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.

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.

Salaries Matter?

Naturally, money is important. But I said salaries.

Do you need a salary?

What if you could make your money doing something completely different than what you earn your livelihood today? Would you do it?

Do your kids care how you make your money? No, they just want, well..want everything.

If you didn't have to go to work Monday morning, what would you do instead to make money?

The NFL, and NBA as well, are arguing about who gets not just millions, but in the NFL's case, billions of dollars. Indeed it puts ones own salary in a whole new perspective, unless you work for a handful of wall street financial firms.

The NFL teams business offices may also close if they strike. Why?
There is no money? Nope they have money of course.
Because these people are the problem and make millions? No and many make only average wages.
The owners don't care about them? Quite likely. They treat them this way astonishing as it may seem when these people are what holds it all together. But management is letting them know they don't care about them. Nice, real nice. The owners better be giving them raises when this is all over.

Why do teachers get paid so little to educate your kids? If this is not the most important job a person could have, not sure what is. Many of us can not home school because of our salaried jobs or maybe because of lack of knowledge. You get what you pay for and is it any wonder private school tuition goes up as does enrollment? Who can afford all this is a whole other post.

Why do companies stop paying for training, insist it is not needed or can be done online by someone on their own? If repetition is how we learn, are businesses being short sighted and short changing themselves and their employees? As adults do we not need to still learn like we always did? And why do we have to do it on our own time? We may like our jobs but do you need to spend 3 hours a night doing your training because your boss won't let you do it on company time?

What matters?

If no one needs to learn, why do our kids go to school? Why do some people pay $20,000 or more for elementary school or even high school education? Did you ever ask the teachers what they get paid? I have and was not surprised it is not really much more than when I was in school back in the mid 80's. So where does all that money go? 12th grade for me cost about $4,500, it now costs over $15,000. 300% increase in 25 years. Did teachers salaries go up that much? Average salary was $20-40,000 back then. Now $30-50,000. Not a big increase is it?

So the public school system treats our teachers horribly, pay them worse, then blame them because they teach in bad districts and come up with some crazy way to figure out if you are a good teacher because of grades students get on standardized tests. Okay, so your boss just fired you because you did not meet your targets, no matter that you had no support, no marketing money, lack of training in sales or the product line and were supposed to do a bunch of things on your own time.

And that encourages teachers to help your son or daughter how? Does it encourage you to keep working for a salary?

Likewise in business, management has some odd ideas about who to fire, promote or provide proper salaries. During economic issues everyone gets hurt, well, unless the government bailed you out and you then gave whopping bonuses to your key executives...who did NOTHING to earn them in most cases. Who did much of the work? Yep, the people who got fired.

Yes, some will be dead wood or bad fits or just not necessary, but when a company lets go of numerous people with 20+ years at the company, makes it hard to imagine they were all so bad to have lasted all that time. Maybe they didn't make the executive track, but you kept them all these years because they were good at something. But now, this year, they no longer are? Okay. Thanks, no gold watches, you understand, it's the economy.

So in this era of $0.99 apps, a whole new meaning to the dollar store franchises, how does one make money? Salaries can not be solely supported by selling cheap applications. Or can they? Maybe in large quantity of numbers this works and there lies the key.

If the consumer side, where else can one find such large quantities of people buying ANYTHING, is where he money is going, why would an organization wish to focus only on selling to companies..instead of the people who work in those companies? Sell both sides and win big. It worked for Microsoft and appears to be finally working for Apple.

Salaries do not matter.

Money matters. So does your health and your family.

Everything else is extra, but what will you do Monday when there is no more salary? You may love your boss, love your products, but the company may not love you one day and then what will you do?

LotusWorld, the next AppStore?

This showed up in my email box sometime in the last few days.

Coming soon! Find tons of great applications designed for your BlackBerry smartphone in one convenient place - BlackBerry App World.

So now RIM is doing it too. Makes sense for them.
Imagine, if you will, What a Lotus or Domino World would be like.
Openntf could be one way to do it and I am sure IBM has some other view on this as well.
or do they? Or have I forgotten someone's site and if so, please let me know.

Imagine if every little app you or I offer for free, instead charge a nominal amount of money, say $1-$5 per template or programming effort. Could we micropay our way to riches as some have on the Apple AppStore? Lotusworld.com by the way is some Lotus car site, but the name sounded good to me.

An interesting idea which maybe is worth it for those not quite an application but more a nice to have idea. Maybe I am being a capitalist.

Then again what if every organization needed your little app?

EDIT Update 3/12/2009 Lotus911 I believe showed an app like store and was trying to expand that idea, as was I think Planetlotus at some point. But I could be wrong in this memory.

Fud buster Friday #30 - The Cloud Will Save us Money

Let me start by saying if you are committed in a relationship, either stick with it or drop it.

2009 will go down as the year, in the US at least, where everything changed, from the President to your bank and your bank account or job or home or life in general.

Evidently the companies of the world are choosing to drop long time relationships in favor of what some see as short term crutches and it is upsetting quite a few companies, the ones still in existence.

100,000 GSK employees are going to the Cloud. 100,000 in various price points too.
How many of these lucky people will also get to work from home? After all if you are going to do this, why not go all out? Commercial Realtors you are about to get FUBAR(look it up).

85,000 x $15 = $1,275,000 a month
15,000 x $3 = $45,000 a month

So for about $1.3 Million dollars a month or $15.6 million a year they will get online version of everything Microsoft can offer.

Now surely someone said we are already paying Microsoft about $1000 per employee for Windows, Office, plus Lotus costs for email and well sure this looks good.

But hold on, what are all these employees going to use for accessing the web? Linux machines? That would make perfect sense, but no, the SAME machines they have now will still be in use. Saving money? not yet.

Also all those small offices are going to need more bandwidth or if GSK goes whole hog to let everyone work from home hopefully they are picking up the tab for the internet bill. if so, let's imagine 40% of the company works form home.
40,000 x $50(average per month)= $2 million a month or $24 million a year.
This doesn't include the real bandwidth which may be added at corporate.

So at $40 million a year this is saving them money? Right. they expect to shave off 30% of their costs over time. How? Once you start with a host the costs only escalate. Have you ever seen them go down? I didn't think so.

So let's say GSK is smart enough to lock in some pricing growth limits, like $1 for higher users or a quarter for the lower ones that's still quite a chunk of change in year 2 and going further.

Wait, don't forget there are admins for all this. I don't see any of them losing jobs soon. Microsoft is going to manage their user base? I don't think so.

So that cost doesn't go away. IT Support also is not going away although maybe they cut a deal for that as well.

And classically, what happens when you lose the connection at the wrong moment? What is the BC plan? Business Continuity can be costly to or is Microsoft making GSK pay for a complete redundant data center on both sides of the ocean?

Maybe GSK's costs are much more than this, and I know this is not even all the possible items on laundry list of costs(security, disk space, integration to their back office solutions), and a deal like this is probably being underwritten by Microsoft in one form or another.

A smarter way to look at their environment could have saved them even more money. But they needed that money for the day the try to get off the Microsoft hosting.