always been done that way. The Met is no different. They were measuring success based on page views. Their mission statement says

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art collects, studies, conserves, and presents significant works of art across all times and cultures in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas."

So the logical KPI to come out of this was to look at page views. After all, the more people who view your content, you can logically surmise that is the more people you have 'connected to creativity, knowledge and ideas'.

Loic and his team convinced the higher-ups to use a CC0 license, and therefore they threw their content out into the wild. Then they looked at overall page views, on places like Wikipedia. They found that their content, on Wikipedia was being viewed a multitude of times more. In fact, when they looked at Wikipedia page views in all languages (whereas the Met Museum's website is only served in English) they had tens of thousands more again.

I've probably done a terrible job of giving you an overall feel for the conference. We all take away what we want right? I'll let Rachel Kelly (the MC) sum it up for you… it's probably a much less biased take.

Vivian Chandra is a self-employed contract CTO and currently spends a lot of her time hanging out with the team at OMGTech!