Utah

I’ve been in Utah since Monday, and have had a great time with a good mix of business and pleasure.

I’ve been spending time with Phil Windley. We’ve talked about enterprise architecture, web services and much more. We’ve also made arrangements for a continued relationship, and Phil can now add “consultant to the Danish government” on his resume.

Thanks to Dave Fletcher, I also had the pleasure of meeting members of the Utah Product management Council, and did a presentation to them about the Danish work on enterprise architecture. We had a very good discussion. One thing I’ve brought with me is the concept of product management, which is a good concept for what e-government is all about. In Denmark, we’ve had a tendency to focus more on project management, which of course is important enough, but tends to lack a more comprehensive perspective on the sustainability of the solutions brought forth by the projects, which in turn leads to suboptimisation and only gets the lower hanging fruits.

Phil also took me on a tour in his private plane:

We had planned to fly down south to the national parks, but the weather down there was bad, so we went north instead, and had breakfast in Teton Valley, Idaho.

I also found time for a bit of culture, and went to hear the greatest choir in the world:

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
With 360 members, the choir’s sound is fantastic. Amazon offers a free download of the Battle Hymn Of The Republic, which is one of the choir’s most famous acts. Impressive!

Here on Saturday, I’ll move on to Portland, Oregon. But this has not been my last visit to Utah, which is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to.