#fow2014

[friendsofwhalescosplay]

Just some pictures of our cosplay to get things started! If you see yourself in the TARDIS pic, please don’t hesitate to tag!

[simwilso]

Best job title = Futurist

In my last post I spoke about the Future of Work conference I attended in Melbourne. I have to say that I had some key takeaways and walked away pretty inspired by one speaker in particular. The whole conference was fantastic and I’ll definitely be making an effort to attend a few more ‘non-technical’ events in the future as a result. For me it really helped broaden my view and got me back some perspective and focus on where the value really lies in what we do and provide as IT professionals. It’s so easy in our field to get caught in the gadgets, widgets and politics of our own domains and can be too easy to lose sight of the real reasons we do what we do. This conference helped connect me back to that focus. If you’re in IT and have an opportunity I’d thoroughly recommend booking in to a short course or conference outside of ‘direct’ technology for sure. If I see anything coming up I’ll make sure to tweet it out ‘@simwilso’ and hope maybe if your reading this you could do the same back. Anyway, the speaker that won the show by a longshot was Dave Evans. Dave is Chief Futurist for Cisco which is clearly the coolest job title you can get. Dave gave a crowd of dropped jaws an incredible summary of what’s happening in the world of Technology research and development (electronics, the internet, biology, robotics, 3d printing etc). He also provided some simply incredible (and well justified) predictions for the future. His story focussed on the compounding impact of all these amazing pieces and how they will change the way we live and will impact almost every facet of our lives, and at the same time will transform our businesses in the not too distant future. I can honestly say this was by far the most incredible presentation that I’ve sat in and really got me super excited about the industry that I’m a part of and as it enters its next phase what it might do for the world. Once the webinar is published I’ll be sure to share it here so you can see for yourself but in the meantime if you’re a Tech person who’s a bit tired or lacking energy in our field or even if you’re just someone interested in innovation, you need to hear this guy talk. If that's not workable I suggest you or get hold of a book called ‘Abundance’ which talks about some of the same stuff. Pretty confident it will give you the buck up you need!