Things are a bit crazy this week, since I am helping out at the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship in St. Louis, but I thought I'd get one last post out this week about a couple of events that I’ll be at in the coming months. One is Interop at Las Vegas in Early May. The other is HP Discover.

For HP Discover I will participate in a serveral panels and do a couple of presentations. For the first time HP labs will also have a booth at HP Discover, please stop by.

The sessions I’m in are a bit up in the air at this time, but here is what I know so far:

Presentation Session: BB2883 - Application transformation in preparation for cloud
HP Application Transformation to Cloud Services enables organizations to determine cloud suitability for applications and infrastructure as they plan their transformation. Application Transformation to Cloud Services is a full lifecycle solution, from analysis to implementation of applications on cloud infrastructure. Learn three core steps that can be employed to transform your applications.

Presentation Session: BB3061 - Why you should care about Systems of Record
Traditional applications, combined with their infrastructure, can be called “Systems of Record.” These systems run today's organizations. They comprise the transactional engines, the information engines and the bulk of your IT expenditure. But are they close to being functionally complete?

Panel Session: BB3062 - Life as we know it is going to be all about “Systems of Engagement”
Systems of Engagement are about growth. They’re about making you stand out from your competition. In fact, they’re going to be the reason your customers remain your customers and the way you’re going to attract somebody else's customers. In this session, we’re going to look at examples of organizations that are doing just that and explore the technology they’re doing it with.

Panel Session: RT3063 - Don’t be the only one wondering about Systems of Record!
Join this roundtable session to discuss whether the Systems of Record make sense in your business and if so, what you should do with them to make them capable of taking advantage of a converged cloud environment.

Every semester I try and help out by participating in some way at a Business of IT course taught at the University of North Texas. Last night, I was an active audience member as groups of students presented their final presentation. This usually means we ask them relevant questions about their papers as they are presented to see if we can get them off-track or at least out of their depth. The philosophy is that it is better to falter in this in a relatively safe environment, rather than have their first real exposure to a truly animated customer be in their first job presentation.

The presentations last night were based on some current and relevant topics:

1)      How to become and remain a great CIO

2)      Managing Bring Your Own Device

3)      IT Security: What Boards and CEOs need to know and do

4)      Effective Communication of IT to the Business in ‘Business Terms’

5)      From the Enterprise Today to the “Information Age Enterprise”

All the students presented information based on the coursework covered during the year (e.g., COBIT, Zachman) in the context of their subject of interest. Other review team members were a CIO, a SCRUM certified project manager and a recent graduate of the course (at least relative to when I was an undergraduate), so it was varied enough to pursue them through any rat hole that may open up.

I try to participate in these opportunities, because they give me a chance to look at problems from a different perspective. It is relatively easy to see the students fall into certain traps. It is a bit harder to see how I’ve fallen (or continue to fall) into similar ones. Supporting others and performing self-examination can be quite cathartic.

The areas that I were a bit suprised were no covered were Cloud Computing and Big Data. Maybe they were banned as being too much of a buzzword.

I was talking with a co-worker about his approach when scheduling meetings, since he has been having some success in changing his approach. Anyone who knows me knows my perspective is that a cancelled meeting is always a good meeting.

First thing to have an effective meeting is to validate that a meeting is really needed.  We were talking about the number of times your sitting on a phone call or in a face-to-face meeting wonder “Why am I here?” or “Were they lonely and just needed someone to talk with?” Many times people could just have sent along a document and asked us to read it, asynchronously, rather than schedule a meeting. This meeting proliferation behavior may be a sign of how little attention people feel they get, since the only way they can get your attention is to get everyone together at the same time. Anyway…

He said he picked up this technique somewhere along the way and since it sounded useful, I thought I’d pass it along. It is called POST and it sets a standard level of expectation for a meeting:

P – Purpose – Document why we are having this meeting.

O – Outcomes – The expected deliverables from the meeting

S - Structure – The supporting materials used to facilitate this meeting (e.g., PowerPoints, project plans)

T- Timing – How much time will be allocated for the meeting.

He said that once he started using this approach, people took his meetings more seriously and the meetings actually got shorter. There are a couple of things I mentioned that I’d do as part of this:

1)      Let everyone know that if they prepare we should be able to get this meeting completed in X minutes, if not we will allocate the whole meeting time.

2)      Let them know everyone who will be attending

There are some expectations for those using the process:

• There should be 5 days’ notice  of the meeting unless it is critical, so everyone can be prepared
• Every person should know what is expected of them before, during and after the meeting
• Everyone should know what media will be supported (virtual, teleconference) or if they will be needed in the room.
• At the end of the meeting, there will be minutes including at least a summary of the decisions, action items and who will be held accountable
•  And of course -- Meetings run to time

All these actions and expectations seem like common courtesy, but in this event-driven, multi-tasking world, meeting decorum seems to have fallen by the wayside.