Business Technology: Send Us Your Ideas, Please--In Real TimeBusiness Technology: Send Us Your Ideas, Please--In Real Time

Here at information, we've devoted a great deal of thinking, research, reporting, and coverage to the idea of having customers intimately involved in your development and enhancement of products and services. And we try to practice that same art form ourselves: Engaging as many of the 1 million of you who use information every week to tell us what you want and need from us, when we're wandering into unproductive areas, what compelling new topics or ideas we should be pursuing, and in general how to be more timely, relevant, and valuable to you.

In that spirit, we'd like to request your input for the two major conferences we run each year: the information Fall Conference, which will be held Sept. 21 to 24 in Tucson, Ariz. (information.com/events/03fall), and the information Spring Conference, to be held next year in Florida. While we've got a lot of our Fall Conference program in place, we've left some spots open for your specific suggestions, so please consider this a call for ideas. And in return, we're offering more than just a conference program autographed by information Events editor-in-chief Brian Gillooly (and, FYI, he won't give me one, which might be an indicator of market demand). So let me describe the prizes to get the creative neurons firing, and then I'll ask about some specific areas for which we'd love your help. We'll go through the entries and select the three that we feel would be of greatest interest and value to the several hundred attendees:

And while we know it's better to give than to receive, here's what we're looking for on our end for the fall event, whose theme is, "Real-Time Business: Optimizing Business Processes Across Your Extended Enterprise." Please give us your best answers to one or all of these questions (you don't need to answer all, but you're welcome to):

We'll try to work as many of your ideas into our fall program as possible. In other cases, we'll integrate the best of these ideas into our Spring Conference. We'll read through the entries and reply to each before selecting the three winners, and we'll contact the winners quickly so they can make plans to join us and several hundred peers in Tucson.

We think you'll find this conference valuable as it will pull together discussions from leading companies on how they are wringing greater value out of their business-technology investments by not just tinkering with but striving to optimize their business processes. And those efforts are taking place not just inside companies but outside as well, extending all the way from suppliers' suppliers on out to customers' customers.

So that we get to each of your entries in a timely fashion, please send them to this special mailbox--[email protected], or click on this Web form at information.com/events/confideas.jhtml--by July 10. Thanks very much in advance for your ideas, and have a wonderful Fourth of July!

Bob Evans
Editor in Chief
[email protected]

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