Keynote and Opening: The Amazon.com Technology Platform: Building Blocks for Innovation
Speaker:Werner Vogels
Time: Wednesday 09:00 - 10:00
Location: To be announced
Abstract: In modern enterprises specific business offerings are often build on a core technology platform. Opening up this platform for innovation of partners will lead to a better utilization of the core competencies. Amazon.com has undergone the transformation from application to platform provider and an increasing number of diverse businesses are built on the Amazon.com platform. Platform customers range from retail partners, who integrate at the data level, to enterprise partners who consume platform services, to innovative start-ups who consume fundamental services such as S3, the Amazon storage service. This presentation will dive deep into how technology and architecture have enabled Amazon.com to become a platform provider, while still innovating its technology base at internet speed. Although Amazon.com's scale makes them seem an extreme case, there are lessons learned from this transformation that will be of use to every enterprise looking to provide its technologies as a service or to consume services of business partners.
Pre Banquet Keynote: Meeting the Usability Challenge
Speaker: Larry Constantine
Time: Wednesday 18:30 - 19:30
Location: To be announced
Abstract: In an era of lean and agile development practices and growing pressures to deliver features ahead of the pack, developers and their managers need to use resources wisely. Although nearly everyone acknowledges the importance of users and user experience, usability often ends up pushed to the back of the queue. How then can we know whether what we are delivering makes sense and will work for our users? Designers need to focus sharply on those aspects of users and use with the most impact and greatest potential payoff, but where do we turn?
Usability guru Donald Norman and a growing number of other leaders in the usability field argue that too much attention has been paid to users as people and not enough to what they are doing and trying to do. An approach to usability that focuses on the activities in which users engage offers the potential for delivering dramatic improvements in user performance and satisfaction with much less effort.
