This morning I attended a seminar organised by a local business specialising in accounting software. The NGO oriented audience was hoping for tools that would make accounting in multiple currencies in a hyper-inflationary environment easier. The fact that the Zimbabwe dollar loses value every couple of hours means that we’re looking for specialised solutions!

Under normal circumstances it makes sense for software companies to offer variations of their software to cater for the differing needs of small, medium and large organisations. But as the presentation proceeded it became clear that everyone in the audience needed the flexible, “advanced” features normally packaged and priced for large organisations. The hefty price tag meant that for many of the smaller organisations it would be back to the office to their spreadsheets and individual ingenuity.

At the tea break I observed another telling reality. In the past we’ve normally queued to fetch a cup of tea or coffee then gone on to add a biscuit or slice of cake to our saucer. This morning most people headed straight for the food – then lined up patiently to wash it down with something hot later.

This entry was posted on October 18th, 2007 at 12:40 pm by Brenda Burrell and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.