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In our customer-vendor relationships, we rarely spend quality thinking or communicating time with our IT vendors. Instead, the vendor focus of those exchanges, especially in this economy, is on up or cross selling, implementing, and upgrading. How often does the vendor just spend time listening to and trying to understand today’s dynamics and decision-making of your business?
Our IT partners are integral in preventing our problems. Often, rather than involving them, we join them in becoming intellectuals. This may be because our expectations of our partners are not very high. Too often in the past, vendors have disappointed with vaporware or pretending to understand our needs while really saying what we want to hear in order to get our business.
My view about the possibilities of genius in a vendor changed with a recent offer by my local Microsoft team that I accepted. (Yes, the evil empire Microsoft has empowered its local offices to work with even smaller customers to better match needs and expectations.)
Let me share how this happened and some of the details.
The offer. Two dedicated Microsoft employees, Scott Byrd and Dave Monahan, met with me to discuss Microsoft's role in our business. I mentioned how reliant we were on Microsoft having aligned our technology infrastructure with Microsoft products. Nevertheless, our disappointment and confusion with the present and future really made decision-making for the future unnecessarily difficult. They suggested an Envisioning Lab.
The Lab. The Envisioning Lab is a one-on-one strategy session hosted by the local Microsoft office where a cross-disciplinarian team of individuals from our business would meet with one or more Microsoft technical experts. This meeting was at no cost and was not to be a disguised sales meeting; this meeting was to help us craft a better vision for our technological future.
Microsoft's objectives for this meeting were defined as:
Deliverables. The deliverables for us were very clear.
Preparation. With a productive outcome in mind, both partners spent some time preparing through a series of phone calls and surveys. First, we signed a non-disclosure agreement. Then we shared information, including:
Finally, we identified who should represent our company and participate in this strategic planning session with this key vendor. We chose among our executive, user, and IT staff looking for the different perspective of impact that vendor interaction may have in decision-making, implementation, and maintenance of any choice.
The Envisioning Lab. The Lab presented a unique forum in which to openly discuss some past decisions as well as see the future a little clearer. It gave me perspectives from among the group that were previously never discussed or even raised. This opportunity to speak freely and better understand some of our needs added to our confidence. We left knowing that we are headed in a good direction with a partner, albeit with some tweaking necessary. Even an appreciation of the challenges that IT faces in decision-making was better understood by the non-IT participants.
Would we do it again? One of the greatest tests of purposefulness of any vendor meeting is asking the age-old question, "was this time well-spent?" In our case it was for the following reasons.
The end result was wonderful. We had a purposeful discussion within our group as well as perspective from Microsoft to create the first step in better consensus and understanding for some decisions that we will be making over the next 12 to 18 months. In addition, we now have a better understanding of how to leverage decisions involving our commitment to Microsoft products that we have already made.
Microsoft likely hopes that this translates to more business. What has surprised me is the practicality of this approach to greater customer satisfaction with their IT strategies.
Please share your stories about this type of approach of strategizing with your IT vendors: 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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