Damn! I thought that I was going to be the first to blog about the upcoming Cutter Consortium Summit conference, but I see that my friend and colleague, Michael Mah, has beaten me to the punch with his own posting. Well, that’s okay: it’s a sufficiently important conference to warrant several different perspectives on the speakers, the topics, and the interchange between the participants.

The Cutter Consortium was founded in 1997 by Karen Coburn and yours truly, as a hip, outspoken, independent quasi-think tank of of consultants, pundits, researchers, and thinkers in the information technology field. Under Karen’s tireless and relentlessly optimistic leadership, it has grown to an amazingly eclectic group of nearly a hundred people who fit the intellectual model of David Weinberger’s description of the Web: Small Pieces, Loosely Joined (Weinberger is a past speaker/panelist at the Cutter Summit, and editor of a lively blog called JOHO, which you’ll find on my “cool blogs” list).

Every year, the Consortium consultants gather together with a hundred or so IT professionals from around the world to discuss and debate the Great Issues of the IT profession today. The format has always been quite different than any of the other conferences I’ve attended: instead of a hurried 20-30 minute talk that barely scratches the surface of a topic, each keynote speaker has a full hour and a half to provide an in-depth presentation of his/her ideas; and that’s followed by another 90-minute session, consisting of the keynote speaker and three or four panelists, who carry on a lively, outspoken, often raucous debate about the topic — whether it’s outsourcing, the future of the Internet, computer security, or anything else. It’s rather amazing to suddenly realize how long we’ve been doing this: this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Cutter Summit.

The first topic on Monday morning will be “the broadband explosion,” followed by an afternoon session about IT litigation. I suspect that Michael Mah and I, perhaps with a few others, will be blogging away throughout the three days. We’re both looking forward to the talk by Ward Cunningham (inventor of the first wiki, known as the WikiWikiWeb), about the use of Wikipedia as a form of collaboration. There’s also a presentation by Siobhan O’Mahoney on open-source computing, Robert Phaal on strategic roadmapping to link technologies to markets, and Lou Mazzucchelli on emerging technologies.

My good friend Tom DeMarco acts as the master or ceremonies for the conference, introducing the speaker, and then furiously scribbling notes all through the conference, so that he can present a wrapup/summary on Wednesday afternoon, pointing out themes and threads, which many of us would otherwise have missed, throughout all of the presentations. Indeed, Tom was furiously scribbling notes even before this conference began: I saw him this evening at a pre-conference dinner for the speakers and consultants, held at Karen Coburn’s house, where he was introducing himself to all the speakers, and making certain that he understood their backgrounds and perspectives on IT issues before he begins introducing them on Monday morning.

I’ll be back later on Monday, after I hear what Harvard Business School professor Stephen Bradley has to say about the broadband explosion.

Damn! I thought that I was going to be the first to blog about the upcoming Cutter Consortium Summit conference, but I see that my friend and colleague, Michael Mah, has beaten me to the punch with his own posting. Well, that’s okay: it’s a sufficiently important conference to warrant several different perspectives on the speakers, the topics, and the interchange between the participants.

The Cutter Consortium was founded in 1997 by Karen Coburn and yours truly, as a hip, outspoken, independent quasi-think tank of of consultants, pundits, researchers, and thinkers in the information technology field; under Karen’s unflagging and relentlessly optimistic eadership, it has grown to an amazingly eclectic group of nearly a hundred people who fit the intellectual model of David Weinberger’s description of the Web: “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” (Weinberger is a past Summit keynotes speaker/panelist, and publishes a lively blog called JOHO, on my list of “cool blogs”).

Every year, the Consortium consultants gather together with a hundred or so IT professionals from around the world to discuss and debate the Great Issues of the IT profession today. The format has always been quite different than any of the other conferences I’ve attended: instead of a hurried 20-30 minute talk that barely scratches the surface of a topic, each keynote speaker has a full hour and a half to provide an in-depth presentation of his/her ideas; and that’s followed by another 90-minute session, consisting of the keynote speaker and three or four panelists, who carry on a lively, outspoken, often raucous debate about the topic — whether it’s outsourcing, the future of the Internet, computer security, or anything else. It’s rather amazing to suddenly realize how long we’ve been doing this: this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Cutter Summit.

The first topic on Monday morning will be “the broadband explosion,” followed by an afternoon session about IT litigation. I suspect that Michael Mah and I, perhaps with a few others, will be blogging away throughout the three days. We’re both looking forward to the talk by Ward Cunningham (inventor of the first wiki, known as the WikiWikiWeb), about the use of Wikipedia as a form of collaboration. There’s also a presentation by Siobhan O’Mahoney on open-source computing, Robert Phaal on strategic roadmapping to link technologies to markets, and Lou Mazzucchelli on emerging technologies.

My good friend Tom DeMarco acts as the master or ceremonies for the conference, introducing the speaker, and then furiously scribbling notes all through the conference, so that he can present a wrapup/summary on Wednesday afternoon, pointing out themes and threads, which many of us would otherwise have missed, throughout all of the presentations. Indeed, Tom was furiously scribbling notes even before this conference began: I saw him this evening at a pre-conference dinner for the speakers and consultants, held at Karen Coburn’s house, where he was introducing himself to all the speakers, and making certain that he understood their backgrounds and perspectives on IT issues before he begins introducing them on Monday morning.
I’ll be back later on Monday,after I hear what Harvard Business School professor Stephen Bradley has to say about the broadband explosion.