We look at the latest IQPC Conference on Big Data…
Analysis of data – is is not everyone’s choice of must-go-to events. You will not see people queuing outside the Apollo Hammersmith for – wait for it – a Seminar on Data Analytics.
“Honey, I’ve got two tickets for the Data Analytics Conference”.
No. It doesn’t fly, does it.
Part of it is due to the industry itself; it is too full of its own industry generated hype. Only this week, a revered and instructed post by a gentleman named Greg Allum, talked in loving tones about how British Gas had ““gained rich insight into various subject matters, events, topics and the opinion of those audiences.”. Great stuff! Except that Mr Allum is indeed the Social Media Manager for said British Gas. Sort of biased, isn’t it? I don’t recall M Allum being at the Utility Data conference that I attended a year ago. He might have learnt something.
How so?
Because the Insurance industry CDOs that shared a table with me at the latest IQPC event – were modest, and eager to learn. And eager to share. This conference was not about the “good things that companies had done”. It was about the good things that each wanted to do.
With a line up of key speakers taken from all related areas of industry and academia, this event was a melting pot of information that got behind the flannel, the bluster, and became a platform for sharing concerns not on monetization – although there was an accent on that – but rather, on compliance, of understanding the law, of seeing what courses of action deliver what sort of result.
Key to these sort of events is the freedom and flexibility for all or any, to question what is being said. The usual format of an IQPC conference is to see the “speaker slots” so to say – as a brokerage of views. This enables delegates, who are all themselves erudite and articulate on their field – to contribute.
I stayed for just half of the two day event. I wanted to know; just what is the industry doing on moving its customer approach forward. In that time, I found the answer. That’s good enough for me.