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We’ve just closed the panel discussions and slimmed 67 topic submissions down to 10 speaking slots for the third edition of Ness TechDays, our virtual, technical knowledge exchange conference for Ness employees and customers, to be held in September. I wanted to capture and share some genuine excitement: a hopeful dream has come to life over the last 18 months.
Ness has 3,200 engineers. I don’t know them all. I have probably met and spoken to around 200 of them. I read our blogs and our message boards. I see talent, insight, intelligence and ambition. In my opinion, anyone who bothered to submit something outside of their day job is worthy of note by the virtue of Leaning In.
In my role as Chief Digital Officer within Ness’s Chief Technology Office, and our stated ambition of being the “Spiritual Home of Keen Minds and Digital Technology Smarts at Ness,” I am challenged to maximise the potential energy of all that talent and fizzing energy. Our version of turning it into kinetic energy is to turn thought into action, idea into innovation and insight into value.
We do that in a few ways:
- Our CTO Associates forum takes on particularly thorny technology problems posed by our clients, who have access to this forum to request outside perspective on wide-ranging, technical topics that are impacting their business, and addresses them. We have an 80% hit rate in pooling knowledge to solve problems (with knowledge and experience) at speed.
- Our CTO Architects Forum gathers virtually twice a month to educate ourselves (through presentation by our leading authorities) on topics like Functional Programming, API-Centric Design and Machine Learning.
- We drive Ness Connected Labs, where the hottest topics in the industry are tackled, so that Ness can present prototypes and accelerators, an informed and expert Point of View, and useful insights on subjects like Data Personalization, Blockchain and a modern approach to Microservices.
- And then there is our Tech Conference, Ness TechDays
It is indeed a heady mix. It’s powered by an internal engine of energy and passion for knowledge and is directed at showing thought leadership on where technology is heading.
The Ness TechDays Conference is the stage for anyone with something insightful to say, to win the right (through the judging process) to take the microphone and say it. Everyone in the company finds a way, individually or collectively, to attend the three days of two-hour sessions. It brings us all together to listen.
This year the topics championed by our community have gone deep and wide and tall. I’ve been both charmed and alarmed by the sheer breadth and scale. From the delights of homomorphic encryption to the seductive power of multi-dimensional data visualization, it seems no enterprise software stone has gone unturned. When you add the commercial value, the benefits to the employees who will one day use these solutions, and the utility to the end consumer, it gets me incredibly positive that we have our own version of Ness Oil about to come gushing to the surface.
Together with our ten Ness presenters (as voted for by 12 internal tech leaders with no bias in any direction), we will have two senior client leaders who will share with the wider Ness audience their own business, technology and career story and the opinions and observations they have collected along the way. It is always a fascinating event with a healthy dose of left-field questions to keep everyone on their toes.
We have both an audience vote and judges vote to establish the three best-loved presentations, and we turn them into films which we put on the Ness YouTube channel. We want to give a voice to our best and brightest and give prizes to those with a story to tell. It’s worth pointing out that speaking in public (even behind a webcast) is not natural territory for many of our presenters. With that in mind, we spend four weeks ahead of the event mentoring each presenter. They get the coaching advice and support of one of our technology leaders, so that when the moment arrives, it comes out polished and all about the message rather than its delivery. We hope the ambitious ten who will be speaking in September will enjoy it as much as those who graduated with honors from the previous two Ness TechDays conferences.
And the content endures. Many of the 57 who didn’t make the final cut will be supported in turning their submission ideas into blog posts which can be promoted to the world.
All the presentations are hosted internally and are available to all Nessians and interested client developers. And the three best presentations will be cut into three minutes each, which our presenters can proudly attach their name to throughout their career.
This is the modern world. Knowledge is power, but that power is best harnessed when it is shared. Ness is home to an incredibly rich seam of knowledge, and I can’t wait to hear it play out to a willing audience in technology hotspots across the planet.
The topics to be presented are:
- Create Smart contracts using Blockchain
- UX Quality Assurance
- Microservices x Kafka – Conquering Challenges
- DevOps – What Can Go Wrong?
- Generic REST API Automation (GRAA)
- Art and Science of Creating Highly Interactive Huddle-Boards For Visualizing Multidimensional Data
- Machine Learning Integration with SAP HANA for Data De-duplication
- Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): Experience That Combines the Best of the Web and the Best of the Apps
- Automated Accessibility Web Testing with Selenium and Java Framework
- App Development Made Faster with Google’s Firebase (Mobile Back End As A Service)
If you’re interested in speaking with Ness experts about any of these topics below, please contact us here.
