The Anatomy of a Conference: Pulling it All Together Behind the Scenes

We’re one week away from ASUG Annual Conference.  I wanted to feature what ASUG volunteers are doing or have been doing for this conference, particularly this time focusing on the “BI-IM” (Information Management) track.  Yatkwai Kee (goes by “Kee”), Coca-Cola, is the ASUG Volunteer Program Chair for the BI Information Management track.  Jim Spath describes it in this blog as “My role (among others) is to review the proposals, fit sessions into a reasonable schedule, then shepherd the chosen speakers and material onto the stage“.

It all started back in January in Atlanta at the ASUG Volunteer meeting where some volunteers met a day early.  Initial selections were made and we were lucky that our ASUG SAP Point of contact Ina Felsheim also arrived a day early.  We also had help from fellow ASUG volunteer Bob Berntsen who found some mistakes in our initial selections. 

With the help of fellow ASUG volunteers Joyce Butler and Jeff Hughes the initial schedule was pulled together that Friday, to be finalized with the other volunteers that Saturday.  Most of the sessions in this track are by customers; we asked Ina if she was good with that and she said yes, that is was what she preferred.

After January, ASUG Headquarters notified the speakers, and then the presentations started to come in and this is where Kee (pictured at the left) spent late hours and weekends reviewing the this track’s presentations.  One speaker’s abstract said it would include benchmarking information but it was missing from his presentation; Kee followed up with an e-mail at about 10:00 PM at night.  Another session didn’t contain enough information; Kee followed up on that.  One session had too many marketing slides (ASUG isn’t selling anything) so Kee followed up on this.

Ina also reviewed Kee’s comments and was helpful in following up, especially if the session was co-presented by SAP.

I’m highlighting this so you will see that ASUG volunteers such as Kee worked on their own time to ensure attendees next week will receive the best, high quality content as possible.  This is truly customer/user-group driven education.

Here’s the result of the efforts for the BI – Information Management track (the “plumbing” behind BI):

Other related resources for ASUG Annual Conference:

• ASUG BI Session Schedule

• ASUG BI Community Brochure

It is with thanks to volunteers such as Kee, Joyce and with help from our SAP Points of contact like Ina that this is all possible.