Energized Accounting

Two manufacturing customers were comparing notes as I sat down at the lunch table at Convergence, the Microsoft customer convention. Customer A was considering Microsoft software and Customer B was close to "going live" (i.e. stopping their old system and using the new one exclusively).

Which new technology should you invest your time in? Which of these self-titled experts and gurus should you follow? My simple approach to these questions has been to try before I buy. Even with free internet tools, it takes a lot of time to get set up and going.

Blogging

My first blog was an experiment for a volunteer group. It did not touch my work or my career, so I was free to experiment. The result was that within a month I felt confident enough to create this blog. With every experiment, the key is to have some way to measure success.

How do you network if you're in a crowd of strangers and you're not particularly good at it anyway? I'm sure that's a question that the organizers of the Microsoft Convergence conference for their accounting system customers thought long and hard about.

I have to hand it to them for being innovative.

How do you get the attention of the people who developed your accounting system? How do you let them know the new features you would like to see or what you find really frustrating? If you had five minutes alone with the chief programmer, what would you say?

That isn't as impossible as it might seem. It really isn't like turning the Queen Mary. Would it surprise you to know that the development teams are hungry for input from the people who use their system? I'm at the annual Microsoft customer conference for accounting systems, "Convergence".

By Bill Kennedy - If confession is good for the soul, then here's mine: I haven't been reading much lately.