The benefits of attending a conference

It would be easy to say that conferences are not as useful as they once were, given the huge amount of information that is available on the web. All the web sites, online documents, webinars, etc. do provide a lot of useful information.

There is a difference though.  That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week.  I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.

Why is going to a conference so different?  Let me tell you.

Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless.  Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not.  Finding out what they thought about a presentation.  It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me.  I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.

Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important.  The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important.  Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.

The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry.  The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing.  The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network.  So what good does a firewall do you in that case?

Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you.  Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing?  Does this person really know what they are talking about?  Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.

As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet.  The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there.  At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.

So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference.  It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come.   Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours.  Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.