Event Technology: Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

EVENT TECHNOLOGY:  DON’T RE-INVENT THE WHEEL
Meeting professionals are focusing too much on new event technologies, and ignoring existing methods that will improve events—at a fraction of the cost.

REMEMBER THE 1970S TELEVISION SERIES
The Six Million Dollar Man? It featured a former astronaut whose limbs and eye were replaced with bionic implants, allowing him to perform super-human feats. The show’s opening catch phrase “We can rebuild him…we have the technology” highlights our fascination with improving our lives via better gadgets and software.

Today’s event professionals aren’t immune from the allure of new technology. Industry conferences incorporate the latest and greatest mobile and gamification apps, video-streaming platforms, attendee tracking systems, audience response systems, mobile networking and registrant analytics. Suppliers are happy to sponsor these events, using them to showcase their wares and, hopefully, convince participants that their new technology is worth buying…My November 2013 column for The Meeting Professional: Meeting Professionals International’s member magazine.

2 thoughts on “Event Technology: Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

  1. This article limits technology examples
    to apps, registration and attendee engagement. The overall manual process of
    procuring suppliers and reconciling invoices has been automated using
    technology in almost every other spend category for over 10 years and the
    meeting and event spend sector is lagging way behind, especially for an
    industry that currently requires far more manual work then “office supplies” to
    procure and pay. Event Commerce is the automation of buying and selling
    meetings and events, a technology that actually frees up the planner to be more
    strategic and spend more time on the human elements that technology can’t
    replace because it automates the back office saving millions of dollars.

    1. Thanks for sharing another example of “new” technology, Talia. I think there are (and will probably always be) plenty of new opportunities for conventionally-defined technology like yours to improve meetings and events. Rather, my article attempts to widen our framing of technology so as to include powerful existing concepts that are in danger of being overlooked.

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