2020 has been a challenging year for every industry. As far as the technology industry is concerned, its positioning, value, practice, and many other aspects are undergoing or about to undergo huge changes. However, any macro changes will give signals in the early stages. Catching these signals and acting in time is the message that this Thoughtworks Technology Radar Summit wants to convey. We will gather the global vision of Thoughtworks, bring together top local and international experts to discuss those widely disregarded technical prejudices, differentiated understanding of technology between East and West, and how to build a harmonious technology ecosystem. We look forward to helping practitioners in related fields calmly cope with industry challenges by sharing in-depth technical practice insights and trend predictions within the industry.
| 09:00-09:05 | Opening by Moderator | Kaifeng Zhang, Lead Consultant, Thoughtworks China |
| 09:05-09:35 | Different Takes of Technology in the Context of Asia’s Rise | Hao Xu, Chief Technology Officer, Thoughtworks China |
| 09:35-10:05 | Planning a Cloud Migration—More Than Infrastructure | Scott Shaw,Head of Technology, Thoughtworks Australia |
| 10:05-10:35 | Rethinking “Technology Bimodal” | Ran Xiao, Innovation Director, Thoughtworks |
| 10:35-11:05 | Digital Technology Culture and Leadership | Wei Wang, Director of Technology Strategy Consultancy, Thoughtworks China |
| 11:05-11:35 | Rethink Decentralization in Technology Supplychain Restructuring | Shangqi Liu, Lead of Blockchain Practice, Thoughtworks China |
| 11:35-12:05 | The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Technology | Rebecca Parsons, Chief Technology Officer, Thoughtworks |
| 12:05-12:45 | Remote Work Impact on Software Development | Kaifeng Zhang, Hao Xu, Zhengquan Yang(Tech Principal of NA Market Unit, Thoughtworks China) |
Speakers
Rebecca Parsons
Chief Technology Officer, Thoughtworks
Chief Technology Officer, Thoughtworks, Dr. Rebecca Parsons is the co-author of Building EvolutionaryArchitectures.She is also a strong advocate for diversity in the technology industry and received the 2018 Technical Leadership Abie Award. She committed to increasing the number of women in coding and STEM fields, Dr. Parsons served on the board of CodeChix and acted as an advisor to Women Who Code.
Scott Shaw
Head of Technology, Thoughtworks Australia
As the Head of Technology for Thoughtworks in Australia, Scott divides his time between professional services leadership and consulting. As a consultant, he helps enterprise customers to shape their technology to align with 21st century practices like cloud, continuous delivery, microservices and lean governance. As a lifelong programmer and technology professional, Scott has designed and worked on distributed systems of every imaginable size and shape. When he’s not in meetings, Scott enjoys writing Clojure code.
Hao Xu
Chief Technology Officer, Thoughtworks China
He is also the founder of Beijing Java User Group (BJUG: Beijing Java User Group) and Agile China.He has extensive experience in agile methods such as Scrum and FDD, as well as agile delivery and agile project management. Apart from a vocal option leader in technology community, he is also a renowned classical guitar maker and collector.
Ran Xiao
Innovation Director, Thoughtworks
PhD candidate in Computer Algorithms and Complexity, trailblazer in digital transformation, and specialist in lean governance and agile development. In the past five years, Ran Xiao has led his team in providing long-term innovation services from strategic planning to implementation, serving more than 20 medium- and large-scale enterprises in the areas of Lean Enterprise, Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, and DevOps. He is currently the chief digital transformation advisor for several major companies.
Shangqi Liu
Lead of Blockchain Practice, Thoughtworks China
Working at front line with emerging technology. Shangqi has provided software consulting and delivery services to clients in the automotive, financial, telecome, healthcare industries. As a technical consultant, he help to design system architecture, evaluate technology, refactor large-scale legacy system. And as tech lead he led team to delivery software, build up engineering capabilities. Shangqi is passionate about technologies like blockchain, distributed computing, microservice architecture, domain modeling, and legacy system refactoring. His geek passion is to decentralize everything.
As memeber of Technology Advisory Board, Shangqi also contribute to shape Thoughtworks Technology Radar.
Wei Wang
Director of Technology Strategy Consultancy, Thoughtworks China
Thoughtworks' director of technology strategy consultancy, system architect, and senior consultant. In the past few years, Wei Wang has led his team in providing consultancy services related to digital transformation, technology strategies, and platform strategies for leading global enterprises in the fields of telecommunication, finance, energy, and shipping. He is a co-founder of the DDD China community, and a principal convener of the DDD China summit.
Kaifeng Zhang
Lead Consultant, Thoughtworks China
Kaifeng Zhang is Chief Editor of Thoughtworks Insights, Senior Editor of InfoQ China, Producer of Tech Radar Summit and Track Owner of QCon Beijing. He has a passion for technical community and communication, and has a long career of crossover between programmer and editor.
Zhengquan Yang
Tech Principal of NA Market Unit， Thoughtworks China
Zhengquan Yang is the Tech Principal of NA Market Unit of Thoughtworks China, has many years of experience in off-shore projects, provides customized software development and consulting services for NA customers, and has played the role of Tech Lead, Tech Principal and Account Solution Architect. Performing as the key technology communicator, he leads and participates in technology strategy formulation and strategy implementation as well as the governance of enterprise architecture with key technical stakeholders. Zhengquan majorly focuses on the areas of software architecture design, legacy modernization, tech leadership and organizational structures.
Summit Highlights
Different Takes of Technology in the Context of Asia’s Rise
For many years, technology community has been dominated by the western. New technologies and practices were introduced to solve problems existing in their world. Then China follows. But noways, the market environments and competitive strategies are vastly different. In this keynote, we will examine different takes on two major technologies: mobile and cloud. And the reason why we chose differently may surprise you.
Planning a Cloud Migration—More Than Infrastructure
Although the benefits of public cloud are well-known and advice on cloud adoption is plentiful, we still see customers struggling to get real business value from their cloud adoption efforts. Skyrocketing costs, schedule delays and a skills shortage are pain points that we hear repeatedly. Success with public cloud requires more than a simple change of infrastructure. In this talk I'll explain some ways to improve chances of success with cloud—operating models, vendor selection, risk management and engineering practices all play a role in successful cloud adoption.
Rethinking “Technology Bimodal”
“Bimodal IT” have been somewhat controversial in recent years. As digital transformation deepens, the shortfall becomes obvious, where the Bimodal IT thinking have chosen a rather narrow perspective, which may limit the leverage of technology into a rather cargo cult fashion.
Rethinking from tech@core aspects, we define the new “Technology Bimodal” to help people understand the mindset shift towards building a modern digital business (not only IT). We further analyze the potential differences under each modal and unveil the intention behind this separation.
Digital Technology Culture and Leadership
In the course of a company’s digital transformation, the issue of transforming organizational culture naturally comes under discussion by the company’s managers. Every manager with a technical background faces questions of how to reduce the organizational conflicts brought about by implementation of digital transformations, and how to maximize the value of technological investment through reshaping organizational culture. The new organizational culture will of course redefine and reshape the leadership models used by the organization’s managers themselves. In this lecture, the speaker will use a series of examples based on the implementation of Thoughtworks' digital technology strategy to demonstrate to the audience how to transform the culture and leadership of an organization by constructing a constraint system.
Rethink Decentralization in Technology Supplychain Restructuring
Geopolitics is profoundly reshaping technology ecology. When supplychain dependence is used as a new weapon, we need to pay more attention to the resilience and adaptability of software systems than ever before. This talk will bring the inspiration from decentralization principles. We will retrospect the development of decentralized technologies, from distributed version control(git) to microservice architecture, from blockchain to data mesh, to get new perspectives: when we value simplicity over complexity, inclusion over efficiency, modular tools over comprehensive systems, decentralized decision making over centralized control planning, we'll get a more resilient and thrived technology ecosystem. And this is also how Internet initially developed.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Technology
For tech utopians, technology is never bad, yet for tech dystopians technology is always bad. As with all such extremes, the truth is somewhere in the middle. As technology impacts greater parts of our everyday lives the potential scope for both good and harm grows. Many of the questions arising about the use of technology in settings such as health care or autonomous vehicles should be answered by the broader society, not just technologists. In this talk we'll examine how to introduce more ethical thinking into the creation of technology and how to mitigate the risks associated with technology.
Remote Work Impact on Software Development
Due to Open Source Movement and Offshore Software in recent years, we are quite familiar with Remote Work and have had rich experience about tools and approaches. But when facing outbreak, we observed “working from home” is starkly different from “being forced to work from home during a pandemic“. In this roundtable, we would like to share some insights about how we develop remote-first working methods and reach full productivity as we wish.
We would discuss:
- Experience we already had in offshore field, and issues we always want to fix.
- Problems emerged and solutions due to the pandemic.
- Friendly tools and means which support remote work.
- Expectation how to achieve high development productivity in future.
