Two days of fun at DAMA/Wilshire

I seemed to cram a lot into just two days this year at the DAMA International Symposium and WILSHIRE Meta-Data Conference. Sold out 30 copies of my book even before we got to my talk on Friday.

• At my 3.5 hr talk (started with 85, ended with 40, which was twice the expected attendance, with great audience participation), I queried the audience on my long-standing questions regarding the proper scope of Change Management and the definition of Service versus Application. The responses were overwhelmingly that Change Management is short lead time and not about project portfolio management, and that Application Management groups and managers in their organizations were *not* about to embrace the terminology of Service Management any time soon for their capabilities (although they might be doing all the pieces).
• Brushes with fame: Had a good laugh with John Zachman over his appearance in ITIL, and discovered that DAMA stalwart Bonnie O'Neil of Westridge Consulting is the mother of child star Chris O'Neil (The Last Mimzy).
• More tragically, found out that the missing Jim Gray of Microsoft was Series Editor for the Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems; his Morgan Kaufman publisher Diane Cerra is also my publisher and knew Jim personally.
• Also hooked up with friends from Adaptive, which I consider to be the finest metadata repository out there as well as an EA tool and graphical DSM workbench.
• And of course, attended various and sundry excellent presentations and keynotes, including one by Don Tapscott (Wikinomics). 

DAMA/Wilshire continues to grow; it is a very large conference which sometimes surprises outsiders I think, because the subject matter can seem specialized. Just goes to show how big and diverse the IT community is. 

-Charlie