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Reading these words written by our thirtieth President, Calvin Coolidge, inspired me to realize how well this describes the IT side of business. Despite availability of education, myriad vendors and third-party integrators, and the large groups of super smart people working for us, persistence is still the key to many successful outcomes. This is true for everything IT touches -- maintenance tasks, help-desk functions, and especially new projects.
There are many reasons for this, but they may be summarized with two tenets: "Anything that can go wrong likely will" and "Nothing ever works as easily as demonstrated during the sales pitch (think Plug and Play technology -- and frequently they do not work quite right in the demo and we still buy!)." As a result, part of institutionalizing that persistence in our IT organizations must include a methodology for working through unexpected interruptions to progress.
If you have not done this yet, the timing is great. With survey evidence showing that our businesses are still mostly focused on absorbing already-owned technology, methodology of persistence can lead to better resolution of that long waiting list. Besides, without this process, sometimes it seems that IT spends too much time spinning its wheels with a challenge.
Part of the process involves working outside of your employed braintrust to resolve issues. There are five basics in dealing with outside vendors.
Find the expert. The changed economic environment has changed the landscape of value added resellers (VAR), the typical installers of much infrastructure. For the mid market this means that the best people to do work in your area may be very different than even two or three years ago. Many VARs have changed their business focus and others have been forced to downsize staffing and promised response time. In addition, some manufacturers of the technology have expanded into the services business in ways that they have not in the past.
The goal is not to spin wheels with a vendor who is serving as an information broker to solve problems. For example, after four failed attempts over 3 years, we finally found a reliable Citrix VAR with a CTO who can solve and work through any question involving a Citrix product.
Rely on the manufacturer. The manufacturer's resources can be valuable. There are four elements to those resources beyond consulting services: online end user self-help, online interactive or email support, over the phone free support (sometimes included in maintenance agreements), and over the phone per incident paid support. Vendors like Dell and Microsoft seem to understand how useful this can be to corporate users and make things like drivers, fixes, and even incident support available.
Other vendors leave you scratching your head wondering, "what are they thinking?" For instance, instant access to drivers and other product related fixes, on the Web site, is essential. In contrast, Wyse Technologies is not reasonable in requiring a signup to get an email "within 24 hours" containing the URL of the requested driver!
Even on our homes computers, we can have unusual combination of the perfect storm of hardware and software mixing to create a particularly vexing problem. In our corporate environments, instances that are unexpected and unrelenting happen. For these instances, you may find it expedient to involve at least one of the vendors, even if it requires an incident charge. The typical downtime and disruption is usually more expensive than even the most outlandish per incident credit card charge. You may even want to buy discounted sets of incidents from your most dependable and commonly used manufacturers.
Trust your instinct. Regardless of whether you are depending on an employee of the manufacturer or a VAR, sometimes a proposed solution does not smell right. In a management role of that vendor, demand to know and make sure you understand the logic of a solution. This does not mean that you must understand the detailed technical means of the solution, only that you understand conceptually how this will work. Sometimes perplexed vendors start "trying stuff" to create a workaround, instead of fixing the problem and this can introduce new problems. Beware of answers that do not make sense.
The real TCO. Total cost of ownership is an easy thing to quantify in a lab analyzing known behaviors to be used or justifying initiatives. But what about the surprises?
For example, thin client terminals are a great idea because ideally the hardware does not need to be updated as frequently. Imagine my shock that firmware, the software running in the terminal, needed to be updated (on Wyse terminals at least) when a new version of Citrix Metaframe was installed. This installation is not a simple process. The firmware must be installed using a local FTP server -- not over the Web and not over a WAN. In layman's terms, this meant I needed a local Web server in a remote location to get my terminals working again!
One of most likely uses and greatest savings of thin client is for remote offices. This establishes an unexpected real and potentially substantial cost depending on your environment. The total cost of ownership of the savings strategy of thin client terminals is thereby significantly diminished.
Tips for working through problems. Based on experience, there are four things that may help to speedy solutions.
Message to vendors. Vendor staff may sometimes have a nonchalance about the urgency and pragmatic considerations when dealing with corporate IT staff. In fact, some seem to move at the pace of the stereotypical motor vehicle office! Here are some reminders that you may want to share with those vendors.
Hopefully, in sharing my life in the trenches view of interaction with vendors' support in the clutch, two things will be accomplished. One, the classical divide and conquer approach taken by some vendors cannot survive where there is discussion ("you are the only one with this experience"). By the way, Internet discussion groups are another great way for making this happen. Second, you will be less likely to make bad decisions about when to cut your losses with a problem. Let me know what you think: cyudkowsky@ByteofSuccess.com
Read more articles by Mr. Yudkowsky.
CHAIM YUDKOWSKY, CPA, is president of Byte of Success Inc., a technology consulting company specializing in helping small and mid-size business grow. He may be reached at 301-937-4555 or cyudkowsky@ByteofSuccess.com. Chaim is available to speak to your group or business on a variety of technology topics. |
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