My November 2013 column for The Meeting Professional: Meeting Professionals International’s member magazine.
Related posts:
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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.
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.