I look into the conference bundle and how the digital twins stack up

I’ve had a tough time being productive over the last few days. The events around the world currently are a lot to process, and as I’ve said before, I’m not the type to react instantly with hollow missives. I need time to think about it, reflect upon it and do some research to know more about it. I’ve struggled over the last few days to come up with a response here for this newsletter, to try to fully come to terms with what some are only just waking up to acknowledge. I’m fifty years old now, and have lived through a few life shocks —I don’t need to bore you with the details. Suffice to say, what is currently happening is deeply troubling to me and I’m starting to form a bigger picture of where the world might go in the future, and I’m not comfortable with it.

On to administrative matters. I’ve decided to simplify the delivery of this newsletter and narrated podcast. There will now only be one email that contains both the text and the podcast version ensemble. You do not need to do anything to continue to enjoy it. If you prefer reading, the full text is in the email and if you prefer listening, keep pressing play as you’ve previously done. For those that pick up the episode through your podcast player, the show notes contain the full text as well. It’s to make it easier for you to consume these essays. Additionally, in the event of another interview issue, it’ll allow you to follow along with the conversation while listening by browsing the show notes.

DM me at @tfid_newsletter if you want to know more. The door is open.

On to this weeks’ essay.

The Conference Bundle

Last week’s issue was a little, shall we say, unstructured. I apologise. There was a reason. I wanted to write down what it is that makes a conference. I probably could have done a better job at explaining what the constituent parts of a conference are for starters. So I thought I’d expand upon those initial thoughts and try to give it some structure.

The conferences we know today were developed in the pre-internet era. The earliest reference I could find was the Convention Nationale of 1792 in France. The assumptions made during this development have applied to all conferences since. Get a bunch of people in the same city at the same time, mix it up and see what good comes from it. For conferences to become digital, those assumptions will be ignored, and a new digital conference template will emerge, one that is based on internet assumptions.

Looking at conferences (or conventions if you prefer), several parts are common to all meetings. Firstly, there is content. Content is delivered in different forms; presentations, Q&A, etc., the content is also an opportunity for marketing to spread its message to the attendees. Additionally, conferences rely on the physical structure and cognitive separation from day-to-day work, providing opportunities for attendees to meet, chat and learn. Many sales-oriented attendees are present simply because they know that potential clients will be in the same city at the same time. At large conferences, people often don’t even attend any of the content provided; their expectations simply targeted to compress several months’ worth of meetings into a multi-day conference. It saves on travel expenses and not least, time away from the office and family. Packaged together is the social aspect that tries to engineer meet-ups and new introductions —like side meetings, social evenings, corridor chats— in an attempt to enlarge the ecosystem and the potential for business for the conference hosts and sponsors. Some conferences even attract attendees to the host city without having any intention at all to attend the meetings. WWDC is an excellent example of this. The conference is typically limited to 5000 attendees with several thousand more present in San Jose during the week it is on. Again, the aim is to take advantage of the gathering of the people they need/want to meet during the conference. Lastly, most conferences have at least some expo capacity. Tens if not hundreds of vendors set up shop and promote their wares for the duration of the conference in the expo hall. It’s a convenient gathering to browse and scout out new products, services and businesses.

So if you think about it, a conference is a bundle of products, and much like Microsoft 365 is a bundle of solutions for productivity or your triple-play TV/Internet/Phone service is a bundle for entertainment, the conference will appeal to different needs for different jobs to be done. And like all bundles, not all users will use all the products and services included during the week. The trick for conference hosts is to provide enough of a value for each attendee profile. I detailed the Conference Bundle in the diagram below:

Matthew Cowen

Looking closely at each part of the bundle, it’s not difficult to see that pretty much the only part that has been solved for the digital and online world, is that of content. In record-time, many conferences across the globe pivoted to “virtual” meetings very quickly. Some of the biggest and most prestigious conferences, like Microsoft Build, the WWDC as mentioned earlier from Apple, or VMworld have all shifted online, simultaneously avoiding cancellation (unlike Google’s I/O) in offering more than before. I’ll get to that in a little bit. The proximity problem of side-meetings has also largely been solved, in that it is easy to schedule individual one-to-one meetings during conferences. Again knowing that your colleagues and friends are attending allows this, but how is that any different than planning a one-to-one outside the conference? Does the conference itself bring value in that instance?

What has not been solved, however, is the organically generated social nature of large gatherings that attract like-minded and open-to-learn individuals cooped up in the same room. Something that, by circumstance, breeds the kind of interactions I attempted to highlight in the last issue, i.e., the impromptu lunch meetings, the corridor conversations, the sometimes-awkward socialising over vendor-provided drinks. These interactions, however brief or however staged, are part of the experience, in that they add to the value of your presence. How do we solve for that in the digital world?

Outside of the presentations and social interactions, exists the show floor, or the expo hall. This element of the bundle doesn’t currently have a digital equivalent. Wandering around the expo hall, fulfils two jobs to be done. One is the exposure to new products and services, and the other is access to technical staff or to C-suite execs of companies you may be interested in learning more about. It’s quite efficient when you think about it. If of course, you take advantage of it. But how do you transfer that discovery experience into digital, an experience that solves the jobs to be done puzzle?

This change in the nature itself of conferences provides some insight and ideas on their future. The most significant difference during the pandemic is not the fact that some conferences have become cheap or free, it is that their reach has widened to such an extent that the potential audience for a popular conference is now up to 4 billion people! It is also interesting to learn that even niche conferences may develop into international affairs.

Looking at the expo hall, it is entirely possible that in some instances an online expo hall could take on some of the attributes of a contemporary massive online multiplayer game like Fortnite or PUBG. The Marshmello concert in 2019 and the more recent Travis Scott show directly in Fortnite taught us that entertainment in an online setting had the potential to be just as enjoyable as in a typical concert venue. It provided a glimpse into the future of online events. You may be recoiling at the thought of this, but there’s no easy way to put this, our time on this planet is limited. The generations following on from us are growing up with entirely different frames of reference, ones that are based on internet assumptions. Organisers of conferences of the future will also have those frames of reference and not 18th-century shackles in which to operate. This will free up their imagination, and when they design future gatherings, the contemporary conference will be a completely different beast.

Taking that a step further, the interactive nature of a conference, and if I’m continuing the comparison with online MPGs, players (you can substitute attendees) already use multi-channel communications in realtime. When kids play Fortnite today, those with a PS4 create a “Party” and invite each other to join. The non-PS4 players join the game too but interact using WhatsApp or FaceTime. What you get is a realtime interactive tissue, where the common interest is the game and different branches of communication join the participants. It should give designers of future conferences encouragement to be more ambitious and organic in their development.

From one of my presentations

With more and more people now meeting and dating online, interestingly doing so without third-person intermediaries, is it too far-fetched to believe that this could provide a model for online conferences also? Many of the social taboos surrounding meeting on the internet have all but disappeared where dating is concerned, why not for business meetings? Perhaps future conference software may include an attendee directory that, when browsed with the relevant filtering, you could swipe right to set up a meeting?

What about Virtual Reality? For what it’s worth, I don’t currently believe for a second that VR will take an essential role of this new wave of online conferences. In its current form, it is just too restrictive and too cumbersome to be used in that way. The friction required to enter the virtual world is too significant, it is too uncomfortable for prolonged use and too illness-inducing for many for it to be a serious consideration. Virtual reality sickness is a real thing and cannot be ignored.

As a side note, the imposed shift to digital has, interestingly, enabled a rethink of the tariffs and reach of all conferences. Conferences are traditionally an exclusive club. The investment in time and money is too much for most people and most small organisations that would benefit most from them, and the returns on that investment too small all things considered. The opportunity cost is just not high enough to for that audience. That’s why it is encouraging to see more online conferences that are either low-cost or free. WWDC, for example, is open and no cost to all registered Apple Developers. That’s a 100$ per year subscription that replaces the previously stiff price tag of 1599$. Microsoft Conferences, like Build, were somewhat exclusive too. Covid-19 opened the doors to all comers, for free. A full 48-hour content package was deployed in a way that was easy to jump in and out of as needed. The benefits of a much wider audience for Microsoft was duly noted. An estimated 100 000 people took part in this years’ conference. For comparison, its offline event last year attracted only 6000!

For now, I think I can safely say that in-person conferences are not a thing of the past and that pretty soon many of us are going be on a plane flying off to a convention in some far off city. But I do think that the conference experience has changed forever, and that in-person conferences will include remote participation simultaneously with in-person content, with new smart ways for us to communicate together. I can imagine a Microsoft conference that holds 10-20 thousand people in a convention centre in Florida for example, with another 100-150 thousand connecting from around the world. A convention where in-person you get to see in realtime, and dialled-in you can follow time-shifted to your preferred timezone or follow live if required, all while feeling like a full participant in the event.

Until we meet again.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in digital technology and how it affects business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it in your network.

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This is the belated narrated version. I also fixed a few typos on the original article.

Evening all. Today I’ll dive a little into the forced change that is taking place in the Caribbean and show how we still have a long way to go, and I start an analysis on digital conferencing, firstly by looking at what exactly conferences are for and why they exist using a model I’ve developed to help explain this. In another newsletter, I’ll get into the discussion about what digital conferences can and can’t offer and what the future might hold.

Enjoy.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it to those in your network.

Share The Future is Digital

If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you on board. You can sign up here:

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Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

It’s a start, but there’s plenty more to be done

Evening all. Today I’ll dive a little into the forced change that is taking place in the Caribbean and show how we still have a long way to go, and I start an analysis on digital conferencing, firstly by looking at what exactly conferences are for and why they exist using a model I’ve developed to help explain this. In another newsletter, I’ll get into the discussion about what digital conferences can and can’t offer and what the future might hold.

I’m a bit behind on the narrated version. I’ll try and get it out tomorrow.

Enjoy.

Follow on Twitter

Knee-jerk digital transformation

Source: Twitter (original tweet not found)

This, now infamous tweet, is prescient in explaining a series of announcements across the Caribbean form businesses that are now miraculously online! Amazing! Yeah, it took a global pandemic to get it started, but hey I’ll take it. Snark aside, I honestly applaud the effort that companies are making to get online and I welcome the, even if forced, change in mindset that is collectively being undertaken by residents in some territories. This shift is only going to let people experience first-hand what other countries have been tasting over the last 15 years or so. I’ve written about it here several times, like in the issue called The New Reality:

I have been very frustrated over the last 16 years that the development of digital solutions has been severely behind the times of other countries. Sixteen years ago, I lived in the UK, and we had been ordering our groceries online and having them delivered to our flat five years before that. Yes, you read that right, over 20 years ago, supermarkets in the UK were providing online ordering and delivery to the door. You’re lucky in the French West Indies to have one pickup point, one you’re required to drive to, and if you’re fortunate you’ll get the time slot you want! Have they not heard of Jobs to be Done?

But that there is the problem, this is not the future, it’s the past. Or if I’m very understanding and sympathetic, this is our present. The Coronavirus pandemic has forced to pull up to what has been around in the world for over a decade— and I do mean forced because without it we would still be in exactly the same situation as before. Why did it take a global pandemic to move the needle in the mindset of the businesses in the Caribbean? The answer is a lot more complicated than you might think.

Some put it down to laziness. Personally, I disagree with that, as this is not a binary situation where the opposite of doing something is doing nothing. That’s rubbish! Take this question, for example. The opposite of light is what? Many would say “darkness”. The answer is, in fact, the absence of light. The opposite of doing something is not doing anything, but the absence of doing something, which leaves space for you to do something else. That admittedly sounds a bit like gibberish, but explains the principle that us doing something rather than nothing is not necessarily the best thing!

In these times, under the stresses and short-term urgencies, that something else is often unstructured, un-strategised and built up with successive layers of gaffer tape, that many businesses in the region are not able to adequately “digitise” and only offer a faux semblance. Oh, I’m not criticising that at all. In these times, by any means necessary is the mantra. Structural and architectural realities of ageing IT systems are going to force companies, at one point or another, to massively rethink and retool their business to be in a position to offer what the population has just become accustomed to. How do you think people are going to go back to roaming around shops, sometimes kilometres away from home, to find that the product they’re looking for is out of stock, when for the last few weeks or so they’ve been able to look up online, order and reserve a pickup? Or in some cases wait for the postman to deliver it to the home. The more we’re in this lockdown world, the more companies are going to adjust their offers to cater to this “New Reality”. Which in turn means that customers are going to adapt to this new normal and expect the same thing, even after lockdown has ended. By resetting expectations, expectations are being reset.

On a practical level, I couldn’t begin to tell you how many businesses in the region are ready for a real transformation or have started and not just from the fact that I can’t travel around to see them. There are many reasons, often structural ones. The reliance on cash, as I’ve highlighted before, the fact that the audience is captive and can’t go anywhere else easily, and many other reasons that are counterproductive to digital business. But I can make educated guesses from what I see in my Island, Martinique. Many companies have started to offer basic online services in the hope that even a small amount of income will keep them afloat. 

There is much to be done around the region, but at least it’s a start down the right track. Although often, critical and perhaps cynical, I am quietly optimistic that the talent and creativity will deliver some innovative results in coming months. Maybe this was the push that was needed to get the region kickstarted. As I discussed with on a recent podcast, Michele Marius asked me about this chicken and egg situation, how do we get the business to become digital if the public isn’t digital? Because the public is not digital, then companies see no need. Covid-19 has produced an egg. It’s now up to us the nurture it, so it hatches into the bird we want. Let me know if you want any help.

Digital conferencing

Most industries have, over the years, developed a strong culture of continued-interest tools. Industry magazines were probably the first and today you can find (mostly online) magazines specific to a particular industry that is deeply technical, highly specialised and accurately targeted. In fact, this blueprint was subsequently used by hobbyist magazines to imbue a feeling of uniqueness and inclusion for fans of a particular craft and often crossed-over producing hybrid industry/hobbyist magazines.

Take Nuts and Volts Magazine, the about page shows this:

ABOUT NUTS & VOLTS

Now In Our 40th Year!

The first issue of Nuts & Volts was published in 1980. It was originally designed as a newsprint, all advertising publication that was mostly given away. Over the next few years, the magazine continued to grow in readership and advertising, however, not much changed until February 1992 when NV was changed to a tabloid format and started to make the shift to a more content-oriented publication. New editorial features were added along with monthly columns and projects for electronics DIYers. Since then, it has grown into one of the most popular and relevant magazines for the electronics hobbyist in the nation. Beginning with the January 2003 issue, Nuts & Volts was reformatted from a tabloid size back to a standard magazine size. NV now averages about 100 pages and is printed on high-quality paper in full color.

Nuts & Volts is the leading magazine for those seriously interested in electronics. There now remain only a handful of magazines written for the electronics community with Nuts & Volts being the highest readership, longest running electronics publication left in the US today. And we still have readers and advertisers that have been with us since the early 80s.

Nuts & Volts is written for the hands-on hobbyist, design engineer, technician, and experimenter. The diversity of subjects appeals to all levels of experience and spans such topics as amateur robotics, circuit design, lasers, computer control, home automation, data acquisition, new technology, DIY projects, electronic theory, analog, and myriad microcontrollers.

So I started to think about this from a perspective of the tech industry, something dear to my heart. More specifically, how this relates to what has become standard in the industry; Tech Conferences. I’ve been attending conferences for many years, starting with the public conferences in the early ’90s in London, where I got to try on a working VR system that while quite rudimentary, gave me insight into a future industry that may finally have its moment in the next few years. I took part in coding sessions on Microsoft’s new Visual Fox Pro before it was available for sale, played with the outstanding for the time, OS/2 and saw the future of smartwatches with the too-early-for-its-own-good Spot watch. I’ll always remember what one of the demonstrators said about VR —highly influenced by William Gibson, I might add:

In the future the only way to tell if it’s real or not will be to vigorously shake your head to see if there’s any lag.

That quote struck me for both its prescience and simultaneous myopia. For the ’90s it was a reasonable thing to think, but I fundamentally know that technology would no doubt render the lag imperceptible at some point in the future. A future that is still not here, I might add.

But getting back to conferences, I thought I’d have a stab at trying to predict the future of conferences since a global pandemic has rendered the 2020 season dead or virtually dead. But as you’ll see new opportunities have emerged, with some companies more or less able to take advantage of them.

To ask a basic question to get started, what do we get out of a conference?

The Cowen Hierarchy of Conference Needs

At its most basic level on a scale similar to the Maslow hierarchy of needs, I’ll half-jokingly call it the “Cowen Hierarchy of Conference Needs”, we get access to sessions and presentations on subjects that interest us, hands-on experience using lab computers (depending on the conference of course). We get bombarded with both technical and marketing information. In fact, most conferences are so adept at information sharing that by the end of the second or third day your brain is generally fried if you haven’t paced yourself intelligently. I call this the Information layer. It’s dominated by both technical and marketing information. This is the layer that most people come for and is correctly, the layer that is targeting by the host to provide the most value for attendees. If you attend a conference and only stick to this level you will find value for you or your business. Companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, spend a lot of energy and money ensuring that this is the case.

The danger for the attendee at this level is fatigue. Information overload is a real thing and it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of content, the typically fast-paced nature of it and the feeling that if you are not 100% on the ball all day, you’ll miss something important. This is intentional on the part of the organisers. They typically have too much to share in a short space of time and many conference-goers are interested in several subjects or have a mandate from their companies to récolte as much as possible to justify the investment made. So these conferences are organised to dive in quickly and easily. I have developed strategies over the years how to cope and how to get the best out of the conference. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share. Let me know.

If we look at the next layer in my model, we move into the Social aspect. A conference that groups several hundred or tens of thousands of people in the same area naturally creates opportunities for social interaction. Like the presentations and sessions these need to be curated and managed. Many conferences allow the creation of one-to-one meetings between attendees, to take part in Q&A panels and in some cases become part of the companies programs designed for product feedback. Social is often promoted as a way to get to know your contemporaries and promote collaboration between people.

Moving up the model to the next layer, I call it Strategic Understanding. At this level, you will likely have a good understanding of the future directions and strategic implications of the host over the next couple of years or so. Getting to this level is not generally something you’ll attain if you go to one conference every ten years. By attending successive years, you build habits, piece information together from different years and even create friendships with people you only see at that specific conference. When you get to this level, you start to see the real value of the conference and how you can best take advantage of its opportunities.

At the top level, called Business Opportunities, we clearly see the opportunities for partnering and doing business. It doesn’t happen every year, but when it does arise, its something to bear in mind. I’ve been in this situation a couple of times and each time the “deal” done was very lucrative for both sides.

One last aspect which is not a layer in the model, but a context. Context is all-important to the success of a conference for its attendees. Most conferences (pre-COVID) grouped people in one city for the period of the conference. The mere fact of taking time out of the office — and in some cases flying from a different part of the globe — naturally creates a context in which most attendees will attempt to take maximum advantage of the material on offer.

Meeting people is possibly one of the most valuable things you can do at a conference. How can you do this digitally? When you go to lunch, you grab your food and look for a table with a couple of people on it and say “Hi my name's Matthew. May I sit and eat here?”. The answer is always yes. It’s your window of opportunity to ask a couple of questions of the person and what they do, and similarly share your own field of expertise. How are we going to be able to that, digitally?

Which leads me to my initial thought, can a digital-only conference recreate that? TL;DR, no. I’ll explore that question and other related questions soon.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it to those in your network.

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I promised to let you know

As promised here’s the link and show notes for the podcast, with the ever-wonderful Michele Marius.

Follow me on Twitter (I announced it there first 😉).

For the RSS-inclined, you should know that you can catch all the issues through any RSS reader, such as NetNewsWire (Mac), Reeder (Mac) and plenty of other online services (Feedbin, Feedly, etc.) here: https://thefutureisdigital.substack.com/feed

Enjoy!

ICTP 105: Why Tools And Culture Are The Keys To Digital Transformation, With Matthew Cowen

From the ICTPulse website:

The term ‘digital transformation’ has been a buzz phrase over the past few years, with organisations trying to realise it – with varying degrees of effort and success. However, now, digital transformation may be crucial for organisations to not only survive, but more importantly, to be in a position to thrive, once we get to the other side of the current COVID-19, which is also known as the novel coronavirus, pandemic.

Over the past several weeks, organisations have had to grapple with how they can best leverage technology in order to keep themselves afloat, and digital transformation is frequently being touted as the key to their survival. However, as much as the term ‘digital transformation’ has perhaps reached the point of overuse, we may still not have a clear understanding of what it is, and how best it can be achieved.

To a considerable degree, organisations are looking for a magic bullet: a quick fix that would allow them, at the very least, to sustain their operations, and to be able to meet their financial commitments. To that end, their focus when pursuing digital transformation is the use of digital tools, specifically software applications that can assist with specific tasks – but which in fact are not necessarily ‘transforming’ the business or organisation.

Hence the focus of our podcast episode today is the mechanics of digital transformation in businesses, and how organisations can bet the ball rolling now, and more so in the face of the ongoing pandemic.

…

Due to the subject, it is easy to have in-depth conversations on individual aspects of the digital transformation process. However, and in order to keep the discussion with Matthew to a manageable length, below are some of the questions raised that guided our conversation:

What has been the reaction and the experience of the Martinique business community to COVID-19?

What are some of the challenges tech businesses are experiencing or are likely to experience at this time?

How would you define the term ‘digital transformation’?

Typically, what would you say are the key steps as an organisation thinks of embarking on a digital transformation process?

How might the digital transformation process during COID-19 be different from what might have been implemented pre-COVID-19?

For service-based businesses, their income is likely to be adversely affected when they become digital. How might that be managed?

What are 3 to 5 questions an organisation should ask itself to determine how or where they should start their digital transformation effort?

The title is the link, but here it is again if you missed it: 

https://www.ict-pulse.com/2020/05/ictp-105-tools-culture-keys-digital-transformation-matthew-cowen/

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it to those in your network.

Share The Future is Digital

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Visit the website to read all the archives and thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

In this issue, I thought I’d offer a quick look into the role of a Digital Transformation consultant during a project and try to highlight their value and the clarity that they bring from what seems to be impossible to untangle.

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter.

Twitter

Enjoy.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it to those in your network.

Share The Future is Digital

If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you on board. You can sign up here:

Subscribe now

Visit the website to read all the archives.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.