Re: COMMON Question Was: Congrads John Earl!

["Paul Nelson" <pnelson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

True, False or Not-Applicable (T/F/N):

I have attended at least one COMMON conference since January of 2002.
    True

I thought that the COMMON conference was a good value for the money spent.
    True. I feel that COMMON is free. I ALWAYS come home with education that
contributes almost         immediately to the bottom line. That track record
goes all the way back to my first conference in 1980.

I thought that the COMMON conference was a good value for the time spent.
    See above

I would attend another COMMON conference.
    Yes


Multiple Choice:
What is the biggest impediment to you attending COMMON conferences? (Feel
free to rank them if you like).
   A) Monetary Cost
   B) Time Cost
   C) Can't get management approval
   D) Traveling is a hassle
   E) I don't learn anything
   F) The sessions aren't relevant to what I do today
   G) There is another conference I'd much rather attend (Name it?)
   H) Other __See below______________________________________________

I've been saying for years that COMMON needs to bring back sessions geared
toward the IT managers in the industry in which they are employed. For
example, when the "projects" were eliminated, there were 25-30 managers from
construction companies that stopped attending. They no longer had a forum in
which they could share ideas with their peers as to what those peers were
doing with the platform. These folks were not interested in new programming
techniques. They also could not justify sending their programmers to the
conference (if they had any), because most of them were running various
packages.

Where do the IT managers go nowadays? To the packaged software company
conferences. How many remember that it was either last fall or the year
before that SSA held their BPCS user group meeting the exact same week as
the COMMON conference? Whether it was an accident or intentional, that had
to have hurt attendance at COMMON. Also, how many JDE shops are going to
send someone to the spring conference when the JDE conference is held every
year in early June?