Criteria for Value: What do you ask yourself?
Oct 6th, 2008 by Norman Sung
My colleague, Christine Crandell, did a great post on her initial thoughts on how the financial crisis will affect all of us - customers, vendors and individuals. And importantly, that the opportunity for impact starts with our attitudes. It got me thinking…about who really “wins” in times like these. Value is more important than ever - but it’s more than dollars and cents.
So, IT budgets are once again under the microscope after recovering somewhat over the past few years following the post dot-com/Y2K/ERP binge of the late 90s, so warns the Burton Group (and so many others). Inevitably, it is the vendors that can demonstrate true customer returns and value-add that will emerge the strongest through the period.
The products that deliver the highest customer ROI are based on simplification and integrated delivery. The best products eliminate clutter, not add to it. And as much as is feasible, the product should contain all the functionality necessary to complete key tasks while providing robust mechanisms to snap into other components at the functional boundaries. Make sense?
Often there is a temptation to simply add software layers to fill in some functional gaps and to create super views to mask complexities below. But many of these approaches result in systems that very complex and require highly specialized training, significant set-up effort and continuous maintenance. These costs hugely detract from the benefits. Worse, costs grow disproportionately with scale, so the largest environments face the greatest strains. During good times, these escalating operational costs may not be as noticeable. During downturns, they stick out like a sore thumb.
To avoid this situation, I would ask the following questions when thinking about technologies that are durable through downturns by yielding continuous ROI:
- Does the product provide fundamental simplification? Or is it a masking layer that doesn’t tackle underlying complexity?
- How much training is involved in order to get started with the product? How much is required to achieve the highest levels of proficiency so that I can scale?
- How many steps are needed to set-up the system versus the functionality covered. What’s my measure of efficiency and scalability?
I’d love to hear from vendors on their own set of questions. We can all learn from this discussion no matter where we sit in the stack.