Still pitching to CIOs? You're living in the PAST Within the next year, almost half of the cloud deals negotiated by value-added resellers will not have an IT team representative present when the technology decision is made, according to the latest predictions from top IT biz analysts Gartner and Forrester. The consumerisation of IT - where biz bods introduce cutting edge …
"...She has been tasked to work out how deploying tablet devices could help the management team better cope with the demands of their day..."
An interesting task in that it pre-supposes tablet devices will be given to the management team, even though there is (as yet) no proven business case to do so. Toys for the excs first; IT case second. Same-o same-o.
Well done, you just summed up why they are no longer speaking to IT. When they asked IT how a tablet could help them in their day, the IT nerd said "it can't". When they asked someone who actually understands their day, they got a long detailed response with all of the ways in which a tablet could improve their productivity and make their life easier along with a business case for the expenditure.
Guess who gets to keep their job.
No longer speaking to IT? You act like this is a new problem when it's been happening for pretty much as long as we have had IT departments.
The real issue is that managers often don't like to hear dissenting voices even if they are completely correct. The results are predictable: Ask one of my previous employers about the kit he bought and based an entire business model on that ended up being useless because it simply wasn't designed for the distance he needed it to work. Guess who got blamed for it not working? The very IT people they didn't bother to consult in the first place.
It has been my experience that too often the IT person being asked is unwilling to frame their response in a way that doesn't make the asker want to throttle them.
No, a tablet will not help in their job & yes it's a stupid question for them to be asking but if you have a shitty response all you do is cut yourself out of the equation as they go over your head.
That only happens when an IT department fails to understand business requirements, given those circumstances, the company should address the issues, easily done by hiring competent staff and ensuring they are kept in the loop. Trying to bypass IT only perpetuates the problem, which in the end actually makes matters worse.
Also your spot about the budget, all it takes is for the business case to be laid out and the benefit clearly demonstrated.
>>almost half of the cloud deals negotiated by value-added resellers will not have an IT team representative present when the technology decision is made<<
And would anyone care to wager how many of those projects without an IT rep will go titsup because the purchaser has no idea of what they have agreed to buy and so subsequently find that it doesn't meet their needs?
I'd hazard a guess at 'most'. A more pertinent question might 'how many of these projects will fail and that failure will be blamed on IT despite them having nothing to do with it at any stage prior to implementation and how as IT do we stop that from happening'.
Just a tip for the article writer - I'd suggest the number of readers on El Reg that work in 'the channel' is vastly outnumbered by the number of readers who think 'the channel' is populated entirely by idiotic clowns.
You cannot sell to Marketing, they don't have IT budget control. At best, they can influence, just like at best the Sales Director (who probably does have a lot more say than Marketing) can only influence the decision, because neither makes either the IT purchases or IT strategy. The Financial Director or CFO would be a better bet as they can apply more pressure to the CIO. Trying to byepass IT is a really bad idea - the CIO will think you are trying to byepass him and it will be the last time you get invited to tender for anything of worth. I have worked at companies where the CIO has removed companies from the approved purchasing list simply becuase they forgot to send him a Christmas card! And trying to foist any tech onto the IT team that they haven't already approved or at least looked at? Are you crazy? Their backs would be up in an instant, they'd be so resistive to your ideas you'd think you were selling a coal alternative in Newcastle. Trying to sell something as core as cloud in via Marketing would be sounding the deathknell on your presence in the company. Please, go back to advising on desktop rollouts, this article is probably the daftest piece I've seen on here!
What? Are you insane? The Marketing Dept at lots of large firms has a bigger IT budget than the IT dept. It is common practice in large companies for major departments to have massive budgets and completely seperate policies than the people in operations, administration and accounts. Marketing, R&D, Engineering, Sales and Executives are a few common examples.
".....The Marketing Dept at lots of large firms has a bigger IT budget than the IT dept....." No they won't. They will have a large Marketing budget for doing marketing activities, not for IT. Any large company with a centralised IT structure will also have a centralised IT budget for all such purchases unless you're talking about minor items like mobile phones (and even they are likely to be centrally controlled, again by IT). Large companies - obviously larger than the sweatshop ops you have worked in - centralise IT purchases so that they do not waste money by letting the unqualified make IT purchasing decisions. Even the old hold-out of printing is much more likely to be centralised nowadays.
It's been done before and will be done again -- whomever at the company decided IT doesn't need in on a decision, picks some random vendor, then (most likely) then expects IT to sort everything out for them. (Of course, IT may be able to salvage the situation depending on just what is going on.) The advantage of some cloud vendor talking to marketing -- what will cloud computing do for marketing? If they don't plan it out, absolutely nothing -- just like a PC without software, it'll sit there doing nothing -- but it can be made to sound so impressive that it's a no-brainer to pick it (to a non-technical person.)
Want to avoid this situation? You'll have to suck it up and interact with these people, otherwise they will see you as out of the loop (and in fact you *will* be out of the loop) and decide to just make decisions like this on their own. Also, remember that you are providing services for them -- if something seems unnecessary but the users really want it, figure out what it'll cost and if they still want it, give it to them.
"then expects IT to sort everything out for them."
In the olden days, yes. These days, and the whole reason for the article, is that the solution they are about to buy doesn't involve the IT department AT ALL. They can buy 100 iPads and start work immediately and get more value from them than the shitty Windows XP box you won't upgrade because you fear the Windows 8 interface might be too hard for them. Yes, there may be security concerns they havn't thought of but it's still the fault of the IT team that pushed them into buying what they need to do their jobs.
They also won't need IT staff for the cloud solution which is automatically updated with no downtime window or overtime bill. They won't need you to implement that SAN you bought because you thought it was cooler than the more appropriate one, and they certainly won't need you to ignore the entire feature list of the SAN you wasted money on because you couldn't be arsed to implement it once you'd unpacked your new toy. If they have a problem in the 21st century you know what they do? They call support at Google or Microsoft who fix the problem for them with no fuss and with an SLA to match what they paid.
I work with lots of companies in my job and the most common thread is that IT don't understand other peoples jobs. Most nerds imagine people sitting in front of MS Office all day where in reality they are out in meetings, on the train, taking notes, reading the latest business news, looking at reports and various other activities which contribute to the company. All of which could be done while on the train using a tablet which IT told them they couldn't have for "security reasons". They may even want to edit a word document on their tablet while on the train but it won't work. You know why it won't work? because that sweaty nerd in IT designed it to look pretty in Word rather than making it cross platform because he thought that would please the boss more and maybe get some respect (it didn't). Guess what though, Mr Sweaty has a solution, we'll run the crappy Windows XP image in VDI and send it over a poor connection to the tablet and that will be more impressive than making the template work on the iPad (it won't kids, it really won't). Of course to get on the internet the geek has set them up to bluetooth to their phone to save £15 a month line rental on a separate 3G connection. Sadly, Mr CEO would have been more than £15 worth of productive in the 20 minutes it took him to get it working and so he binned the cheap tablet provided and bought a proper one with 3G for less than an hour of his time is worth.
In reality when Mr CEO has a problem with the new IT strategy, all the IT people he should be able to rely on actually say "I can't, there's no documentation". when you point to the documentation they say "it's out of date". When you tell them they said they knew the technology on their CV which is why you hired them they say "I need training, it's been updated".
Bring on the sackings and good riddance.
"....They can buy 100 iPads and start work immediately and get more value from them than the shitty Windows XP box...." Seriously? Did you even pause for half a thought before letting your anti-M$ bile spill all over your keyboard? So, you buy 100 iPads out of the budget you have for... what, your staff? OK, let's ignore that simple check and pretend you do have the cash to spend in some form of budget excess, and can ignore central purchasing rules regarding IT kit, and you manage to get your 100 iPads. And then what? How are you going to make those 100 employees magically gain "more value" when you no longer have access to the desktop apps they were using on their WinXP systems? What, you're also going to pay out for 100 Office365 accounts too? But I'm not just talking about Office apps, I'm talking about the simple fact you will replace desktops probably with access to core service over wired LAN, with wireless devices which will not, because most businesses keep their wireless access separate from the core LAN for security reasons. That's even if you have enough wireless access points for your 100 iPads. Oh, did no-one explain to you that that whole BYOD thing wasn't that easy? What, now you want to pay out for a VPN tool and additional firewall security just so you can have your wireless iPads connect to the core LAN? Well, hasn't that little budget spend of yours grown! Duh!
And VDI? So you want to pay out for VMware (only virtualisation host that actually works with iPad) licences, as well as new servers and storage to host your VDI stack? And where are you going to put that stack but in a datacenter, which will happen to be in IT's control. Oh, you want to outsource? Just convince IT they should add an external to their AD domain? FAIL!
Seriously, El Reg needs to stop giving gold badges out to charity cases just because they borrowed a Mac off them some time in the past.
if it's a 'family' business, the boss' son is a much juicier target. While using SalesForce to manage a telephony based system we discovered a few things:
1. The integration and extra bumf to actually do the work (SF barely functioned as the frontend) at all took more work than just adding the functionality to our own systems
2. There's a 1 million transactions per day limit when interacting directly with the SF database, we hit that regularly.
3. SOQL (SF's own Query Language) is structured to minimise loads on their db so you can't do table joins. At all.
I thought that largely disappeared decades back. It's certainly one of the first things you check in ITIL cases. If the CIO isn't on the board then the company will probably be fucked by the first big IT problem that comes their way because IT hasn't been involved in so many necessary things like business continuity etc.
My first job in IT was technical support for a timesharing company selling a financial planning and modelling service (like SaaS, but back in 1978). The software was something like Basic in terms of ease of use, and about half the people I was supporting were what we now call "C-level", mostly finance directors, company secretaries, a few marketing and sales directors. And they were doing it themselves, my job was to help figure out the tricky bits.
Fast forward 5 years and we're trying to sell similar software to the data processing manager to run in-house. Suddenly, we're hearing that directors can't cope with computers and can't manage to use a keyboard, let alone write any kind of program. It wasn't till a lot later I thought, it might not have been the best use of their time, but with a bit of support most of them had no problem with it at all. So what changed?
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