I read a great blog post today by @purercktscience about how event technologies are disrupting … gotcha… no, not events but event experience. (https://wp.me/pEdm8-dF) Classic case of pendulum swing. Five or six years ago event organizers were in the throes of adopting new technologies like web based registration systems. Today, selecting event tools seems a bit like the old days in Filene’s basement. (ok, I am dating myself) For the participant the quality, types and usefulness of these technologies is extremely variable. So what’s an organizer to do?
Step one is admitting you have a problem. Step two is to understand what you want the outcome to look like before choosing the ingredients.
Imagine this. You are having a dinner party for guests you want to impress. So you go to the store and buy all sorts of great, and perhaps questionable, ingredients. You go home, start cooking, and realize that you have too much of some things, not enough of others and some things that just arent relevant to the dinner at all. No worries, you can put those items in the fridge and hope someone can use them before they expire.
This is my view of how many decisions get made about which technologies to deploy at events. But I don’t blame the organizers. They have been faced with increasing pressure to create valuable, sustainable, impactful events without the ability to put their data into action, learn what is missing, and make a strategic plan for their event tech ecosystem. So rather than using the data they have, they continue to adopt new data collection technologies in hopes that one will finally be the holy grail. But big(ger) data is not the solution. Until you have a strategy for collecting the right data in the right way with the right architecture, bigger data is the problem.
