So let's get this straight: Technological and business change is speeding up. Businesses are reorganizing around business processes, trying to get ready to move to the Web services model and embrace next-generation instant-messaging, RSS and ATOM syndication technologies.

To stay agile, IT infrastructure has got to reflect changes by providing flexible systems that can rapidly change—i.e., virtualized servers.

Yet we're still straddled with a software pricing and licensing model that is "absolutely broken," Bittman said.

Yes, Bittman said, we have to move faster, but right now we're hobbled. "How can you virtualize if a vendor wants to charge you based on the physical aspects of each server?" he said.

The showgoer concurred, pointing to Microsoft's operating system licensing terms as the main vendor holding Westinghouse back.

What does it mean? It means a bit of confusion for the next few years, and it caused the Westinghouse rep to pore over his session list to find something—anything—that presented people who are actually saving money with virtualization.

For his part, Ahmad Shabon, a Project Management Professional for Robbins Gioia, whose main client is the U.S. court system, described a cunning plan to get the U.S. judiciary out of the Stone Ages.

He told me about it after the keynote, and it basically amounts to, well, a shell game.

"You've got to understand: The court systems, the environment is very conservative," Shabon said.

"There are lots of lawyers, judges, clerks. They're still running Windows 2000. They haven't even migrated to NT 4. They're even looking at SOA [service-oriented architecture]. Their interest is their system is rather dinosaur-like. So I'm trying to promote data architecture to them, and through that, enterprise architecture."

Now, Shabon was at Symposium two years ago, when Gartner was touting real-time enterprise architecture.

The problem with that mindset, Shabon said, was that by the time you're done doing enterprise architecture, the system still needs to be able to let a business take advantage of what it's done.

Nowadays, Gartner is talking instead about rapid results; about being very responsive in the way business is run.

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That's all well and good, but getting an agile mindset out of a group that consists of judges appointed, often enough, for life, can be tough.

"By nature, the judicial system, the way it's laid out, you can't fire a judge, you can't cut his pay, and when appointed by the president, they're appointed for life," Shabon said. "There's no pain point on their part."

This is dangerous. When you're still running Word Perfect for word processing, when Novell is still your operating system and Lotus Notes is still your e-mail client, you're getting into the land of lost toys, where the patch train just doesn't stop after awhile, Shabon said.

How do you move that comfortable client? You have to produce a change agent, and that came with 9/11.

"In our system we're very responsive to threats of terrorists and the changes Congress produces, which happen very fast," Sabon said. "In all truthfulness, if we have to keep pace with Congress' new laws and legislation, we need to be fast as well."

Sabon has four people working with him on first data architecture, then enterprise architecture after that.

He has a data warehouse designer and a data modeler among them. They're continuously talking to CIOs. They try to tell them the new world is moving faster and faster.

His strategy is this: While Gartner says the best approach to enterprise architecture is top-down, there's a little loophole for conservative clients: Start at the bottom layer of the data architecture.

Moving from metadatas, up through a common data architecture, and moving through a slice of data architecture, he hopes to develop both a process architecture and an infrastructure architecture for his clients.

That means identifying what's important to the business. In his client's case, it's a list that includes courts, judges and events, such as an act of Congress or a crime.

Then his group develops models, which they populate with real data, retaining concepts of quality, security, systems management, governance, hardware, software and configurations within that data architecture.

Does it sound familiar? It should: It's the rough framework for a services architecture, and thus you have Sabon's hidden agenda.

"SOAs would help them tremendously," he told me. "The court systems are so stovepipe. I could have Web services as a commodity in each court and have a central hub for all that. Bankruptcies, probate services: all the courts have those processes. They all could be put to work as services."

Sabon said he can't talk to his clients now. The comfort level with IT technology just isn't there. He's trying to get them to come closer to enterprise architecture and hopefully move them to SOA, which will be their logical solution.

"The CIO of U.S. courts keeps trying to tell me we're doing this data architecture now only to get us to the enterprise architecture. And I extended that sentence saying hopefully that will get us to SOA, where each court could be commodities. And he looked at me and he said, 'You're being very ambitious in your goals.' But that told me at least I could talk to CIOs and see how things work with them."

The message so far from Gartner Symposium: Be fast. Be agile. Be flexible. Don't scare your CIOs. And for God's sake, don't drop the spinning teacups.

The madcap, musical, multianalyst keynote? Technically, it wasn't musical. But yikes, it might as well be.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.