Show me the money

For those three readers of my Industry Insights, you will by now have cottoned on to the fact that I am somewhat of a movie buff, or perhaps just someone who enjoys getting lost in the other worlds that talented movie-makers create for us.

By no means do I categorise myself in the same league as our well loved Barry Ronge, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I do love the words 'lights, camera, action...'

Having recently been travelling on business and being hurtled through the air at over 900kph, I got thinking. With all the solutions we as an industry provide to our customers, the end game is always the bottom line. I mean, all the interactions, selling, positioning, differentiations and the like; all of this must have some intrinsic value to our customers otherwise why would they be entertaining our numerous engagements?

So this got me thinking even more about the subject and specifically, about something I see very little of in the industry: value realisation. How often do we go back to our customers and articulate the realised value of the solution we have sold?

Unfortunately, I just do not see this happening, and I believe this is one of the factors why maybe IT has still got the mantle of 'the necessary evil'.

We have to learn how to sell our value after the fact too, not just in positioning our value from the idea stage. For sure, there are numerous ways we can achieve this and a scientific view can be taken on the subject. We can initiate a detailed 'AS IS' study of the customer environment, covering people, process and technology.

Financial benefits, organisational efficiency, reduced risk and improved service quality are just some of the value points we align our solutions to. NPV, IRR, EVA metrics (for those of you doing your MBA, you know what I am talking about) all provide the financial review board the required information to make a 'go-no-go' decision on the solution. This happens all the time and is especially relevant considering the still tough economic environment we find ourselves in today.

How often do we go back to our customers and articulate the realised value of the solution we have sold?

Clive Brindley is solution architect and pre-sales manager within the BTO business unit at HP Software + Solutions SA.

So as we approached Kimberly at flight level 380, I for some reason started thinking about the movie Jerry Maguire. You remember the phrase Tom uttered to Mr Jnr, “Help me, help you”. Well that is exactly what we are doing when we conduct the 'AS IS' analysis. We are assisting our customers with building credible business case artefacts and value propositions, so that they can get the solution approved by those holding the purse strings.

As the solution provider we certainly need this as well, because muttering “Show me the money” is a little easier if you have justified (with accurate and real world ROI) your existence and value to the customer.

But for me, this is where I see the momentum fade away. The project is in the green, all deliverables have been met and six to 12 months later our customers sometimes still scratch their heads and contemplate the next steps. Do they continue with the initiatives? Do they request further budget for phase two? And so the questions go on.

This is where we need to start changing the game as an industry. We need to have the confidence to look the customer in the eye and have a 'realisation' conversation.

This is not a complex task, we simply need to have a look at the AS IS, the TO BE (which is where we are today) and agree/disagree on the actual outcomes. Tangible and intangible benefits are all important. Gaining insight into the impact of the solution is paramount. Mr Customer, six months ago you needed x to do y, now you need a fraction of x and you are getting y + z. We need to sell our value throughout the lifecycle of the solutions and services we offer our customer (internal and external).

And if the value is not realised, let's be honest and understand why we have missed the mark. And by 'we', I mean the customer and ourselves, as in many cases IT is not always to blame.

So there you have it, my views on making a change in how we approach value realisation with customers, all intertwined with the various phrases from well known flicks, because that is how my grey matter works.

I will end off by saying that I truly believe this is something that IT can change. It is not rocket science to achieve this but it requires application and planning.

If we get this right, our relationship with the business will most certainly improve. Who knows, maybe one day we will see IT and business whisper to each other, “You complete me.”