Frost & Sullivan's Competitive Intelligence in Business Conference

You know, the reason I travel is to remind myself how much I love life in small-town Wisconsin. After I lived through the Great San Francisco Earthquake of August 1998 and just when I thought it couldn't get any more interesting, but...

Northwest Airlines was on my mind as I winged my way towards Boston, MA in mid-September for the annual (or semi-annual, or whatever...), Frost & Sullivan CI in Business Conference. It seems that, about two weeks after I purchased my airline tickets, the pilots decided they needed to walk out and leave me high-&-dry in West Central Wisconsin with a need to make it to Boston for a speaking engagement. Luckily, Delta decided it was to its competitive advantage to get me on a plane to my destination, which was okay... but, it still put me in more than a day late and more than a few dollars short. To top things off, Boston seems to have been struck by some strange, super-secret "urban planning warhead" that causes Bostonians to tear down their existing (quite good, I thought) urban infrastructure and rebuild ALL of it over the next several years. After touching down at 11:00 p.m. and finding my microscopic hotel room, the street thing was not what I was looking forward to; I'd have preferred to arrive as scheduled a few days early and bum around the greater Metro Boston area eating good food and perhaps a lager or two. But, enough about the travails of a travelling CI salesman...

Frost & Sullivan always seems to put on a pretty nice show... this is my third F&S speech this year and I've been trapped in this Knowledge Management phase for the past several months deciding that indeed KM is a substantive innovation affecting CI -- at least in terms of technology. There were several KM-oriented discussions, not to mention my own discussion of Competitive Intelligence Applications on Corporate Intranets, pretty much the same presentation I delivered at the F&S Healthcare Conference in S.F.

A few of the other interesting presentations included:

• James Austin (Baxter Healthcare) -- "Panel Discussion: CI Management Strategies"
• Larry Barton (Motorola Semiconductor) -- "CI and the Role of the Corporation Spokesperson"
• Gary Calvaneso (Hewlett-Packard Medical) -- "Panel Discussion: Best Practices"
• David Frigstad (Frost & Sullivan) -- "Conference Chairman"
• Robert Flynn (Futures Group) -- "Integrating Business Intelligence Methods into Strategy"
• Jerry Hoffmann (Southwestern Bell) -- "Panel Discussion: Best Practices"
• Guy Kolb (SCIP) -- "CI in Business Today"
• Debbi MacLeod (Polaroid) -- "Panel Discussion: Best Practices"
• Andy Michuda (Teltech) -- "Using KM to Explode Application & Impact of CI"
• Jerry Miller (Simmons College) -- "Adapt the Firm Before Adapting the Intelligence Function"
• Allen Paschal (Information Access) -- "CI for Everyone: Vendors Need to Change Too"
• Wayne Rosenkrans (Zeneca) -- "Panel Discussion: CI Management Strategies"
• Leslie Rubin (SAP) -- "Panel Discussion: CI Management Strategies"
• Frank Ruotolo (Futures Group) -- "Integrating Business Intelligence Methods into Strategy"
• Derek Smith (Frost & Sullivan) -- "CI Online: 2000 and Beyond"
• Kirk Tyson (Kirk Tyson) -- "Focusing on Your Internal Customer"

So, although my teensy-weensy hotel room and flight out left something to be desired, I was back in Minneapolis early; and although I spent a grand total of 19 hours in wonderful Boston, it was all torn up anyhow... so I don't feel like I missed much. I understand there will be another CI in Business Conference coming up soon. I'll try for another speaking slot, if it's anything like September's event, I'm sure it'll be worth putting up with another airline strike.