Yesterday was an incongruous mix – Wembley stadium dressed up for an NFL game between the Tampa Bay Bucaneers and Chicago Bears and “the home of football” home to hoards of accountants. This was the keynote IRISWorld event where Phill Robinson and his team got to say, “Hello Wembley” to massed rows of accountants worrying more about the numbers and the future of their practices than the 3 lions. The stadium is very impressive of course (and so it should be) and with a target attendance of c.800 IRIS pulled out all the stops to do justice to the choice of venue. OK – typical exhibition drop-out rates meant that the actual number was somewhat under but what this single community saw was an example of a well-focused team talking directly and knowledgably to its customers about what they wanted to hear. And it’s this aspect that struck home as being most impressive. The financial community has a very important concept: KYC – Know Your Customer. Wembley and the other IRIS roadshows was a fine example of how to know your audience en masse.
The headline plenary sessions were good and strong and stuffed with subject matter experts from the ICAEW and Microsoft. More importantly the mood-music and buzz around the break-out rooms and the exhibition stands was confident; an acknowledgement that this was no waste-of-chargeable-time, but an important tool in knowing how to guide each individual practice. And it wasn’t all futures and jam-tomorrow. One of the sessions was a very simple hints-and-tips talk and it was just as packed as the bright-new-future presentations.
IRIS’s branded version of Invu (IRIS OpenDocs) was well in evidence and it confirmed our view that Invu’s integration with IRIS and it’s strong positioning with accountants was natural and now, almost taken for granted. On the IRIS OpenDocs stand, a steady stream of attendees sought more info (“how does it work?”, “what’s the cost”), but the number one question? Email, email, email. How do I handle the sea of emails I get? Almost from day one in our relationship with IRIS, the need for a flexible email solution was a top agenda item and directly led to Invu Email Manager coming to market. Yesterday continued the evidence that this was well judged.
The last couple of years have seen a lot of change at Invu, including the IRIS partnership. Standing back and reflecting, this was and continues to be an extremely positive partnership and Wembley showed the benefit of dealing with the experts in an area. Invu deals with a number of domains as well as solving some more generic issues in other sectors and it’s important not to lose that focus. Where we get close to the issues faced by individual customers or sectors we have a solution set which can be a veritable chameleon. But you have to understand what’s needed and what works best for each business. As Invu delivers more individual mid-market type solutions our focus on what’s needed for a successful solution teaches us a valuable lesson in listening closely to what our customers want. This varies by business sector and by customer and we’ve had to change the way we work. In fact this has been a major and hugely positive transformation. Wembley showed that with a strong, capable and domain expert partner we can deliver on both fronts with trust and confidence. IRIS and other partners keep us on the ball so we cannot ever afford complacency. Without getting smug, Wembley reinforced the partnership. For some of us with many years spent delivering software for accountants it wasn’t quite like coming home, but it was pretty close.
