EA conferences: we are not amused

A couple of weeks back I had a phone-call, out of the blue, by a guy who ‘wanted some advice about enterprise architecture’, he said.

He was from a conference-group somewhere in middle-Europe (I won’t say the country or the company). He’d seen me on LinkedIn and on Twitter, and knew that I had a different approach from the standard IT-oriented emphasis to EA. He was thinking about setting up an enterprise-architecture conference, but wanted advice on where the industry was going. (He did at least know that it’s changing rapidly at present.) What emphasis should he give this conference? Of two cities that he suggested, which one would be better to hold the conference?

The call lasted about an hour, I would guess. I certainly gave him a lot of information about industry trends, about the way that the standard IT-centric approaches are now better-understood to be a dysfunctional dead-end (as in Gartner’s description some time back that EA had sunk into ‘the Trough of Disillusion’ and so on), and how even the more business-centric approaches have their dangers too. He took a lot of notes (I could hear him doing so). He did say “Thank you”, at the end, which is something, I guess. And “We’ll keep in touch”.

At least the second part was true. I had another phone-call yesterday, again out of the blue, from someone else in the same company. His marketing-department, to be precise. She didn’t know who I was, but she’d been given my details from one of her colleagues. Told me they were organising this great new EA conference later this year, she said. Based on a new approach to enterprise-architecture. In the city I’d recommended, as it happens. Representatives from a lot of important companies would be presenting there, she said: she listed a few, at least one of which I had actually heard of, and knew as reasonably solid if perhaps not exactly innovative in their EA. She described the overall emphasis and focus of the conference: it was clear that it was pretty much word-for-word from that previous conversation with her colleague.

Was this going to be an invitation to present, as per that previous conversation? Keynote speaker?

Briefly flattered, I was, for a moment. And then flattened…

No. It wasn’t the promised invitation to present. It was an ‘offer’ to be a sponsor for the conference. In effect, to pay the conference-company a very large sum for the privilege of supporting them to hijack my work and present it as theirs. I pointed out, politely, that my vast, influential, famous-worldwide company happens to consist of just one person, namely me. That’s it. I don’t have a huge budget for other people’s conferences: I struggle to be able to go to as many as I do, to be honest. (In effect, like most of the independent consultants I know, my main marketing budget consists of my books, my weblog and – more than anything else – my colleagues and clients.) She tried various hard-sell tactics – how I would be missing out if I didn’t go for this great once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and so on – but eventually she understood the one thing that mattered to her: I really did mean it when I said that didn’t have the money to do it.

Oh. Well, perhaps I would like to be a delegate instead? She could pass me on to the sales department, she said. They could offer a special rate, she said, because of my previous conversations with the company: just for me. Special. And she then quoted an eye-watering sum, well over twice the rate of any other EA conference I’ve seen. I again politely pointed out that I usually expect to be paid to go to conferences, or at least have the fees waived as a presenter. This seemed to be a new concept to her: she continued to push quite hard to sell me this ‘special’ delegate-package. Eventually I did get her to understand that the answer was ‘No’, and was going to stay ‘No’, and the call came to an end.

Unsurprisingly, right now I am feeling seriously ripped-off. I’m very happy to help anyone in enterprise-architecture and the like, and I think most people in ‘the trade’ will know this. But it leaves a very sour taste in the mouth to find that in this case not only has that help been turned into a blatant theft, but is now being used to not far off steal from others. And worse, if they’re as questionably-honest as this, it’s all too likely they will scramble the portrayal of my work into unusability, causing me further damage down the line when I have to repair the subsequent mess. Not good.

As Queen Victoria famously put it, “we are not amused”. Sigh…