Practitioners and Talking Heads

It’s good to see three non-vendor, non-traditional analyst firm events survive and grow. Enterprise 2.0, GigaOm Structure and LeWeb are all this week and again in the Fall. All have grown a loyal patronage over the last few years. More interestingly, they all appear (at least based on scan of agendas) to feature more practitioner sessions.

Enterprise 2.0, for example has Nike and Wells Fargo execs presenting. Structure has Amazon and Zynga,  LeWeb has American Express and Google among others.

Not only can they better bring out operational nuances, I find practitioners somewhat modest about their roles. So, a Nike executive is highly unlikely to just sing praises of social savvy and not of product innovation and supply chain excellence. Similarly a Google executive may talk Plus or other products, but is very aware of the amazing data centers and developer ecosystem his operational colleagues have grown. The Amazon CTO knows plenty of impressive work is happening in its logistics and merchandising areas.

Many talking heads on the other hand tend to hype their current passion. Social experts have little time for product design or financial constraints. Startup/VC watchers get bored with scaling up considerations. Cloud watchers are mostly about efficiency, not revenue or growth.

BTW – looking at the three agendas, maybe they should put on a joint event. Heavy on practitioners. And a realistic tension that exists in most companies with competing technologies, executive expectations and limited budgets.