The CFO Conference a Few Weeks Ago.

Nic and I had the good fortune to land at the same conference in NYC a few weeks earlier for the most recent installment of the CFO Magazine Performance Management donnybrook in beautiful Times Square in Manhattan. In between ducking for cover between rainstorms, we managed to get some great insight from the executives on sight.

To build on Nic’s recap (a bit short and lacking in any meaningful detail if you ask me), I thought the event was, well, fair. Actually I expected a bit higher caliber event than we got, which is due in no part to the hard working staff from CFO.com. Unfortunately the keynote speaker, Craig Schiff, was late to his own presentation, owing to traffic delays, so the day didn’t start off great by going right into the customer presentation. Normally you’d expect to set the tone with the analyst and then dig into details with the customer, but the opposite happened here, so it ended up being somewhat disjointed.

I’m also not sure that we gained any real new insights from the keynote presentations. There was certainly some good, if dated, materials, but it seemed to be a bit of a rehash of things we’ve heard before, and that’s where things fell a bit short for me.

It’s also hard when you have to plan for a common denominator of attendee—a decision between talking about really cool content that appeals to a fraction of the audience, or the safe middle ground that covers the majority of the attendees. So the keynote speakers clearly went for the middle ground.

I took a different tact however, and will leave that for my next post, as I think it really illustrates the issue that both analysts and vendors have in today’s performance management marketplace.

More to come…