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BY MICHAEL KRAUSS
(Posted with permission
by the Chicago Sun Times)
Chicago will host one of the computing industry's premier
events for women in technology for the first time this October.
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the
Association for Computing Machinery will hold their Grace
Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2004 event here
from Oct. 6 to Oct. 9.
The conference marks a unique opportunity for Chicago's
technology community to connect with some of the leading
minds in computing.
The event focuses on the technical achievements of women
in academia and industry, and recruited support of major
corporate sponsors, including AT&T, Hewlett-Packard,
IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Google and Sun. According to organizers,
it has the backing of major academic institutions including
Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, the University of California
at Berkeley and UC Irvine. Organizers are just beginning
to reach out to Chicago-based companies and academic institutions
for participation.
"Our programs date back to 1987 when Anita Borg founded
the Systers community," says Telle Whitney, president
of the Anita Borg Institute.
Systers was an early online community designed for women
in technology. It enabled women to share thoughts about
complex technology problems and about being a woman in the
technology field. For more information, go to www.Systers.org
Pioneer honored
Borg and Whitney founded the Grace Hopper celebration
10 years ago. The program honors Admiral Grace Hopper, a
computer industry pioneer who invented the first compiler
program in 1953, translating English-language instructions
into language that computers can understand. Hopper also
found the very first computer, bug, which was an actual
insect that crawled into the wiring of a post-World War
II computer.
Born in suburban Palatine, she encouraged women in computing
and often sported a T-shirt proclaiming, "Well-behaved
women rarely make history." Borg died of brain cancer
last year.
"It's important to have diverse perspectives,"
Whitney says. "Half the consumers of technology are
women. Engineers create products for the person down the
hallway who looks an awful lot like them. If we don't have
a diverse project team, the technology that all of us will
use suffers," she adds.
Warby warbles on partnering
There's a rule in high-tech that you can't be good at everything.
You need to team and partner.
Even the mighty Microsoft and Accenture, two companies
that are known for their willfulness and independence, teamed
up to form Avanade in April 2000. Their goal was to wed
Microsoft's focus on software and Accenture's delivery of
services to support large enterprise customers.
This Wednesday, the Chicago Software Association hosts
its eighth annual partnering conference, focusing on the
"Art of Alliances." Adam Warby, senior vice president,
Americas for Avanade, keynotes the event. It's a homecoming
for Warby, who previously worked in Chicago as general manager
of the Midwest district for Microsoft.
Watch for Warby to share stories from the home front to
make his point about successful high-tech partnering. "I
have teenage daughters who are beginning to date,"
says Warby, who feels tech partnerships should be based
on compatibility, not the glamor of the moment. "The
best-looking boy is not always the one to go with,"
he advises. "Look for someone who you're going to be
compatible with."
He stresses the need to tie alliances to the core business.
"What often happens is alliances are treated as a separate
entity," Warby says. "Commit to it and make it
work," he adds. "Every-one at Avanade is an alliance
partner."
Bits & bytes
- The final presentations in this year's Edward L. Kaplan
New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago Graduate
School of Business take place Wednesday. Prize money totaling
$50,000 is at stake.
- Also Wednesday, the Evanston-based Illinois Technology
Enterprise Corp. and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management
hold an entrepreneurial education event, "Bootstrapping
Your Way to Success." Kellogg professor Linda Darragh
moderates a panel that includes Bryan Hopcraft, co-founder,
Simplified Workforce Solutions; Amy Ravi, co-founder,
ConferenceSeek, and Art Roldan, CEO, SecurePipe.
Michael Krauss is a Chicago-based tech writer and consultant.
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