Gereon Vey

In these days we are seeing more and more virtual events happening, sometimes complementing and sometimes even replacing face-to-face events. In times of cost cutting companies see a big opportunity to save some cost.

Virtual events undoubted are a great tool. They are capable of reaching a big audience with relatively small budget, both for the event organizer and the attendee. You can save a lot on cost and time for travel, and most of the time it’s even possible to attend when it fits into your schedule, leveraging the on-demand nature of these virtual events. There are usually a load of possibilities to interact, mostly through chat-like interfaces.

Image by Eduserv Foundation

If you need to get into a topic that’s new for you, or if you want to check out if offerings are in the range of what you are looking for, virtual events are a great tool for you as an attendee to learn a lot with minimal impact to your schedule and in a cost-effective way. Virtual events can help the organizer to reach a global audience, and, due to the benefits for the attendee, even reach more people than with face-to-face events. Virtual collaboration in general (virtual events being a special form of collaboration) makes collaboration more effective, and in many cases it makes meetings practical, which wouldn’t even be possible to do face-to-face, either due to cost or time restrictions.

But, like with everything, there are some drawbacks, which I am seeing with virtual events. For example, when you want to discuss things in detail, be it a problem you are trying to solve, or how an offering could fit exactly your (“your” as in “you”, not as in “the customer”) needs, I find it very difficult to do that via a chat-like interface. A face-to-face discussion at a “real” event is much more effective. Restricting communication to the written word makes it more difficult to listen and respond to your counterpart. In general, the personal contact is missing. It’s not the same to exchange contact details digitally, instead of meeting someone in person, shaking hands, doing a little small talk and exchanging business cards. Last but not least, people seem to behave differently in a virtual environment. Although it might in fact not be anonymous at all, some important parts of the human interaction are missing, leading to a kind of “anonymous behavior”.

I am practicing virtual collaboration on a day-by-day basis (yes, even in my private life) and I wouldn’t want to miss it, but there’s nothing like a face-to-face meeting. Maybe I’m kind of old-fashioned, but for me meeting someone in person is an important part in networking, that cannot be replaced by virtual meetings. Virtual meetings and events are a great tool to increase your collaboration effectiveness, to complement face-to-face meetings, but not to replace them completely.

I’d like to hear from you! What do you think about virtual vs. face-to-face? Please leave a comment.

The result of my second IBM Redbooks residency has just been published: The IBM Redpaper titled “The Benefits of Running SAP Solutions on IBM eX5 Systems”. I don’t want to tell you about the Redpaper, you can look at it yourself. But I want to tell you about the process of creating it.

It’s really a unique experience to do an IBM Redbooks residency. Having the opportunity to really focus on a topic, away from your daily business, and to create such a comprehensive piece of information in an astonishing short timeframe, is just stunning and unique. Usually there’s e-mail, phone, meetings, colleagues, all kinds of things you have to do, so that focusing on a single topic for a longer period of time is nearly impossible.  You get distracted by all kinds of events throughout your day. During an IBM Redbooks residency you have one single task: creating that Redbook or Redpaper. Nothing else. You can take a deep dive into complex topics, which you couldn’t do with those constant distractions. Having only one thing to do, allows you to work so focused that you’ll be astonished about your progress.

Another great thing about a residency is to have the opportunity to work in a truly international team. It’s a great way to work with people from all over the globe, combining different people, different ways of working, different cultures.

Consider becoming a published author, and apply for a residency.  It’s an opportunity to spotlight your skills and grow your career. And it’s a great experience!

Usually it’s enough to know where you can find the information you need. Is it really enough? Think about it… You can only combine information to new ideas, not pointers to information. You need to know how B-tree and AVL-tree work, to be able to come up with a new smart search algorithm. Knowing where the basic concepts are described (i.e. the pointers) is not enough. Innovation needs information, not only pointers.

The same applies to data warehousing. It doesn’t help you anything to know where your data is. Yes, your data… if you just dump it to your warehouse it’s only data, not information. It becomes information when you start working with it, exploring it. And there are tools that are supporting you with that. Look at SAP Netweaver BW Accelerator: It lets you analyze your data with incredibly low response times, and with BusinessObjects Explorer accelerated version virtually everybody can use it. Navigate through your data, analyze it. Get to know the information it contains.

It’s not enough to know where it is. Know your data! Let it become valuable information that helps you do smart decisions. Let it help you drive innovation.

I hesitated for a long time to create my own blog, because I didn’t want to create yet another blog with meaningless content. But what is meaningless? If I consider it worth blogging, it might be useful for you, and if not, you don’t have to read it, right?

So here it is, my blog. Don’t expect numerous posts here, but I’ll write down my thoughts once in a while. Thoughts about business intelligence, x86-based servers, the big IT companies (apparently especially SAP and IBM), the combination of those, or even totally unrelated. If I think it’s worth reading, I’ll post it,  the small pieces will go to my Twitter account, and the bigger pieces will show up here. And you can choose if you want to read it or not. I hope you’ll find at least some of it useful.