Is Your Company #DominoForever or Exiting Stage Left?

A good friend of mine sent me a link to this post from David Giller and I recognized much of what he posted (crowdsourced) happens in all industries and businesses.

But for those on the cusp of debating "should we stay, or should we go", read on.

"Too little, too late" is what I hear and see from people and my reply is, quite honestly, well, there is not too little now thanks to HCL.

Too late is a relative term in an Enterprise. If you decided today to change your course, it would be months, possibly years for some of your larger companies, before you even took a step forward with a new partner or vendor to architect where you are going.

There are also the costs involved in any big project, and this would be a big project. Ask yourself, or your executive, do you really want to spend money on swapping one mail system for another?

A rough estimate I use with customers asking is, at a minimum, the cost to migrate will exceed $1,000 per user/email address moved.

The number doubles if you are big enough and need both worlds maintained in parallel. 

The number triples if you also "must have" coexistence so your calendaring and scheduling can work together.

And I did not even get to your licensing and hardware purchases, that is if you are not going to a Cloud solution.

If you are going to a cloud solution, don't forget the costs and time involved to get your security, Directory, and single sign-on parts to work and upgrade your telecommunications because that bandwidth is going sky high next.

Okay, enough scary tactics, feel free to argue with me, I am all ears to anyone who says I am lying. Maybe my numbers are off, if anything, they are low. Seriously.

Back to Mr. Giller's post, here is my SCNDT (Sametime, Connections, Notes, Domino, Traveler) version of some of them. You need to recognize and fix these before you face the end of the road:

• No business teams are providing requests for new applications, if they ever did, and you find you are not being involved in the meetings about the future of business applications.
• When was the last time someone asked, and you got approval, for application enhancements?
• When was the last time you DID NOT SAY "give me a few days/hours I will come up with something". And instead explained to your boss how this would be a serious enterprise required application that should be on the next IT budget meeting. If your apps are not Enterprise need, your infrastructure is not either.
• Your admins left or were moved along and it is now up to the help desk or the developers, if any are still around, to maintain the environment. Would you let the pizza delivery person fix your Porsche?
• Rolling out SalesForce? ServiceNow? Not integrating them with Domino? You have lost a huge opportunity because you know what? Both of the former requires a small army to customize it so it is useful. You already had much of this at your fingertips. 
• Your company may say they want "best of breed" or the latest app in the Cloud, but you know your company and why that is probably not the safest most secure way to implement something that really could have been built on Domino.
• Someone complains about the high cost of maintaining the Domino Infrastructure.
• Ha, April Fool's, no one ever complains about the high cost of the Domino Infrastructure, except Microsoft and Google.
• Executives say they want O365 but really have no business reason for it. the Outlook they use at home is not the same as in business. Directories and lookups, calendars, public/private information, multiple depositories for files are just some of the "functions" they have yet to use or think about. 
• Look at the companies that tried to blame their problems on their email system and moved away from Domino only to die a miserable death soon afterward or fall into a serious free fall. Hello Comcast, BlockBuster, and Qantas Airlines to name some famous ones.
• If your executive that has backed SCNDT all this time is now shying away, or leaves, who you gonna call? I am available.
• Have you tried to provide ideas for how your infrastructure could be leveraged to management? They are grasping at straws and need a light, no matter how small, to help them.
• You hear about database bloat. Look, you are the admin or developer and you should be trying to retire a database a day, that is about 250 a year and no one will argue with you even if you say you removed 30, 50, or 100. Be proactive or face negative reactive management.
• There is a lack of vision by the management to understand how to leverage the SCNDT platforms to streamline and automate processes – instead of simply replicating the same backward manual way things have always been done….in Excel. And Excel, which is over 30 years old, is what runs many sales teams and finance departments. Just. Stop. It.
• Some Microsoft tech complains about having to cover your servers when you are on vacation, you do take a vacation I hope, and you don't try to educate them, you lose the best chance of getting them on your side. Remember, no one ever says they love Exchange.
• Training doesn't exist. I get it. But you know what? Leverage the hell out of your intranet. Wiki, blog posts, status updates, if you are not posting something, then the executives think it doesn't exist and what doesn't exist, doesn't get funded, and disappears. 
• 1 great admin can manage a few dozen servers and between 1-3,000 users or more if given the right tools, for support issues and has minimal complaints and usually exceptional uptime. Learn your craft, read more blogs, go to user group events....The opposite of having bad admins is a sure sign the end is nigh.
• Management thinks that Domino data is simply “ONE OF” the other systems that we have (resulting in siloed data being dispersed across multiple systems throughout the organization, making 360 degrees reporting practically impossible). This one I stole from Mr. Giller's post because it is still true.
• If your organization cannot articulate their current or future business processes and expectations in a way that makes sense to a normal person, you may have a problem.
• Middle management is more interested in their job and budget than benefiting the company. Small mind = no advancement.
• Not leveraging Domino policies, Panagenda's Marvel Client or any of the configurable options that make user's lives better. I have been told by clients that Notes "should look and act like other apps" so they do not enable all the preferences. My retort usually is something like "Tesla didn't build a car, they built a car everyone wants because they included options people want and need." Yes, this is public enemy number one of a reluctant IT staff to maintain Domino.

</soapbox>

Executive Upgrades of the Server Kind

At Gurupalooza, the last day session of IBM Connect where the IBM Champions and Best Practices presenters answer audience questions, my friend Todd asked us something along these lines:

“How do you convince an executive that feature packs must be installed and maintained like formal releases?"

In today’s world, there are no formal releases. Your browsers update automatically, if you let them, your phones update apps automatically, again if you let them. So why should your servers or clients that have helped you to make money and sales likewise not be updated?

A few of us replied with these answers:

• ·         Security, many updates are about security which should not even be a question, especially if you have outside facing servers.
• ·         Compatibility, advances by obvious vendors like Microsoft can cause issues with older code because it cannot understand new drivers or parameters (I’m not a developer so keeping this simple for readers). Even Apple makes choices that can limit functionality for Traveler and device synchronization.
• ·         New functionality, even old dogs can have new tricks although these days evolutionary functionality is more expected. To be fair, non IBM messaging products do not have anything truly new, just different ways of doing the same thing, albeit faster (one hopes).

And these are all good and valid reasons, but for a stubborn executive, or a combatant one against specific companies or products, you need to dig deeper.

My answer was formed from my years of evangelizing the product line and pushing the boundary of what one can say to an executive. I always ask to see their staging and development architecture or environment. This usually creates a long discussion about priorities, resources and good intentions, but also brings the point home. If you want to delay the updates, because of fear of it breaking something, which is a very valid reason, you have no reason NOT to at least have some test environment for the updates.

My friend, and fellow IBM Champion, Bill Malchisky added to this idea by suggesting one look for the feature or function in the updates that best supports the business lines and getting the business lines to do your dirty work in getting the updates pushed through.

If you need an illustration, try referencing an automobile. If they had a service engine light on, they would bring their car in to the dealer. If their headlight died, they would go to Auto Zone or whatever shop, Walmart probably works too, and get a bulb and replace it. Okay, maybe this is too much for an executive who may not even know there are bulbs, but as a parallel reference it works.

The feature packs are that bulb. Safety (security) necessitates your head lights work.

Now ask about changing the oil on the car. The average person has no idea that it does not need to get changed every 3 months, yet that is what the industry started to do because once a year didn’t make them enough money. Anyway, the point is, when you change your oil, and your oil filter and usually the air filter and some other things you are helping your car run better and improve your mileage/gas ratio.

Feature pack 8 works the same way. One nice benefit is you get faster indexing or new enhanced view lookups or as we will see shortly, the index being removed from the NSF itself, optionally, and imagine how much faster your backup could be and your replication once you have these installed. Now to put that in application transactional business benefit, you may be able to do transactions a few seconds faster which makes your customers happier. Every little bit counts.

Like I have been preaching for years, if you did not get any budget for updates or after hours work it is because you never made the proper business case for your Enterprise software. If you treat it, internally, as an expense, rather than an investment with an ROI, you deserve the quagmire you may have fallen into by now.

In two separate conversations with other Business Partners, each were amazed at how many Domino.Doc customers still exist and never went to Lotus Quickr, or anything else. And now they will find it is even more expensive to migrate because at the time it was “just the document management app” instead of the “soul of our organization”.

If you put Domino and your applications up on high, or down low, then your executives will see it as you do. 

Aim high, be proud, be strong....and then present it all as a case study at IBM Connect next year or at a User Group event and be a leader to others.

Building Competitive Pitches #EvangelistGuide

In my previous post in the #EvangelistGuide series, I discussed writing competitive pitches, but covered quite a bit of ground as well.

As promised, we now move on to the way one builds a competitive pitch. This may take many forms, and formats, with the idea being the same throughout, namely helping the customer say what they need and why they need it.

If you start a conversation with an attack, you put people on the defensive, which is not always in your favor. However, there are times when it not only makes sense, but would be the most direct way to accomplish your task.

Know your audience
If you are speaking to tech people or executives, you need to understand their pain, their business, and their thought process. Many of these people will have logic and minutiae to help them ward off any attack. Your ability to speak their language and work with their fears/loves is key.

Never lose sight of the business aspects, present information in ways that you can say "we provide the option for you to pick which way to implement this solution in house or in the Cloud" instead of "we made this work only in the Cloud" if you are facing companies that cannot go to the Cloud today.

Explain your words 
Do your best not to talk down to the audience, but also not talk above them either. It is not an easy line to walk. Please keep in mind, words and terms which the US may use, or think are normal, may not work outside of the US.

Speak so any person in the room, or their company, can understand your intentions and your solution.

Do not use acronyms, unless the audience has already.

Invest your time
Be there at the moment, no distractions, no phone, no Twitter, just you and them. You may use the same ploys every time, but you need to have many ploys in your bag of improvisational responses. Practice other angles, read more, watch more, write more. You also need to relax and take the time to debrief yourself after you are finished each time.

Test new ideas
If you are on a path of evangelism you should have already read or watched or listened to as much as you can on the subjects of sales, overcoming objections, persuasive techniques, hypnotism, poker, body language, non-fiction business biographies, The Godfather, the Bible, The Art of War and The Prince.

If you are still interested in going into the discussions that make sales people cower, now the hard work begins. Just like you need to push people beyond the law of 3 (3 no's, 3 excuses, 3 yes's) you need to be ready with so many more methods for your attack in case you are thwarted early on. It will happen to you, especially in the earlier days, but even later on, you need more ploys.

You can try to reason with the person on the other side, just remember if you are one on one, they will LIE to your face. Never have these discussions one on one, you want their people in there to listen to you and hear their own management make a case for themselves. You can be on your own, in fact, I advocate it should always be one on many. I like them to feel they can gang up on me, I like those odds.

When reason fails, resort to other tactics that match up with your opponent. They may say they want openness, yet are a closed company. They may be happy with their incumbent, but is that because they fear the new, the unknown or just are afraid to MAKE MORE MONEY. Never be afraid to point out the obvious. Push them to think, push them to visualize the problem through a story of your own. If you cannot reference other companies, or provide a good enough story, you need to practice this further and do more research.

Sometimes the simplest method is the easiest. I like to listen to people tell me why they don't like our solution or a specific vendor while I take notes and wait and listen. You then have them telling you what is wrong, what is important to them, and what the largest issue they face is on this topic. If there is a team of people at the meeting, they may all have input, but the executive is the only one we really care about, so watch the executive as the underlings toss out red herrings.

Help them make a decision
The hardest part is having the customer say what you want to hear, without you saying it first. Just like in salary negotiations, the one that mentions a figure first loses, if you or I suggest an outcome, prior to the customer stating it, we will lose all of the time and effort we put into the pitch.

Walk along with them as they explain themselves. Check in with them while they are speaking by verifying what they have stated in their terms. Lead them if you need to, but work on helping them solve their problem, not on you providing the solution. They will love you all the more, and never look back at the competition.

Coming up in this series, why executives lie, why one on many is important and the differences between Enterprise customers and Family owned business/startups.

If your sales or marketing teams are in need of training on this topic please contact me now as Q1 is getting busy.

Business Anti-Social: Why the Boss Doesn't Get It

This is my slidedeck from the Sugarcon 2012 session I just finished about ways to help executives be more social. It also covers some ideas around out thinking your competition and how to get stuff done without approval.

The link to my slides page is here. Slideshare link as well.