Another Long Day In Dress Clothes
Yep, another year, another Epic User's Group Meeting. The first day - the "general session" - is never bad, it's just long.
I woke up at 6:45 this morning (early for me, but not for most mortals; plus, I didn't sleep so well last night) and put on my suit. I ambled down to the Madison Civic Center, where I stood around talking to folks and eating the provided breakfast. Unfortunately, the lobby of the Civic Center is not well air-conditioned, so I got pretty hot! Once we went into the auditorium, things were better.
The general session consists of presentations by the Epic brass about our accomplishments in the past year, and some presentations by our customers and/or some consultants about the impact of Epic's software on their business and on the industry as a whole. (If you're new to my journal, Epic produces front- and back-office software for large medical companies. Medical records, scheduling, billing, referrals and claims, capitation, etc. I've worked on the last three and their related modules.)
Our themes the last two years have been "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones". This year we had a medieval and renaissance theme, and all the slideshows had medieval music, and we really very heavily overworked the medieval metaphor about our "knights" slaying the "dragons" of health care complexity and bureaucracy. I personally do not care to use metaphors to describe a business, especially not to go on about it for three hours; I think it's silly. But the customers seemed to like it, and that's what counts.
(I think my dislike of these things comes from the same area that causes me to dislike wearing costumes.)
The afternoon is given to "focus groups" where each of our product teams ("divisions") spends four hours with some of its customers, reviewing what they did in the past year and discussing plans for the coming year. I had to give an 8-minute piece of a presentation, which seemed to go well. Charlie (my friend and former mentor at Epic who handles sales for our product) thought it was overall an excellent presentation, and I guess he should know.
There were a few suggested enhancements that popped up this year which were of the "I knew this would come up sooner or later" variety. One of them is an enhancement that several of us on the division have been pushing for for years, but which has kept getting put off. Because it's been put off so long we'll have to pay a heavy price in retrofitting our code to handle it, but it is the right way to do it. Some noise was made about finding some sort of compromise, but I think that would be the wrong thing to do and would just make us pay another heavy price later on. We've spent a lot of time taking the "most bang for the buck" approach to our software, and for good reason, but now I think it's time to spend more effort in long-term planning and development, since we've stabilized our product for the most part.
I came home for a little while after the focus group, and found a big box in my mailbox with some odds-and-ends comics I've been looking for, including some ones that are hard-to-find (doubly so because they're in low demand, so dealers aren't inclined to carry or look for them; stuff like the 7th issue of the Deadman reprint series, and two middle issues of a late-1970s Avengers reprint series). So that was a good thing. More stuff to read!
Then I headed down to Monona Terrace for the evening dinner, in which people were encouraged to come in medieval costume. Tracy made costumes for herself, our cow-orker Julie, and Michelle, a woman on another division. Julie's costume looked particularly nice, with some really lovely blue fabric.
They apparently hired the local SCA to perform at the dinner. The fighters and their patented rattan gear staged some combats, and some middle-eastern dancing girls also put on a performance. (Yes, I pretty much would have been happy to take one of them home with me. :-) ) My ex-girlfriend is SCA, but I didn't see her there, nor anyone else I know from the SCA (well, I thought I saw one woman I recognized, but I wasn't quite sure; I didn't know her well anyway).
The food was okay, but not outstanding. Sitting around talking to people was fun, though, including a former cow-orker who's now consulting for a client, and another client whom I haven't seen in over a year.
But boy do my feet hurt after a day of wearing dress shoes and loafers!
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