This March, I traveled to Seattle from Maine for my sixth GITA Annual Conference, now called the Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference.
The GITA organization is trying to change with the times, and, in my opinion, is focusing on more appropriate content, including our national aging infrastructure and energy alternatives. GITA has also invested in several up-beat conference managers who realize the importance of fun in a day’s work. Sure, they ran out of lunch on Wednesday (the late conference crowd was hanging around in numbers greater than expected - a nice problem to have), but I didn’t mind taking a walk to find sustenance. No one is going to starve in downtown Seattle. I loved the way the GITA floor manager handled it. She smiled right through it with grace and humor to calm the hungry crowd.
What I notice at GITA, and at most of the conferences where we exhibit, is that attendees are really shopping for solutions. This sounds cliché; however, if you’re really listening to the attending project managers, GIS specialists, or lone-wolf consultants, you begin to see the common themes challenging each one of them. Technology continues to migrate; it’s a moving target. It’s not so much jumping forward as it is expanding in all directions at once. Yet these people, our customers, have a real job to do. Just like me, they have a boss who’s measuring their progress. They have operating models to adhere to or business models to reinvent. Our job is to listen and apply our technologies to help them achieve their goals — to use our technical expertise, such as it is, to solve their problems and protect their budgets. Do this fairly well and you’ll win a new customer. Screw up and fix it quickly and you just might have that customer for a long time. Technology drives humility into the sales process; it’s called tech support.
It’s easy to get distracted and to focus on the sales opportunity, like a $44 billion fleet of jets or a $500 million census field data collector, and to lose sight of the customer’s real requirements or get lost in the technology.
Technology today is complex because it crosses platforms, operating systems, file formats, and protocols. Who can blame a customer for abandoning the “technology leader” for a less expensive, simpler alternative? It is the natural flow. Still, do any of us believe paper census questionnaires will create a more accurate census in 2010? Shifting requirements, shifting technologies, and ballooning costs forced the census to step back to the paper process of the 1990s. This could be a failure of both the seller and the buyer. The former must listen and help the latter to shop responsibly. Forcing Kool-aid on the customer can be counter-productive.
I get a kick out of reading spatial industry press releases, always touting “ABC, the leader in geospatial blah, blah, blah, today announced…” Maybe the standard PR opening should be redrafted to read, “Company ABC is listening to potential customers interested in our newly released doohickey….” As long as we’re listening, we should be in business. GITA did it - with or without lunch.
-Geoff
Tags: GITA, Technology, XMap
