If you can't innovate - we can

I attended the Regent conference in London last week. Always a high profile affair with the great and the good from the world of IT in attendance. This year we even had the pleasure of Jeremy Paxman as our compere. Great fun for the audience - but speakers got a grilling from him that wouldn't have been out of place on Newsnight.

Jon Moulton of Alchemy gave an entertaining talk about IT in a recession. He believes that companies don't innovate in a recession because they are focusing all their energy on survival. I think this is true to an extent, but take issue on this as a generalisation.

Companies innovating for themselves may see this activity as less important in a downturn. But many companies outsource much of their IT activity. If you are paying for it, you don't expect your service provider to stop innovating on your behalf.

Tens of thousands of users across many companies rely on EGS's "on demand" platform for their e-procurement and electronic invoice processing. Because our proposition is fundamentally a cost reduction one, we are seeing more pull from our customers than ever. Our development team are as busy now as they have been at any time in the last 5 years building innovative new features for our customers.

Perhaps Jon Moulton's hypothesis would be better expressed as "Companies want to innovate in a downturn but choose not to because they have to deploy their money and resources on staying alive". Sounds to me like a very good reason to look for an outsourcing partner or a managed service.

And finally......like Jon Moulton, I was intrigued by sponsors Barclays Bank's gift to delegates of an empty Barclays carrier bag. A fitting metaphor for the parlous state of the banking industry.

A small dash of technology but a large helping of expertise

Last week we were invited to host and moderate a “Learning Lab” session at the SharedServicesLink.com conference on Electronic Invoicing held in London. We spent 3 hours with a number of companies who are on the brink of implementing e-procurement or e-invoicing solutions. We kept the session very practical drawing on the decades of experience our team have of deploying such solutions across our customer base.

A very interesting thing happened at the end of the session. A member of the audience took one of our team to one side and told him that he had evaluated our technology alongside several other companies a few months earlier. There was nothing to distinguish one company’s technology from the others. They all had much the same features. For reasons he was unable to remember EGS was not taken forward to the short list. But here is the really interesting part. He told our man that having listened to us for 3 hours that afternoon, he was so impressed with our knowledge and our practical advice, that he was not only going to put us back on the short list, he was going to put us to the top of it.

We thought this was interesting. We have always had complete confidence in our ability to deliver what we promise, when we promise. What was most significant about this and what this customer believed set us apart, is that our accrued expertise and domain knowledge enables us to help organisations make the big decisions. That doesn't come out of a box or from clever developers. It takes years to accrue.

So the lesson learned is that it is not always about the technology. Much of our value is the expertise that we bring with the technology.