I'm excited about the line up of next month's Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit.  I've been attending EA events from Gartner for the past half decade, and they continue to provide value to me, both in thought leadership and networking.

On the thought leadership side, Malcolm Gladwell is scheduled to speak on mobilizing social networks and power to drive change.  This topic couldn't be more relevant to the enterprise architecture community today.  The shift from command and control IT with dictated structure and strategy has shifted to collaborative and temporal associations that require the IT strategy community to stay engaged and social. 

Gladwell has a couple of great books that should be on your night-stand:  The Tipping Point, and Blink.  Gladwell also has a new book out titled Outliers.  I haven't read that one yet but apparently Gartner is giving away copies to attendees of the keynote.

This year's event - which is taking place at Ceasars Palace in Las Vegas on December 10-12 - has three main tracks:

• Strategic EA: Relationships & Leadership
• Real Life EA: Experiences & Best Practices
• Delivering EA Excellence: Models and Measurement

These themes make sense to me.  I'd probably spend time between hearing the EA case studies and learning the latest strategies for managing EA success.

From the survey we ran earlier this year, we saw that travel expenses for EA education were down this year.  However, if you haven't been able to secure a ticket yet, I'd encourage you to check your budget to see if there are some funds that need to be used by the end of December.  This conference would be an excellent event to close out 2008 with and begin the path to move forward in 2009.