Yesterday I attended a talk celebrating the five year anniversary of First Tuesday Oslo. It seems it is one of only 7 surviving the .COM death. One of the six others is in Bergen, Norway. 🙂 Most speakers were good and covered interesting grounds.
The Norwegian authorities is taking steps through AltInn to consolidate all the government forms on the net. Morten Meyer, our “minister of modernisation” talked about the visions for the project, and signaled a strong commitment from the authoroties. It runs on MicroSoft technology, and is one of their flagship projects.
The MicroSoft Norway CEO, Birger Steen was talking about how the public sector in Norway should and could be more effective through the use of information technology. He spent some time on some extremely ineffective cases in the Norwegian Health Care System, and moved on to explaining solutions. One of the things he emphasized clearly was the use of webservices, in integrating different platforms. MicroSoft has been pushing WS pretty hard and the solution to everything for a while now, so it’s really no news. It was just nice to see the co-existence of .NET, IBM and Unix systems, integrating and sharing information as the important part. I was actually expecting more .NET propaganda, but my first MicroSoft talk turned out to be a good an objective experience.
Paal Fure from Bengal Consulting also talked about creativity and innovation in the business world. He talked about The creative class and how to foster innovation. It was really interesting and he hit spot on in regards to recruiting the brightest brains. When trying to hire the bright people they don’t go for the company in itself, they go for the role your company is playing in the relevant community. If a company wants to attract good architects, it is important for that company to participate in the architect comminity and signal that they are competent and is prioritising it. A company searching innovation also has to maintain diversity, allow failures and tolerate differences in opinions and approaches.
The night ended with some drinks and a great concert from Kaizers Orchestra, excellent Norwegian band.
Even though most talks was only 15 minutes it was good. I’ll be showing up at later gatherings.