I recently launched an independent consulting firm, which has given me the occasion to take a fresh look at the big picture of what’s going on in our industry. It got me to thinking about the enterprise voice and unified communications systems market from the perspective of some recent consulting engagements and vendor/client interaction. I think that there is still a huge divide between how vendors are positioning/selling unified communications solutions and the problems that client organizations are actually trying to solve.
Let me provide an illustration. A leading integrator (with an expensive precious metal level partner status) representing one of the leading manufacturers (5 letters in its name!), continually tried to up sell "presence" as the killer app to a small regional ethnic supermarket chain. Of course the vendor had been provided with a formal requirements assessment report prior to this, had responded to an RFP and had taken several meetings with appropriate client staff. Through all of this, no problem presented itself that would be solved by presence.
On behalf of the client, we engaged the integrator in a workshop to determine how the organization could benefit from "presence". We approached it by mapping out the potential business processes that might be improved by a presence-based solution. Again, no low hanging fruit surfaced. It was at this stage that the vendor finally gave up on this and we moved on after spending countless hours flogging this beast.
Why did the vendor continually push this technology when there wasn’t a justification based on demonstrated need? Was it because the account team was following the "playbook" and trying to fit this customer into a predefined solution? Was it the need to grow the size/margin of the deal?
The client was savvy enough to have conducted a formal requirements phase and conclude that presence did not provide a solution to any of their business needs. And this is the key point. Without doing the hard work to understand how the business runs, mapping out the processes to determine the candidates for UC technology, there will almost always be a misalignment between the technology (and its requisite investment) and the business needs.
What would have happened if a business analysis had not been done? Would the client have purchased technology that they would get no value out of? Would the vendor be invited back for other opportunities?
So this brings me back to my comments about the current economy. Today there is no room for mistakes in terms of procuring technology. Even for mid-market organizations, financial justifications are the norm and more organizations than ever are measuring the actual impact on the bottom line as compared to the projected impact. Get it wrong and you'll soon be working elsewhere.
In many ways, this refreshes memories of the 1980s, when most organizations employed systems or business analysts that were responsible for understanding the business processes. Let's bring that function back!
Dave Stein is president of the Stein Technology Consulting Group. You can reach him at [email protected], telephone 714/420-5733.
