With the prevalence of information on the web and all the communication overload, it is very rare that you have to wait for an annual meeting to find out about new things. I remember attending meetings in the late ’80s and early ’90s (mostly related to my interest in Chemistry) after which you came back energized with all sorts of great ideas. Now, I am disappointed about the presentations in most meetings because it is very rarely that you hear of something new.

However, the networking is invaluable. Almost always, it allows you to gauge how your organization is doing in comparison to the others – and we are doing great, than you, and also you pick up little things here and there regarding directions others are thinking about moving in, feedback regarding products that we may be thinking of purchasing (that they are unlikely to put it in writing) etc.

I attended the Executive Summit organized by SunGard, the Banner vendor, in New Orleans from Friday to Sunday. It precedes the Summit, which is essentially a massive Banner User Group meeting. This year, there are over 6100 attendees!

I am attending the Executive Summit for a second year in a row. They consist of some presentations by SunGard senior management on various topics directed at senior executives from the Colleges and Universities and a few concurrent sessions where the users present on topics of interest.

The SunGard presentations were not useful at all. I pretty much heard the same things that I heard last year. They can be summarized lise this – “We feel your pain. The product can be improved and we are working hard to improve it. We have reorganized to serve you better etc.” The reorganization to serve us better was very confusing and it irks me that whether it is during the reception or otherwise, those who get the most attention from the SunGard folks are those that are obviously the “friends” of the company – in other words, that are already spending a lot of money on SunGard or are about to!

They talked again about how they plan to modularize the product to make the upgrades easier. We will wait to see how this works. They also talked about their Mobile App framework, but there was not much there either.

The two things that I was most excited about was the “Open Digital Campus” and “Community Source” initiatives, both of which are close to my heart. SunGard has realized that it is a hard battle to fight to say to the customers “you have a great need and idea, and we promise to do it for you, but in three years or perhaps four”. Since many cannot wait that long, we end up doing something ourselves anyways.

What SunGard has decided to do instead is encourage the creation of a Community Source group which has strict standards and review committees to develop changes to Banner with wide applicability. They are debated and tested and after such checks and balances, they are added to Banner by SunGard. On the surface all of this looks great. The larger questions of who owns the code, for how long, how exactly does SunGard benefit financially from this and whether the authors should also benefit remain unanswered. Many changes that have been already incorporated look interesting, especially the duplicate PIDM handling.

The other presentation that I greatly enjoyed had NOTHING to do with SunGard or Banner. It was all about what Vassar College is doing about Data Security. Bret Ingerman from Vassar gave an excellent presentation on this topic and I was so encouraged to hear that the plans that our own Data Security implementation team has developed is right in line with what Bret described.

I met up with some of the Wellesley colleagues on Saturday for dinner and watched the second half of UConn Men’s basketball game against Cincinnati and slept late. Then I had to wake up early to watch the last (and important) World Cup cricket match between India and West Indies. India had a solid inning that they managed to bungle and it looked like an easy win for West Indies. Since the SunGard talk on Sunday was pretty boring, I was multitasking – happily watching the West Indies players fail miserably on my iPad while listening to the talk all along. BTW, I can recite the talk to you if you want!

Actually it was amazing – here I am, in New Orleans, LA, attending a technical meeting, while watching an important cricket match being played in my wife’s home town of Chennai, scanning the crowd for the relatives of mine who were updating Facebook from the same stadium. The afternoon ended a little sadly in that my uncle who was living a few blocks from where the match was being played died that night (India time) after a long illness.