Customer Conference

Over the years I have occasionally had various people suggest to me that we ought to hold a conference of GSS customers. Quite recently heard this suggestion once again. The need, it seems, is for folks to be able to discuss together where they would like to see us take our products and take our company. Such a conference would also give us a chance to test out some of our ideas about the future and where we think we see the needs of our customers developing. To be fair to ourselves, we have held a few meetings over the years around the venues of the annual meetings of computer administrators and of conference treasurers, but those have always been short discussions of an hour or two and usually around specific, functional topics.

As I "read the winds of change" of computer usage within the church and the desire of many of our customers to communicate more fully with their constituents through the internet using interactive, data driven websites; and as I look all around me at how much has changed in consumer level purchasing and financial management along with health management and other aspects of our lives, all using the internet to enhance access to both information and action based upon it; it appears to me that we need to map out some significant new courses of direction for future software and services that we offer.

Again, to be fair to ourselves, we have made some substantial forays into internet based, data driven applications. We have online functions for statistics, event registration and rosters, local church leadership and a recent project to process Safe Sanctuary applications, training, screening and references online, and these are all pieces of this puzzle. But the puzzle is much bigger, and when it is all put together it must make a whole picture.

Therefore we have decided to hold a Customer Conference. We would like to have some direct discussions together with our customers regarding your needs and the direction you would like to see us take our software. This will be a concept level discussion, and not about specific software design issues. Thus we would like to invite one person from each of our conferences to come, and to be prepared to represent all of the various ministries that our software supports or that you would like for it to support in your conference.

We have selected the dates of August 24-25, over a Friday afternoon/evening and Saturday morning sessions, beginning at 3:00 PM on Friday and concluding by 11:00 AM Saturday. This should give us three sessions of about two hours each on Friday afternoon, evening, and Saturday morning. We’ll meet in Kansas City because of its central location in the country and good air transportation. We will select a hotel near the airport and one that has shuttle service, to minimize travel hassles.

We’ll send more details to our primary contact for each of our customers soon. In the meantime, it would help us in our planning if each customer would send me an email indicating your interest or commitment to have a representative join us. And all or our users can help by communicating your ideas to your attendee prior to the conference.

Al