Technical training

I attended a 2-day event last week. The purpose of such was to “train” people on new or latest technologies and show what's coming down the pipe.

The topics were varied and the organization allowed attendees to choose from a variety of tracks throughout the day. I was in three different tracks; some of the topics were very technical and fast, non-understandable for the regular Joe, while others were simpler and better explained in the allotted time.

On my calculations, the number of attendees was around 800. During the presentations, on breaks between speakers, and at lunch time I spoke to some fellow technicians, engineers, consultants, contractors, business owners and such.
In the entire 2 days and despite my best efforts to pull information about it nobody touched on the business side of the -mmhh- business. The focus was on software, and the boxes that can use that software, and the interconnections between such boxes and so on...
But no Business Case. No comparison tables. No white papers on case studies –beta or not-. No ROI graphs.

Now don't get me wrong, on average it was good and most of the speakers knew their stuff and delivered very good sessions. However, there was nothing but tech talk all thru the event. There was mentioning obviously on companies already using this and that; and real demonstrations on existing systems working and so on.
However, I felt there was this need to know the appropriate application of all these new toys to real world cases; in brief I think I was expecting more than what they can really deliver. Or perhaps I wanted them to do my work: analyze technologies and crunch numbers to come up with such documents.

I might had simply made a mistake on the training and signed up for something I did not need or want.

Oh! Well... I will wait for such thing to come to my town.

Hope you do enjoy your events.