A few weeks ago, we had our SSI User Conference in beautiful Lisbon, Portugal, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to attend :). It was great news to see that all the attendees seemed to have a healthy amount of work and a backlog. However, the challenge that they and many of us face is that we have our heads down trying to move our businesses forward that we often miss some key pieces of information on how we can be better at our jobs today. These key pieces of information could be the introduction of a new feature that we have been asking for, or even an improved method/workflow to accomplishing a specific task. The analogy I used to describe this is that we are traveling so fast in our car on the autobahn today that we are missing the important street signs trying to tell us how to get to our destination faster.
SSI has released over 1000+ enhancements since the last SSI User Conference. With so many improvements, it is practically impossible for any company to stay on top of all of them. This is a good problem to have :). With our client base numbers increasing rapidly and gaining global experience our users are coming up with many new and creative ways to solve some very tough problems. I was amazed by the results of some of the presentations and solutions our users have created.
One of the main focuses of the SSI User Conference was to provide short, clear and concise presentations on how users and companies can be more efficient today. We did this by having over 45 20 min Ted Talk type presentations from SSI, users, resellers and partners that you were able to easily consume and implement immediately in your organization.
We will have all the presentations and recordings of the presentations available in the coming weeks. Stay tuned on SSI Nexus for an announcement once they are live.
We will have a guest post from Nick Danese in the coming week which will summarize the presentations on our lighthouse blog so I will simply focus on my main take away.
My Main Take-away
It was very noticeable that one of the major challenges our industry is having today is the ability to leverage or re-use the digital information that we already have accessible to us. Long gone are the days when all we needed to focus on was increasing the amount of digital data we created. Today, we are creating so much digital data that the challenge has evolved to how can we better leverage all the digital artifacts we have created or have available to us. Many of these digital assets are created from users in different disciplines, from different companies and even via applications from different vendors. This increases the complexity for us, because to fully exploit the benefits of all this digital data we need to have information that is connected across the organization, business platforms, companies and across vendor applications.
This is a similar theme from other industry conferences I have attended and is going to be an issue that we will continue to solve in the future. I have discussed this challenge and the trend towards a platform of platform ecosystem in blog posts before.
At this user conference we had 17 partners (even some considered competitors) present on their solution, but more importantly on how they are seamlessly leveraging the information from SSI products. The goal that SSI and our partners have is that information will transparently pass through our platforms with the fidelity, accuracy and performance you would expect if they were one solution.
My goal is for it to be difficult for our mutual users to distinguish when an SSI application ends and our partners’ applications start. This has been the goal of companies within their own products, but to take full advantage of all the digital information we have across the multiple platforms we need this seamless workflow across our entire ecosystem – no matter who made the system or who created the data.
Closing Remarks
First, I would like to thank NDAR and Vera Navis for putting on a great event. I loved so many things about it especially the river boat cruise with one of my favorite Portuguese dishes.
Also special thanks to our sponsors.
Our SSI User Conferences never fail to impress, and I always look forward to them. We definitely work hard, but we have time to play hard as well.
There were so many presentations and great discussions that I am still digesting them all. It was great to see what our users are doing today, as well as how our partners are enhancing the SSI ecosystem.
I encourage you to follow SSI Nexus to stay informed when all the presentation material will be available as I can guarantee that everyone will learn something that will improve what they are doing today.