www.nickhodge.com

Same hotel as 2009, but on the hin­ter­land side of the building.

I mulled long and hard over the con­tent of this post over on techedbackstage.net. A dis­cus­sion with a few people, and read­ing to through with Jorke cleared my mind a little.

Should I reveal we had a medium size hic­cup in the first day of net­book handout at TechEd? C’mon, cor­por­a­tions don’t make errors. Well, they sorta do — but never admit it. Prob­lems are couched in cor­por­ate speak. All is well. Look over here.

My per­sonal concept of trans­par­ency and hon­esty is telling it like it is. Whilst I don’t state the actual num­ber of machines need­ing re-imaging: we have yet to get more data tomor­row to be more fac­tual: telling the story as it is, warts and all, is crit­ical. It’s closer to home here as I am respons­ible for the Net­books. In ret­ro­spect, I feel I should have thought of the human factors when in production-line mode. Also, increas­ing the Q&A rate con­sid­er­ing the tight­ness of the handout: I should have thought of that, too.

I’d like to put a big thanks out to Jorke who imple­men­ted techedbackstage.net. We really hope that you guys in IT get some­thing out of this transparency.

Some­times it’s pain­ful to admit your mis­takes and say sorry. Thank­fully, I work in an organ­isa­tion that respects the need for this level of hon­esty. And a great team of people who are pulling to make it right for customers.

After 6 months of plan­ning, lost sleep, deep think­ing — TechEd with the Win­dows 7 / Net­books com­ing to fruitition.

In a week’s time, it will all be over. I really won­der what next week­end will look like.

In the mean­time, this is the view from my hotel room:

As TechEd 2009 approaches, you will see me blog­ging over on TechEd Back­stage