February, 2008
by Kathy Steffens
Kathy was first-line manager of the Defense Department's Defense Logistics Agency corporate office of capacity management from 1992 until 2004. Prior to that, she was the lead capacity planning technician (mainframe platform) in that office from 1987 to 1992. She was the Program Chair for CMG2002.
About the Author
Kathy Steffens
Hard to believe that CMG'07 has come and gone, and the CMG'08 conference committee is well under way to putting together the December conference in Las Vegas! Allow me to provide a few thoughts about the program portion of CMG'07.
First, thanks to the speakers and presenters who provided over 140 program sessions during the week as well as 14 workshops on Sunday. Authors who submitted papers, invited speakers, panelists, vendor product training, and various industry luminaries provided attendees with computer performance expertise in one convenient location. The San Diego Manchester Hyatt provided a floor layout where nearly all program sessions were on the same floor and located close to each other. This offered more time for mingling and networking for attendees, and also provided easy access to other conference activities during the day.
Second, we had relatively few session cancellations, especially given the wintry weather much of the US saw right at the start of the conference week. We did offer one popular session again later in the week, and it would have been nice to have offered a few more popular sessions if the logistics had permitted that.
CMG Best Paper winners were the following papers selected by conference committee reviewers from papers submitted for blind refereeing for inclusion in the conference:
CMG awarded the J. William Mullen Award to the individuals presenting the following papers:
The J. William Mullen award is given in memory of past CMG president Bill Mullen in recognition of his contributions to CMG and the profession of information technology. The award recipient is an individual who exhibits both technical excellence and an engaging presentation style.
Sunday Workshops and the poster sessions presented Thursday afternoon were well attended. This format is a good way to present material if an author is not sure they want to give their talk in front of a regular session audience. And do keep in mind that we have a comprehensive mentoring program available that can assist with any step of the paper submission process! If you come to us, we can assist you.
Late-breaking paper submissions were once again part of the process, and we had so many accepted submissions, we ran out of available sessions in the initial scheduling run in early October.
The Monday keynote and Wednesday plenary sessions were excellent, informative and well attended.
Please note that the attendee session and conference evaluation forms are read and compiled so that further analysis is possible for use in planning future conferences. It's an evolving process to sort out what worked and what didn't, and input from all sources is being reviewed to improve future program content and presentation. To that end, please continue to provide comments and suggestions to the current conference committee so that the committed program committee volunteers can provide the best possible program this next December.
It was my privilege to have been the CMG'07 Program Chair and to have worked with so many fine speakers and volunteers this past year. Thank you! See you in San Diego at CMG'08!