Shane Coghlan and I spent the beginning of the week at the always excellent Futuretix Ticketing Symposium.

I particularly enjoyed the Opening Keynote given by Gloria Nevarez the Commissioner of the West Coast Conference. As technology providers it is easy to get caught up in the echo chamber of why we see value in our goods and services. Gloria really hammered home some key thoughts from the perspective of an event organizer.

1.    Make sure to connect your technology to the problems organizers are trying to solve.  We take for granted people see the same values we do.  

 This one certainly resonated. From its inception, Qcue has sought to reimagine inefficiencies in the live entertainment space. What I found particularly interesting was the idea of that some of the time the value you think you provide isn’t valued the same way by clients. I have been amazed that while we view the Qcue application as a really intelligent data science driven application (and it is) we have recently heard how much clients value the operational efficiencies we bring to their organization.  Time is precious and the insights we provide are great, but would not be as useful without the tools we also provide to implement them.

2.    Be part of the long term solution.  The industry continues to move very quickly, for organizations to invest in partners and solutions, they want to see them align with the longer term organizational strategy and be able to grow and adapt.

This speaks to having a longer term vision for your applications and reminded me again of our Design Thinking concept that is key to not only software development but how we look at things such as employee experience. The industry is littered with companies promising “quick fixes” to problems but organizations clearly value partners that take the time to think not just about a specific problem but want to help develop and implement holistic strategies that can provide real value to the business.

3.    Tools only work if people choose to use them. This goes back to value again. Measure your success to benefit not only your clients but internally.

 Absolutely. I think about how many apps I have on my phone that I never use.  But also how I have at least 3 direction/map apps but really only use one.  Obviously I need to clean up my phone but I value and trust the one app in this example. At Qcue we want to provide insights and tools that people want to use to help manage their business.

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