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I am now in my second term serving on TAWPI’s board of directors. As a career-long fan of TAWPI and one of the current stewards of this organization, I would like to take this opportunity to illuminate one aspect of TAWPI’s “culture” that isn’t easily isolated or articulated, but over the years I have recognized as a very important trait and one of the great defining characteristics of this Association.

I attended my first TAWPI Forums & Expo in 1987, as an exhibitor and as a young man just starting his career in the payments technology business. Of course, this was before TAWPI was actually called TAWPI. Back then a major part of this organization was known as the Recognition Technology User’s Association or RTUA for short. It wasn’t until 1993 that RTUA would merge with the Data Entry Manager’s Associ-ation (“DEMA”) to become The Association for Work Process Improvement.

Nevertheless this was my first tradeshow, and in fact my first real encounter with a trade organization of any kind. Since then I have attended every legacy TAWPI Forums & Expo and over the years have presented or exhibited at literally hundreds of trade shows sponsored by dozens of industry organizations in the remittance, check, and docu-ment imaging market spaces.

This experience has given me the opportunity to see first-hand the culture of many different user and industry organizations from a vendor perspective. As a vendor, I have been periodically disappointed and frustrated by what seems to be an unspoken, but nevertheless apparently negative atti-tude on the part of some associations’ leadership toward ven-dors in general and the role they play in the given association.

Sometimes organizations that are exclusively or domi-nantly end-user focused develop a culture that is excessively and unfairly biased against vendors. Vendors are sometimes treated as a necessary evil, as a deceitful lot with the sole mission to selfishly exploit and prey upon the poor hapless users, and so should be kept in check. In these associations, Vendors seem invited to the table to fund the organization, but are often relegated to 2nd class citizenship when it comes time to participate in the discourse. It is rarely overt, but the undercurrent is perceptible. An incomplete and an evolving notion put forth by a user is “floating a vision”. An incomplete and evolving notion put forth by a vendor is “vaporware”. A vendor who displays even a part of his or her product in forum sessions outside of the confines of the exhibit hall, so as to visually illustrate by example the very real technology component of the issue at hand, is chastised for being too commercial. Vendors can be shunned for even mentioning product at all, even when the product is the tan-gible and ultimate reflection of, and undeniably the desired end-result of the discourse. Moreover it is the very thing that the vendor knows most about and brings to the table. It is simply a lot easier to talk about and understand the chal-lenges and opportunities of an issue with an actual model of the mitigating and enabling solution matter.

One constant I’ve seen with TAWPI is that without sacri-ficing its commitment to coverage of the strategies, regula-tions, and best practices associated with the industries it serves, TAWPI embraces the Vendor and his or her solutions as a vibrant, legitimate, and equally important part of the process. This comes not from a perception that somehow vendor and user interests must be balanced as if they are at odds to begin with, but rather that vendor innovations and even the promotional solution posturing are the engine of change that moves the entire industry forward. Without these innovations, industry would stagnate and users would eventually run out of things to talk about. The heavy partic-ipation in TAWPI by data service bureaus even further under-scores that user and vendor are of equal importance because they are often one in the same.

To some extent the mature and reasonable stance of TAWPI toward its vendor constituency is in TAWPI’s very DNA. Our by-laws provide for fair representation by Vendors in our membership and board, while at the same time ensuring that TAWPI’s initiatives are not challenged by dom-inance of interests by any membership category run amok – Vendors or otherwise. But more than anything it is the people, the individuals, both membership and staff – bound together by long term personal relationships– that sustain a culture of mutual respect and value creation, by association.

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Jeff Vetterick is Executive VP of Marketing at Myriad Systems Inc. He can be reached at 405-463-3457 or jvetterick@myriadsystems.com.

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