Defrag Blog

Reason #7: Learn something you can actually apply

One of my favorite quotes from last year’s Defrag attendees came from Erik Miller of Western Union (emphasis added):

“I’ve been to a lot of conferences. Conferences of all kinds, in fact. I’ve been a speaker at many conferences even. What separated Defrag from every other one, including the ones that I was a speaker at, was that I actually learned something. And not just something that I’ll wind up disregarding in a couple of days, but something actually useful that I can apply to my line of business.”

Too many times, when I say that Defrag is a “strategic” type of conference, people confuse “strategic” with “pie in the sky.” That is, in fact, totally untrue. Rather, Defrag’s exploration of the BIG questions helps implementers to get things right from the get-go; to learn something they can actually apply to business.

Do you need to learn about social search in the enterprise? Rich Hoeg (of Honeywell) will be telling us what he’s doing.

Are you trying to figure out how to derive real intelligence from distributed communities? Four industry experts are digging into that.

Do you want to know how you stack up with your peers when it comes to “social computing?” Saugatuck research will be presenting new findings on just that.

Are email and RSS feeds increasingly becoming a drain on productivity? We’re talking about how to fix those foundational information channels.

Is the whole mess of user data (and the meta-components of that) keeping you up at night? Daniela’s exposing the taxonomy and folksonomy of it all.

All of that and so much more. Bottom line: The *questions* asked at Defrag are precisely the precursor needed to taking real action back in the “real world.”

Defrag is a “strategic” concept - in the best sense of the world: broadly and deeply useful.