[ontology-summit] Elevator pitches and escalator pitches

[Simon Spero <sesuncedu@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was part of what would have been a heated debate on just what counted as an elevator pitch, had we all not started with the same internalized definition :-)

The context was a mentoring session by a group of doctoral students to a group of about to graduate masters students. We were discussing the art of the elevator pitch, and when someone suggested that the upper time limit was 60 seconds, this was immediately corrected to 20-30 seconds, with the shorter the better (Murphy's law will cause the  elevator or coffee line  to travel faster the longer the pitch. ) The hook should come in the first five seconds. 

Someone then proposed that a 60 second pitch should be termed an escalator speech. An additional constraint was proposed that escalator speeches had to use shorter words, as the shared, imaginary escalator was out of order, noisy and/or windy. The proposer had in mind the typical WMTA experience. My prototype has merged this with the escalators at Bank. Mind the semantic gap...

Imho, the ideal pitch would begin with something like "Remember that time when you were 10 months into that integration project when you realized that everyone had a different idea of what "person" meant?" Then the pitch can split into either how this can be caught earlier (legacy conversion), or how an ontology can help make services usable by other groups without having to have months of meetings for each new use.  Think how much more visible you'll be if everyone starts using your services, and think of all the staff time that won't have to come out of your budget line.

This is the enterprise architecture equivalent of cold reading. 

Simon

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