Bridget Kromhout


Title: Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners of Catan

Description:

No critique of bimodal IT is complete without a board game analogy; here's mine. What if Wardley maps were hex-based? In the game Settlers of Catan, players vie for longest road, largest army, and resource monopolies on the game board. But when the Cities and Knights expansion is added to the game, suddenly there are multiple paths to victory. In Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely's history of Silicon Valley, he talks about commandos, infantry, and police. Simon Wardley talks about pioneers, settlers, and town planners. The concept remains the same: some innovate, others turn the innovations into products, and still others make products into commodities. This talk will explain mapping of the enterprise IT journey by way of board games, with whimsical asides.

Speaker

Bridget Kromhout

Bridget Kromhout

@bridgetkromhout

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After years as an operations engineer (most recently at DramaFever), she traded in oncall for more travel. A frequent speaker at tech conferences, she helps organize tech meetups at home in Minneapolis, serves on the program committee for Velocity, and acts as a global core organizer for devopsdays. She podcasts at Arrested DevOps, occasionally blogs at bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.