BMC Corp. goodness: portal-based feedback

I deal with analyst and public relations (AR and PR) people all the time. i also attend an awful lots of conferences and events. One thing i find weird–no actually annoying is that that companies that sell portal and automation technology dont use this stuff for feedback on the events.

IBM still uses paper half the time. or even Microsoft Word-based forms, which is totally bizarre to me. What about WebSphere Portal, what about feedback On Demand? Someone must be transcribing the answers in a document into a spreadsheet for reporting and analysis–dear lord.

Talking of Microsoft–it is just as bad. When one of its many agencies sends me a Word document and asks me to fill it in for feedback i am just amazed. i thought Microsoft was keen to make its documents programmatic. Eat some dogfood guys.

I was therefore impressed and pleased to get an email from BMC this week looking for feedback on its worldwide conference last week (of that more later) that pointed me to a url – in order to give feedback on the event. Apparently BMC is using “online survey and reporting software” from an outfit called confirmit. Well done BMC! Well done Maggie and Chuck! Actually using IT to improve your business processes. What a neat idea.

Anyhow – here’s my challenge to Redmond and Armonk. this new fangled internet thing is pretty cool. why dont you use it? lets face it, when google starts doing market research it won’t be asking people to fill in paper based forms….