Our son, Adrian, is a software developer, and frequently brings us his observations on the IT business. Sometimes, those observations hit closer to home.
A conversation a few months ago had to do with a hardware manufacturer that may be nearing its sunset. It’s a company that once shone brightly, but is being overtaken by more nimble competitors.
For a while, the firm could make up the difference with clever marketing—but just for a while. Adrian’s succinct assessment: great marketing won’t make up for a lousy platform.
The conversation made me realize how important it is that we’ve spent the last year building a better platform.
When our company began going onsite 25 years ago, we opened with an offer the world had never seen before: in an era long before Internet and email, we would put finished conference content in participants’ hands as they left the closing plenary of an event. The alternative was to wait weeks or months for printing and mailing. Sometimes, faster turnaround was a key deciding factor in whether a conference met its goals.
Conference content is at least as important today as it was in the mid-1980s, and summary content is still a unique niche for our company. But in a struggling economy and a changing industry, capturing and reporting that content is just the first step. We’ve spent much of the last year learning how to help our clients
• Widen the audience for a conference and its content
• Extend the conversation from before to during to after the actual event
• Combine live and virtual audiences, in a way that serves them both and binds them together
• Understand and cope with emerging sustainability issues like decarbonization and rising oil prices
By the time we heard Adrian’s observations on that unfortunate hardware manufacturer, we were already most of our way through a website overhaul that we completed in early spring and officially announced last week. This is an overhaul, not just an update, because we have so much more to say, with ideas and opportunities we could hardly have imagined a couple of years ago.
Looking back, Adrian’s comment made me very grateful. Over the last several months, it hasn’t been easy balancing my time (or even the space in my head) between immediate projects and long-term strategy. But we’re still lucky that we’re a service business, not a manufacturer. We don’t have to carry huge inventory or overhead, and it doesn’t cost us tens or hundreds of millions of dollars when we realize we need to change platforms.
I’m pretty sure our ability to shift (relatively) quickly will bring added value and some intensely interesting conversations to many of our clients, and to the industry as a whole. Watch this space, because I haven’t noticed that the pace of change is slowing down.