I first attended Kscope in 2010, when it was – serendipitously – held in Washington, D.C., just a short walk from my then apartment. Within a few hours I had met, in person, a number of people with whom I’d develop both friendships and professional relationships over the next several years. The past few months have seen (along with other more severe hardships) almost all the regular, in-person touchpoints in our industry cancelled. Kscope20, Collaborate, Oracle Openworld etc. Many have been replaced with virtual content (special thanks to the hard work of ODTUG staff, volunteers and speakers, who produced an extremely successful Learn From Home Series). This means that I’ve missed the opportunity to catch up with all my old industry friends from all over the world, and the opportunity to meet new ones.
I’ve also been in the ACE Program for over five years now, and the real core of that (to me, at least) is the sharing of information and enabling and participating in an ongoing “conversation” about technology. In the past, I’ve tried to do that via blogging, Twitter, speaking and volunteering for ODTUG. A month or two ago my friend Cameron Lackpour invited me to join him and Celvin Kattookaran in exploring an additional platform – podcasting. Our objective is to talk to interesting people in our industry – software vendors, service providers, people in industry – in a manner that, hopefully, brings to mind the conference post-session hallway / breakfast / lunch / party conversations that we haven’t been able to have this year. Webinars and online sessions are far from redundant, but we feel there’s a personal insight and aspect that gets missed when those are the only form of interaction with our industry peers, and we hope that a casual, conversational format (hence the name – EPM Conversations) can fill some of that void.
We’re not the only recent podcast in this space – Opal Alapat and Anthony Manfredi launched their Performance Management Techcast just a couple of weeks back (perhaps also missing the opportunity to blather about all this stuff at conferences?) – but hopefully there’s room for both of us and plenty more.
Episode 1: Introduction is available now. You can listen and subscribe via EPMConversations.com, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. Please give it a listen (and get in touch, if you’d like to participate!) and let us know what you think, and who you’d like to hear joining us. Cheers!
