Two paths at crossroads, which one did you take ?

They were deemed a reference customer for the industry and one of the favorites of the big name vendor and solution provider. Over a long period of the relationship they had acquired almost every solution from the same vendor for any business problem. At times the price was quite attractive to turn down the offer, and at times the perceived time taken, complexity of evaluating and then implementing another solution appeared to be too big a task. So the CIO and her team continued to invest with their preferred IT partner.

Life would have continued for them with incremental innovation and harmonious coexistence with their vendor ecosystem had not events overtaken them. The company was caught up in an industry turmoil which required information agility they had never experienced before. Their strategy to stay with one solution provider had given them a basket of solutions for every stated need; the implementations technically successful and were declared live. The business use found them lacking in the new paradigm when efficiency mattered.

Earlier business had continued to use parallel systems and created business critical spreadsheets that became the lifeline for the enterprise. The level of (in)efficiency was deemed acceptable as change required them to actively participate in the definition and building of the solutions. It appeared easier to let the IT organization manage the complexity of IT’s favored solution which ended up becoming a system of records while business users added headcount to solve problems. Now the murmur of disenchantment grew louder.

The CIO was in a fix and wondered why her winning strategy was no longer deemed effective ? They had bought from one of the largest providers in the world and the vendor had in many meetings acknowledged the leadership in implementation of some of the solutions. Business had participated in the selection of the solutions in almost all cases and signed off the choice. Now how could they be pointing fingers and distancing themselves ? Okay, there were some disagreements on the solutions and partners, but …

The applications lead had grown within the ranks and his first implementation of any major system was from this big solution provider. The success of the first big step gave him sense of invincibility if he continued to bet on the same provider. Guess what, it actually worked for a while and the resultant growing arrogance made him deaf to the occasional issue and limitation. After all not every wish list can be fulfilled by the solutions; why did they not admire the brilliance of simplicity of integration of parts from the same vendor ?

The CEO instructed the CIO to benchmark with specific companies to find out how they stacked up in comparison and what they can learn from some of the finest companies. Initially skeptical and full of themselves, the CIO and the team ventured out to explore the world and how others lived. The chosen benchmark had a much awarded CIO who was seen as an early adopter and trend setter. He was always happy to share his success with others and welcomed the team to spend time with him and his IT and business teams.

There were many common solutions deployed between the two companies; they had the same big name vendor as their primary provider and that is where the similarity ended. The CIO had given the freedom of choice to his team to seek solutions beyond the initial investment. In fact he challenged his team to find alternatives just to be sure that they had covered all options before making a choice. They were cautious of the fact that they did not want compromise solutions and were willing to stretch to get the best.

Both companies having started their IT journey had taken different paths at the crossroads; one had gone down the well-trodden path of low risk and reaped the fruits that came along the journey. The other created their own path and enjoyed the journey and the new experiences that it brought. The first was finding her achievements pale in comparison to the risk taker who had the business totally in sync with the decisions, the pains and the success. Two different paths enabling business, two different outcomes, two tales of success.

Which path have you taken and what is your story ?

Legally Illegal

Last year was a very difficult year for most software companies with slowdown in new licence sales that brought in a negative trend in new business revenue. This happened very quickly after the globally experienced slowdown a few years back compounding the issue. This had all software vendors almost like acting in unison deciding to engage their existing customers in licence audits. If you cannot get new revenues, let’s squeeze some juice out of existing lemons.

So these engagements began to look all over the place; the data centres, servers hidden under tables, desktops converted to servers for a simple test or proof of concept, users created though inactive, resigned employees not deactivated, it did not matter what the event was, if there was an user identity or a database, or an instance of the application, it needed to be licenced. Office automation and other fringe app vendors joined the fray and added to the already harried CIOs blood pressure.

No debate that licence compliance is non-negotiable; licences for software or product or package used for the enterprise that in any way impacts a business process. Most vendors allow disaster recovery to be setup at nominal or no extra investment as long as it is not used conjointly with the production environment. That looks like a good principle though some complicate matters based on number of days used even when the primary was down and not operational.

Some also allow test and development instances to be setup; interestingly most do have a licencing policy that charges the customer, however most sales teams shy away from highlighting this fact during the pre-sales discussions or even when the purchase order is received. Instead they give the CIO a fine printed legal document to sign without pointing out to the salient points that the customer needs to be aware of. I don’t know of CIOs who read those wonderful documents; it’s like pressing “I accept” when we enrol to a new website or app.

So far still so good as each instance expects the customer to get into an engagement with eyes and ears open; the principle being we gave you the full documents, you read and sign or you don’t read and sign, that is a choice. The discussion gets interesting when new or additional licences are required even if a line of code is changed or added to any screen, form or report or an add-on deployed. This now attracts additional investment, sometimes a lot more than bargained for. Now that is hitting below the belt !

If I may add, the same vendors participate during the pre-sales gap analysis and bid and quote for customizations through their consulting arms vying for implementation business. But no mention that if the customer did end up customizing, then … This aspect of licencing is rarely discussed if at all and mostly comes up during licence audits leaving the CIO gasping for life. The management demands that the CIO know all this as it is his/her job to know and manage the vendor.

Page number XX, clause YY, sub-clause ZZ in the sales agreement is cited as the reference for the new demand. Read it and if you can figure it out differently let us know; else here is the bill of material and the timeline in which you need to buy. Consequences you know are not something you want to talk about. Sheepish acceptance and wows to be more careful and read all the fine print is normal behaviour; the management takes a not-so-kind view but goes ahead with the devils choice.

Why does this charade repeat itself globally with many vendors, some more than others ? It does not matter which industry, which country or geography, size of the customer (in fact the bigger the better as they are averse to the publicity it draws), this is becoming one of the relationship breakers between the impacted CIO and the vendor. Stories of these are rarely published by publicity shy individuals and enterprises. Is there a way out ?

I believe there isn’t an easy way out; negotiating from a compromised position does not get any great deals; neither does it do wonders to CIOs careers. Whether they like it or not, CIOs have to get more diligent in their approach to legalese and contracting. As the markets saturate and mature, read changes to changing end user contracts and/or licensing terms. You never know what impact it has on your company.

Would you pay more for quality software ?

In a class of MBA students the discussion around quality frameworks veered towards ERP class systems and the large amounts of effort it takes to keep them running. The number of patches released frequently as well as the overall administration keeps everyone busy and on their toes. Bug fixes, functionality enhancements, and then some more bug fixes are the norm. Comparatively the in-house or bespoke systems are relatively stable and the effort investment is around incremental functionality.

Is it because the development of custom solutions is carried out by IT companies with multiple quality certifications like CMMi and others; or just that the big software vendors providing so called “off-the-shelf” solutions are struggling with factories of programmers that churn code trying to keep the innovation wheel running just to stay in the game. The resultant code is often bug ridden with usability that requires a PhD and a large team to keep it from falling apart.

Despite paying anything between 15-30% of the initial acquisition cost and spending a bomb on implementation with process consultants attempting to fit business to solution to business, it is indeed a wonder that quality remains firmly in the backseat. The story is no different across the industry which has started believing that it is their birth right to charge customers exorbitantly as Annual Maintenance Charges so that they can forever keep on downloading patches; they also get to call a helpdesk which will in most cases not solve the problem which to begin with should not have been there. The twist in the story is that now AMC is also indexed to inflation which provides a creeping increase every year with no improvement in the service level.

Why is it that none of the big software vendors ever talk about quality certifications or Six Sigma levels of defects ? Do they not believe in churning out quality solutions that will be the biggest differentiator for the customer rather than esoteric functionality that is rarely used; consider the fact that almost every enterprise uses between 5-50% of the functionality, I am sure that customers would gladly shift to solutions which are stable, work as designed and provide updates to functionality collaboratively.

There have been efforts from various CIO and industry groups to rein in the runaway costs of maintaining business as usual of which a large chunk goes towards the AMC and teams managing the big solutions. User Groups have failed to make a dent in the ever increasing charges; it does not matter how big or small you are, neither does it matter if the solution does not work as promised, you got to pay else support will be withdrawn and reinstatement of support is very expensive.

I wonder how many customers will pay AMC if the solution worked perfectly out of the box and did not have any bugs or required patches. Maybe this is a ploy to create solutions that fail on quality tests so that vendors can charge you to just make the system work; after all it is a very large chunk of revenue for these companies. An interesting thought thus emerges, would the CIO pay more if s/he was assured that the software does not require any patches, bug fixes or support ? I definitely would !