Last fall, I was invited to hold a keynote at the Practice of Enterprise Modelling conference in Oslo.
I usually talk at a few conferences every year, both domestically (Software 2011) and internationally (SATURN 2011 and Gartner EA Summit 2011), but to hold a keynote would be a new experience 🙂
I felt that I had to stretch a little and decided to make it into my own little art project combining my passion for photography with my message on Enterprise Modeling in an Agile World. I had plenty of time (I felt) to take photos for the keynote.
The first photo was taken in the early spring. I ordered my father and eldest daughter out on bicycles and found a quiet, winding gravel road. The point I wanted to make was that to develop models was a journey which would take time and effort to complete. To have an experienced companion on the journey is good, while to bring in young talent brings in new perspectives.
As you may note, my father is not wearing a helmet. This is very intentional, and is meant to illustrate that even the most experienced companions may not always be up to date on current best practices, so the balance between experience and talent must always be maintained.
The next photo is from Flor og Fjære where I visited in the late spring as part of a project dinner. I had been there before, and knew that they had these apple hedges that are apple trees cropped into growing as hedges.
The photo reflects one of the discussions I have often had with modelers: What are we modeling? Is this an apple tree (important for those that harvest fruit) or a hedge (important for the landscapers). Recognizing that all models are abstractions and focusing on getting the abstractions right is crucial to getting a model that is understood by the target audience.
The last photo in this post was taken over the summer where I got my wife and youngest daughter to pose:
The key message here lies in how my wife reads Fortune as bedtime stories for her, even if she is not interested (and has her back turned). I have often seen this in real life as well, where the story told is not the story that the audience want to hear. Luckily for my daughter, this is a staged photo, so my wife never reads Fortune for bedtime stories 🙂
The rest of the photos is found in my Google+ album, and the paper that accompanies my keynote is published in Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Volume 92, 2011, pp 126-130
