Nikki and I were on the phone with a client the other day who posited that in an age where vendors are releasing functionality every twelve weeks via the Cloud vs. annually in traditional on-premise apps, at least one big reason behind the big annual group conference has pretty much evaporated.

Certainly there are some major roadmap changes worthy of a group gathering, along with “taking the temperature ” of the user community, and introducing retailers to new partners, but those don’t have to happen once a year. He thought every eighteen months would suffice.

This was a provocative thought to both Nikki and me, and we decided to put the question out to you, our readers…. “what’s the right frequency for user group conferences if the vendor’s solution is well-established in the Cloud? “

Now, I can’t pretend we don’t have a horse in this race. Retailers may go to one or two user group conferences each year. We go to boatloads. Steve observed he is spending three out of the next four weeks in Las Vegas, and he has already been there once this spring already. I’ve been limiting my travels to some extent, but still find myself on the road every two weeks for the next two months. Of course, they’re not all user group conferences. Mixed in with those events are client visits, strategy days and other travel-based activities that are the core of an analyst’s life. And then, by mid-July, when conference season comes to an end, it’s time for vacation, which usually involves… yup, more travel. It’s a lot, and partly serves to explain why so many analysts have a pretty short shelf-life.

But the purpose of this article isn’t to whine about our challenges. It’s really to understand yours!

I can remember back in my CIO days feeling like user group conferences were very important. We’d find out where the vendor was headed, stick our two cents in around the development roadmap, meet new prospects and fellow clients, and learn a lot about how to use new functionality about to be released. I’m trying to decide what I’d be feeling like today. If part of the beauty of the Cloud is incrementalism, vs. the big bang, would I really need to sit in those sessions? Would I prefer to just attend selected sessions virtually, or would I just sit out every other year?

I was never a big “Comdex ” person. That was the enormous conference where new technology innovations would be on display. Instead, when I was a practitioner, the conferences that always interested me most were more strategic in nature. Brian and I both used to love the conferences put on in Boston by CSC Index, where we’d hear people like Dr. Michael Hammer speak on business process re-engineering (sidebar: I just found out Dr. Hammer passed away in 2009. His notions of BPR: pretending you were starting your business all over again, and asking how you’d do it differently given technology advances remain an excellent exercise for all businesses), James Champy (Dr. Hammer’s co-author), and Alan Kaye, technology visionary and designer of the prototype for what ultimately become the Apple computer back at Xerox Parc labs in 1970 and early designer of the AI programming languages that we still chase today. Of course, there were many others who took us well outside the realm of buy and sell, and into the realm of what businesses could actually become. I truly loved those.

These days travel budgets are tight. We have at least one mega-show in the US (the NRF Big Show in January) that allows us to see every vendor that might have a solution for us, and of course, the opportunity to do so many things virtually.

So in honor of the late Dr. Hammer, I’m going to pose the final question in the way he might have posed it: If you were just starting to attend or organize user group conferences today, would you hold them annually? Would they always be in springtime? And if so, why?

Please let us know your thoughts!