The Undercover IT Correspondent

USER GROUP CONFERENCES

The ultimate diversionary tactic to get clients to forget their real problems!

Now there’s this rumor doing the rounds that user group conferences are not the serious events they’re made out to be, ie sharing best practice with other clients and learning to use the product better. Instead, participants are out playing golf or sailing all day, wining and dining to great entertainment at night, emptying the mini-bar back at their five-star hotel, and generally having a good time at company expense. Well, I’m sorry to say, it’s all true!

We often hear customers complain that enterprise software vendors are out of touch with the real world and what their customers really want. I’m not so sure that’s true when it comes to user group conferences. Here’s the rationale from the vendor’s perspective. Throughout the year they’ve been having a hard time with new customers past the honeymoon stage, recent customers who are having trouble with their projects, and established customers who are wondering just how they managed to get in so deep. And in parallel, they must somehow convince all these people that the forthcoming upgrade, with its attendant headaches and disruption, is still in their best interests.

Using the classic diversionary approach favored by politicians the world over, they therefore stage an event that allows them to temporarily make their constituents forget their real problems, and to simultaneously sell them on the merits of the next version.  Enter the user group conference, a combination of theme park, expo, work and play skillfully rolled into one and billed as the annual extravaganza they just cannot afford to miss. And to top it all off, they also invite along prospective customers, who rub shoulders with real customers and benefit from all that marketing hype, thus increasing the chances of closing new deals.

About three months beforehand, back in the trenches at customer sites, key players from both IT and the business begin to jockey for position to see who will be going this time to San Francisco, San Diego, Barcelona or Cannes for a three-day break. About a month before the final countdown, internal rivalry is rife and reaches fever pitch as IT and users – who’ve been bitching all year at the vendor about that upgrade they don’t really need – all of a sudden begin to think that maybe it will deliver great business benefits after all! And the only possible place for them to reach such a decision is of course at the user group conference! Last but not least, it’s a great place to network if you’re looking to change jobs.

And it works every time, year in and year out. IT departments and senior user execs might not be able to nominate the deserving to tag along to the President’s Club, but they can get them short-listed to go to the next user group conference! On a good year, you’ll find five or more people from the same company in attendance, especially from global companies. ‘Oh Jill, fancy meeting you here as well!’. ‘Tom, what a surprise!’

Amazingly, it’s not even free – invitations are parsimoniously distributed, and only speakers usually have the $1,500-2,000 registration fee waived. Then there are the so-called partners (ie other vendors, consultants and integrators) with their stands in the pavilions, who foot the rest of the bill. Such partners are usually placed in categories like ‘Platinum’, ‘Gold’ or ‘Silver’, which are very aptly named, because they are indicators of how much it costs them to be on the annual user group bandwagon.

No folks, you’ve really got to hand it to them: enterprise software vendors have this particular strategy down to a fine art. So let it not be said that they are not in tune with their customers. It’s just not true! And finally, remember, during the other 11 months of the year, don’t go overboard in giving your vendor a hard time or bad-mouthing the product. Instead, schmooze, suck-up and generally play the great pretender, so you can increase your chances of going to next year’s great event! MG

ENTERPRISE  SOFTWARE

Reps and consultants are thoroughly schooled in a special language called vendor-speak

Enterprise software is a multi-billion dollar industry that keeps a lot of us in gainful employment. But it wasn’t always so. In the sixties and seventies, companies developed their own rudimentary and unreliable systems, even though many basic business processes were very similar, eg payroll and acacounting. Hence the idea of enterprise software, whose basic premise was ‘why should companies run multiple, unreliable systems when they could all run the same unreliable system instead?’ So one day some clever consulting firm saw the opportunity and took a complex and unreliable system – and started selling it to other companies!

Software vendors pack as many features as they can into each new version. The more check-boxes you can tick off, the better. Hence the mind-numbing complexity of ERP and CRM solutions, to name the main culprits. In general, these systems have shown themselves to be far from the panaceas they were initially made out to be. Companies that thought they were going to get a leg up on the competition soon found themselves stumbling with their panacea down around their knees.

Because of the high price tag, enterprise software is usually acquired through an RFP process, which is really an organizational joke, because behind the façade of objectivity, neutrality and integrity there usually lies a hidden agenda. The vast majority of companies have a fairly good idea of which vendor they want to go with, but because of the sums involved they have to be seen to be going through the motions of evaluating competitors, which is where the RFP comes in.  RFPs are rarely put together by the people concerned, because they are usually far too busy – or wouldn’t know how to put one together anyway.  So it is inevitably turned over to a “suitably briefed” consulting company, ie one who is knowledgeable in the solution of the pre-anointed vendor.

Once the RFP has been issued and vendors suitably short-listed, the next phase is the product demonstration.  Demos are like beauty contests: though the final decision is supposedly based on a wide range of objective criteria, first impressions of physical characteristics are important. An attractive user interface, a thin client and a slim footprint will usually elicit appreciable stares and comments from both men and women on the customer side.

Once the demo gets under way, pre-sales consultants will go out of their way to project an air of ‘aw, shucks’ honesty, trust and confidence, almost as if they were speaking from the heart. Which is of course a façade, because vendors never speak from the heart, only from the script. And the closer they stick to the script, the better they come across. Which is why they hate RFPs with a passion, because it breaks up the script and obliges them to focus on irrelevant things – like the customer’s business requirements!

Sales reps and pre-sales consultants are thoroughly schooled in a special language called vendor-speak, whose cardinal rule is very simple: as far as possible always answer ‘Yes’ to any question. Naïve users make this easy by asking open-ended questions like ‘can your product do this or that?’ More astute users will rather ask ‘how does your product do this or that?’. Even when there is reasonable doubt, still answer ‘Yes’. You can even get away with ‘Absolutely!’, since you can always backtrack later by saying there was a misunderstanding (most of these packages are so complex anyway…). And if you can’t answer ‘Yes’, then there is a whole variety of fallbacks, the most common of which are ‘that can easily be customized’ or ‘not in the current version’. Particularly difficult questions can be met with ‘that’s not part of our business model’.

Finally, after using the new software for a couple of years, customers have to go through an upgrade, at which time they usually learn that a lot of their so-called configuration and customization – which was implicitly encouraged by the vendor and the consultants during the sales cycle as the answer to any missing requirements – are not automatically upgraded. Which therefore has to be revisited at their own cost – inevitably with the help of the vendor or the same consultants (hmmm…).

But let’s not get negative here. Upgrades are not always unwelcome or expensive. Even the most cynical and hardened users of enterprise software will readily acknowledge the value of one upgrade – the one that bumps you up to business class! MG

SHRINK-WRAPPED SOFTWARE

Office productivity? Gimme a break…

Before the advent of the PC, the very idea of inexpensive shrink-wrapped software was impossible to imagine. To start with, there was no mass market of computer users, and businesses rolled their own software. Today, of course, you can pick up thousands of software titles, on subjects ranging from business to pleasure, priced from $20 to $1 000 or more.

Today, on every PC at work, you’ll find those most ubiquitous of shrink-wrapped products, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, each loaded down with so many features that the average user gets by with less than 20% of its capabilities. It’s like having a car capable of doing 150 mph on the highway and you never average more than 30 mph in town. Even so, most of us spend hours every day using these tools to do reports, calculations, charts and presentations.

But really, what are we doing that’s so very important? How did we ever manage before these tools came along? Did we do the same stuff more slowly, or did we do less with manual methods – or did we simply do without certain things because they were not economically feasible? And the obvious question – were we any less productive in terms of what we produced for a given quantity of time and effort? The quick answer, borne out by a number of studies on the effect of the computer in the workplace, is ‘no’. There is no direct correlation between productivity and the use of computers in the workplace. And certainly your average office worker would not be in violent disagreement as he or she puts the finishing touches to a 30-slide presentation that has taken a week to prepare, and which in all probability will have an air-time of no longer than 5 minutes in front of some harried executive. And they call it office-productivity software…

But the biggest coup of all was the way in which the IT industry succeeded in getting us male, white-collar workers to accept doing work that previously was done either by assistants, or not at all.  And we’re talking deeply-ingrained stuff here, like status, office politics and male-female relationships. In order to breach these formidable defenses, the software and hardware industries teamed up and targeted the soft underbelly of male vanity and our boyhood passion for gadgetry. They brought out a never-ending stream of new hardware, software, enhancements, upgrades and features, so that while we boys were comparing the size of our toys, we didn’t notice that our use of these tools was gradually becoming institutionalized.

And for those of us who weren’t into gadgetry, they targeted our minds. They designed the software for maximum dependency, and created a sort of ‘personal relationship’ between ourselves and our computers. So today we have a whole hierarchy of little people inside our PCs to help us: drivers, assistants, managers – even wizards. Then there’s the terminology used, like clients, dependent clients, parent objects, parent-child relationships, etc. It’s like having a shrink on your desktop. Maybe that’s why we call it shrink-wrapped software…

In other words, all that skillfully marketed, PC-based techno-progress stuff by the software and hardware industries was just a scam to blind us men to the fact that for the past twenty years we’ve been doing our own typing! MG