What was my session about at Engage? Money and your Job

It was a cathartic, contrarian approach to our current situation, in which we, the admins, developers, and business partners, are supporting our Domino worlds.

I wish this were all in my head. But every single person in the room for my session at Engage was nodding their head at some point and others had very serious faces when confronted with my thoughts. The couple of people that talked with me afterwards were very happy they came to it. After all they gave up the Domino IQ roundtable for my session.

 

How did we get here?

 

The road that got us here is not the road that will get us out of here.

But enough cliché’s let’s be realistic.

We put ourselves in this situation.

Some items to think about:

(Almost) Every time we had a chance to ask for a budget, we failed.

We got what we needed, but this is not what an Enterprise solution desires, deserves, or requires.

We are selling our environments short if we only ask for licensing money, salaries, and some equipment. Way too short.

If your annual budget request does not include enough money that a respected enterprise solution requires, your request will not go up to the budget committee. Each company sets these meetings at various levels. Enterprise ready products have a staggeringly large annual budget, because that is how you know what is important. Or so the executives believe.

Maybe you think this is too much for “your team”.

Here is a little secret: Security budget money usually does not come from your team. It comes from the security budget. Leverage that every year.

Your environment needs to maintain perpetual security, which includes external and internal resources, people, apps, disaster recovery, development architectures, and more.

Everything you do in your Domino environment is for the company's greater good, and extending easier, faster processes for everyone, in a secure and meaningful way, needs to be backed by a secure environment.

I am not talking about 10k, 5k, or even 50k. You probably need to be asking for at least 100/250 or 500K to get to the budget executive committee. These days, maybe starting at a million. This is obviously relative to your situation and industry.

Some of you reading now might think I am out of my mind, but I am just a contrarian who has learned from 30 years of mistakes.

Maybe licensing is handled by a different group, so you didn’t need to ask for a budget. This also happens.

Once you stop asking for a budget, you don’t get invited to ask for one in the future. You mysteriously get left off the group email, or worse, your boss stops asking you about it. It is very hard to get back on the budget list. VERY HARD. 

For those who say, "No, we submit a budget," my question is, do they take it seriously, and do you get funding beyond the licensing basics?

Developers, you fall under this spell as well.

How many times have you said (as an employee), "Oh, I can put something together. Give me a few days or a week or two." Every time you did this but did not chargeback some business units' code or lay out the process and document why the app is needed and what it does for the company, you have also failed your Domino infrastructure.

If you were an outside vendor, you would have a project plan and bill X amount of hours or a total cost.

But you think that as an employee, you can’t do that, and you are wrong.

Everything goes to a cost center somewhere.

The group you are writing this for should be paying your team some of their budget.

But I bet few of you have done this.

While internal cost centers are a BS accounting move, they do work with your budget, so play ball by their rules, not the ones in your head.

Fear of Unemployment

I understand your predicament. You don’t want to lose your job, and I don’t want you to, either. However, no one has ever been fired for asking for budget money. A raise is a different matter.

For some reason, employees started to think they would get punished if they asked for the budget. You don’t get everything, but have you budgeted for the 2-8 various updates (now multiply by how many servers you have) you may need to do all year for your Domino environment? That number gets large fast, especially if you assign a value to it.

Why assign a value?

Because you should be clawing back money from every cost center. Again, internal budget money matters. Think about your budget if you had been "paid back" by the other cost centers.

When Lotusphere/Connect/Connected existed, you had to beg your company to go sometimes. How many of you went to the HCL Factory Tours? I hope you all knew they did these. If not, why not? You should all have been at them.

Did you think you would get fired for asking to go?

No, usually, the fear is to do anything that will get Domino seen inside your company. The CIO may demand someone's head for saying the D word, or your boss gets pushback for the old software. Whatever the reason, I understand, but keep in mind, you are not helping yourself in the long run because you aren't giving your company any reason to stick with Domino. 

I also blame the HCL sales rep at this point because they should be talking to you regularly by phone, email, WhatsApp, SMS, X, TikTok, set up an Ai auto message, whatever, I don't care, but they need to be on your side and not just "we have a webinar" or licensing renewal times. 

To be fair to the HCL rep, they do what makes them money first before anything else, but if they don't want to lose customers, they could be more proactive, so could most of us, that's all I will say here.

Money is everything, and you don’t understand what money means.

Money means one thing to you, but it is totally different to executives. 

You think asking for 10k is too much when the executive deals with million-dollar deals.

I am not saying deals don’t get lost because of price; that does happen. However, when properly laid out and defined, a solution for your company is not a 25k over-the-weekend app. If you want the executives to take it seriously, it is a 500k project or equivalent for your organization.

They will take it even more seriously if you can show that the new app either helps make money or manages some part, if not all, of your company's manufacturing, selling, marketing, or finance. 

Do this, and you can ask for even more money.

I am not talking about fake ROI projections of “time saved,” but real money tied to real work processes.

If you used your budget for licensing, what else would you ask for? I have listed what I expect to be in your budget in the spreadsheet I have uploaded for everyone. I presume you are the budget submitter; otherwise, you must bother your boss more.

Spreadsheet for download.

It includes guideline pricing, multiple items, education, conferences, T&E for these events, and other items that should be clawed back from cost centers.

It is also laid out as though you built an environment properly, and you can understand why, as you start playing with it, how the numbers multiply easily the more servers you have, and some costs also multiply. I aimed to show that all your costs after the Year 1 hardware purchases should be budgeted for you and cover your expenses.

Some of you may find this enlightening, while others may find it far from reality. I will wager that few of you even have something laid out like this, on which you are basing your budget. I hope I am wrong.

UI/UX is NOT HCL's Fault

All the BS talk about a poor UI/UX falls on your developers, now.

Older apps did have limitations, but this is not 2001 and R5, why haven't you refreshed them? Even just using Restyle would help. NOMAD web can be your friend here to reduce the web overhead to convert an app from Notes only to web, but you probably do need a nicer UI.

There are some gorgeous apps, Notes and web ones, so we know it is possible.

Again, who is to blame for this? Your app's UI/UX is not HCL’s fault.

Your executives see it as IBM/HCL's fault, but that only relates to the mail template. Your apps are your own to be creative.

Speaking of executives.....

New Executives have no idea what Domino does for your company

Because NO ONE has told them.

In this situation, I am talking about apps here. Mail is basically a cost of doing business. While on-premises and keeping your data inside are essential and more secure, email is a cost.

Some of you have been trapped by this “cost” term. Just because email is a cost and you are told to reduce expenses(notice they never drop new applications or revise older ones to save money), you may have been mistaken in thinking you shouldn’t ask for more money. But this, again, is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Servers do not update themselves; they can now under v14.5, but you get my point.

But apps, apps run your world, make you money, reduce paperwork (hopefully), and should be so good that no one is looking to replace them. 

Every time a new executive comes on board —and let’s face it, executives bounce between companies every 2-5 years—how have you briefed them on your Domino apps and what they do for the company, what they make for it, or what they provide that would cripple you if it suddenly stopped?

Have you? Has your HCL rep? Have you even told your rep what your apps do? Your HCL rep can't help you be that internal champion if you don't help them with what exists.

In my session, I used one of my clients as an example. They make millions of dollars a day using their Domino app worldwide inside their company. It handles everything from initial email requests for pricing and online sales to shipping, inventory, and manufacturing, tracking everything along the way. It is typical of Domino and an insanely elaborate application put together over two decades of teams of developers.

And yet, EVERY MEETING that involves leadership, I have to go to bat for my client and their app. Their internal people are too afraid to be connected to the “old server” stuff. See the above section Fear of Unemployment".

Imagine that meeting, discussing when we will move off Domino (I have been managing their environment for over 10 years or so) soon, but hearing this every year from me that it keeps them running.

They back down and then ask what is replacing it, which I suggest nothing, since it is an active and constantly changing environment, why would they replace it. Keep in mind that they only know the app by its internal name, which is how I introduce the topic, because they have zero idea it is a Domino application. But it always comes up from the Microsoft guy.

Of course, the business units say some cloud thing or an app made out of another database or workflow solution. Anything they move to would be a considerable cost, and ALL THEY WILL DO IS REWRITE WHAT THEY ALREADY HAVE, and from experience, end up with less functionality. I offer our help with whatever route they choose.

Like I said, 10 years, same meetings, every year. Many partners have similar stories, because we believe in the product, management believes in their bonus and their next salary when they move on.

This is exactly what one person in the meeting said about his situation. While he isn’t happy about the reduction in physical servers (personally I prefer less, but clustered, even when you have remote locations) he agreed that he will be there until he retires, nothing is moving that fast. 

Management has made the decision in his case, but to be fair, their environment might be faster and perform better with less overhead from the dozens of servers being consolidated.

Details matter, but for every excuse or peculiar circumstance, a completely normal one is ignored or under-budgeted until it becomes too late.

I hope my session and this blog post help you never reach that point of no return.

Conclusion

TL:DR The problem is and has been us.

I hit on other items that we all see or hear when advising clients. But almost everyone should know how to handle those by now.

If not, reach out to me. The lack of integration FUD, the “old software” line, the “lack of knowledge out there” hiring managers, and the perpetual “everyone uses <insert some other company>” lazy man excuse from someone that doesn’t want to be accountable for anything.

But we could turn this around by addressing the money issue and how we handle pricing/budgeting.

If you need help with this discussion, contact me, my fellow HCL Ambassadors, your Business Partner (or dump them for me), your HCL sales Rep/ Customer Success Manager/Customer Success Executive.

We are at a fulcrum. The cycle is coming back to in-house data from Cloud data, and now is the best time to Make Domino Great Again in your company and champion it as a proper Enterprise solution.