Recently there has been an announcement that Theo Pristley joined Software AG as "chief evangelist".
I thought this is an interesting title and wondered what is behind this title. Today Theo Pristley published a Blog post with his interpretation of the term. According to Pristley the three main point of this role are (according to my own interpretation): telling the story, connecting the dots and forming influential opinions.
There has been some posts before on technology evangelism, for example, the one from which I copied the above picture, saying that "Evangelist is born to learn, speak, share, sell and inspire the masses towards the technology or product they are passionate about".
I always believed that it is important to a person to work on things that they are passionate about. Early in my career I have taken some management course in which the instructor said: "if you are not getting up every morning being enthusiastic about what you are doing - you are not in the right place, do something else!".
I realized that this assertion is true for me, and I went to do something else (study for Ph.D) - true story!
Some people have used the term about me claiming that I am evangelizing "event processing" (although, unlike the official evangelists nobody ever paid me to do it). While I find it difficult to identify myself with a term associated with religion, I think that I do preach event processing for various aspects for years in different ways (of course, I am not the only person doing it).
Actually, in the last slide of the tutorial that Jeff Adkins and myself delivered in DEBS 2013, we put the following statement:
BTW - Jeff has on his business card the title "connecting the dots", which is kind of part of the evangelist role according to Prisetley. I guess that this is different from the role of chief evangelist in a software vendor level that is looking across the vendor's portfolio. I generally believe that people with bright eyes are happier and working better - and that people who can inspire people to brighten their eyes are great asset.believe that people with
