Current Location (Chris): Orlando, Florida
Current Location (Danielle): Home, NZ – last sleep

I think yesterday can be distilled down to a single word. Wow. While this is not my first USA conference or even my first ConnectWise IT Nation it is still mind blowing. (For those of you following along at home, ConnectWise is the software company that writes our PSA (professional Systems Automation) & RMM (Remote monitoring & management) tool. Pretty much the main applications the LANWorx team use. IT Nation is their biggest annual conference)

The conference has about 3600 attendees which by USA standards would make it a medium sized conference and by NZ standards huge.

The day started with a rush due partly to being out parting to late the night before. Made it across to the conference venue sans breakfast Intime for the keynote speech. I won’t go into the detail of the keynote here other than to say something that isn’t much of a revelation, security, security, security. That is where the MSP focus needs to be over the coming years. The internet is becoming a more hostile place and with IoT more and more of our lives are connected / intertwined with Internet. Security focus has to grow to address a massive skills shortage in this area.

The second keynote was from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Tim is the guy who invented the world wide web! It would be no understatement to say that he has shaped all of our lives.

Sir Tim appears to have Parkinson’s or some other sort of condition which mean you really had to pay attention to keep up with what he was saying. Due to this I have sadly heard some of the other attendees not being all that impressed.

I did follow along maybe days of understanding Americans speak put me in good condition to follow Sir Tim!

Again, not going into all the details, my personal key takeaway from his keynote was the internet is due for a course correction, privacy and absolute data ownership is key moving forwards. Just because your data is stored out there in the cloud, should mean that you don’t have absolute control over who views it.

The afternoon continued with breakout sessions, a creaky nap and much adjustment of perspective. I have been focusing on learning more about building company culture and teams. Not hippy dippy trust falls or anything like that, just more how company culture and small things make such a difference to wellbeing.

If you consider all the staff in your organisation or team as ingredients how they interact is very important the end dish. In a stew you might have beef, carrots, potato, onions etc. you might not even really like onions but in a stew, they have their place 😉. Then you have chocolate chips, if you were to add chocolate chips into a beef stew its fair to say the stew will be ruined. That’s not to say that chocolate chips aren’t great, they ARE, just not in the beef stew recipe. I found this a great way to explain to myself team dynamics.

After the day of intensive learning it was on to the mind blowing section of the day, the main IT Nation party where we had the whole of SeaWorld Orlando to ourselves! Throughout the park there were food and bar stations all free, all unlimited all night long! To cap it off, we finished up the evening with a private performance from “Walk the Moon” the band known for pretty much 1 song “Shut up and Dance!”

If you every have the opportunity to attend a conference in the USA even if you have to pay for it yourself its well worth it. The scale of stuff here is just mind blowing.

I will leave you for today with a few picture, mostly from last night 😊