The Roman Empire was originally poor and small, unique and
austere of virtue. With time it became corrupt, spoilt and rotten from its
vices. Thus, at its fall, its acts of grandeur were obscene to both man and
God.
A virtually unknown presidential aspirant in the run up to
the 2013 Kenya elections, spoke in metaphor when he theorized “when you want to
be healthy, eat when hungry, and when you are hungry you do not fill your belly
with food, you need a third for food, a third for water and then the other
third should be breathing space”.
If you will allow me, I would like to break down this
statement into something that makes sense to someone who drives information
technology in any organization.
One of the conclusive declarations one can make about
technology is that there is a progressive trend and “new” is always the norm,
it is also a fact that what is innovative and essential today, may become
defunct and unnecessary tomorrow. Having made that statement there is a caveat,
not all products that come to market, manufactured by top technology companies,
are necessarily critical to your organization.
Steve Jobs famously quipped that it was really hard to design
products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want
until you show it to them.
The fact is, that most of the products and services brought
to the marketplace have a specific niche market in mind ( I stand to be corrected by firms that don’t do market research and
have a machine gun approach to product and service delivery), the bigger
the product and the more expensive it is, the more constricted the market.
Given that vendors at the end of the day want to make the
most money out of a product, they will milk it, cobble it with other modules, introduce
superfluous features, and sell it to all and sundry who can tune in to their
hallucinogenic sales pitch.
It pains me to see a big budget ERP acquired by an
organization in the third world and five years later, the people on the ground
don’t even understand what the solution is meant to achieve let alone even
remember its name.
Before you go into a shopping spree, and I do mean the one
that starts with you accepting courtesy calls from vendors who have backing
from well-heeled multinational technology firms, start listening to your
internal heart beat (know if you are “hungry” in the first place) appreciate
the needs of your organization to a point where you can fanatically recite it
as a poem. If you know your business’ ins and outs, it is probable you may find
out the springs and the cogs that are miss-placed in the corporate engine.
Having said that, I have to add my voice to the stadium of
people who normally throw a vendor product or service at a problem, rather than
get muddy in trying to unclog the system and find a cohesive solution. It is
the easiest way out.
If you take the long term route where you are fully invested
in discovering your organization’s needs, challenges, or problems, more often
than not you will find it is deeply seated, and your analysis will be a
precursor to something bigger, take time and involve the relevant stakeholders
while you are at it.
The worst thing would be to acquire a solution that only
unravels the symptoms of the problem. In all things, always review, engage and
converse with the potential stakeholders, while fully appreciating the
comprehensive workflows and processes that define the organization. When you
arrive at a critical mass in this process, then you will have a clear picture
of whether or not you need a technology to solve the issue, and when and how it
can be acquired and deployed.
Remember, more than 20% of the solutions you find in the
market today do not bring any intrinsic and specific value to your organization,
even if it is being used by a Fortune 500 firm.
Many of these solutions require you to train your people in
a specific manner and the business value is lost in a clutter of business idioms
like “efficiency, effectiveness and cost savings”.
I beseech you; next time you want to acquire a solution,
make sure it is very clear in no uncertain terms where the efficiencies, effectiveness and
cost savings come from, and this should be expressed in your organization’s
language, where every stakeholder is clear on what it means to them, even
before you commit to acquire any specific solution. Here, I am assuming you
will have already determined your needs way in advance.
The final picture you need to have in your gallery of achievements
is one where your organization has only acquired products and services that
meet your specific needs and are not an attrition point for your revenues, thus
avoiding the nagging and haunting question, “Why did we buy this solution?”
Article was done for the CIO East Africa March 2013 Issue
@edwin_moindi
Comments
Post a Comment