Cordys Cordial 2005 Conference

This morning I attended the keynote speeches at the Cordial 2005 Conference hosted by Cordys at Jan Baan's beautifully restored 17th century estate, Kastell de Vanenburg, in Putten.

Paul Ostendorf, a Dutch Futurologist, gave us a wide scope of technology advances and their potential impact on how we would use them in his speech, "Influential trends in business and IT". He supported his talk with films and charts woven together to create an engaging session. He covered the costs for moving 1 GB through different formats and channels; chips and information exchange; the impact of nano- and bio-technology. His message was that these new technologies are driving the revolution into a new economy of knowledge-fed services and away from a labor-intensive industrial economy. By 2060, computer capacity will exceed human capacity regarding contribution to getting the job done. The old model is: labor, commodoties, capital. The new model is: knowledge, data, creativity. The big issue is how to move this magnitude of data into shared knowledge.

Jonathan Marks, Rudy Hoeboer and I got a chance to chat with him during the break. We asked him "How will we teach people to think conceptually in order to be able to build the algorithms to move that magnitude of data into concepts of knowledge?" How do we address the lack of ability in most cultures to think conceptually and to formulate mathematically and strategically? This is about changing a culture. Look to South Korean culture for some direction here.


Greg H Garrison, Director and Visionary of Price Waterhouse Coopers, gave a very dry but comprehensive framework on "The transformative business benefits of a real-time, Service Oriented Architecture". He lost much of his audience if body language was a signal. At the end of his session, I asked about the impact and consequences of proprietary technologies (like Microsoft) on creating integrated inter-corporate IT systems, with regard to alignments and compatibilities that would allow for quickly adapting and customizing. His answer was more of a possibility to have an "and, and" solution. My question had more to do with exclusive environments that have more to do with controls - rather than inclusive environments that have to do with new ways of sharing and contributing.

I left during the presentation by Guus Brinkel, CIO of ETAM Retail Services, of
"Best in Class with best of breed". It was so old-fashioned "sales pitch" style. With my current travel agenda and meeting schedule for the next several days, I opted to leave early and invest my time in something more valuable.

What I did realize is that even though Cordys has probably got some pretty good enterprise software for integrating systems, they seem to have hijacked the term "collaboration" software for how the technologies will work together instead of the human beings will.

If I were to share some feedback with Cordys, I would say "Add the human being. Align all of this with how the human being is going to use it and how the human being will drive the applications."

I'm sure Jonathan and Rudy will have more to share of their experience today.