Pelz-Sharpe Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Day 3 UK Roadshow - Savvy Buyers

16-Jun-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), SharePoint Ecosystem, European Marketplace, Industry Events, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Higher Ed

Day 3 and a lot of miles covered. So far the drives have been a reminder to me just how beautiful England and Scotland are. For a small set of islands we are blessed with an incredibly changing and visually stunning landscape.  And so today we are at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham (the biggest event so far, with probably a higher proportion of private sector delegates than the previous two). 

Theme of the day?  Difficult to say really, but if I were to choose two it would be the content chaos and archiving.  Where to start in hugely complex, over-running, multiple silo situations, and associated procurement practices.

I confess to being intrigued and a little surprised at how many people were attending the event to gain knowledge for major projects in the pipeline.  I mentioned this before but it bears repeating: the corner does seem to be turned in terms of organizations wanting to address information chaos. Gone is the past attitude that information disarray was either unimportant or too big a situation to take on. Savvy delegates seemed to understand that good information order and process delivers good information management - rather than technology being the starting point.

Story of the day for me though was from a major University that detailed how they manage IT contracts. The long and the short was that they never sign up-front deals, rather only a series of incremental deals and payments based on milestones met. Common enough in the world of consulting but less so for enterprise software.  The important part of this was that they enforced such payment methods without exception.  Where software vendors failed to deliver as promised they relentlessly pursue the vendor for penalty payments. Tough customers, but a practice others may want to consider.

Tomorrow the last and largest event at Earls Court London, so a long drive tonight to drop off the rental car and get to my hotel. This weekend will hopefully involve a great deal of sleep.

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