Still LOST In The Chasm? Part 2:  Find The Button!

  by Richard Muirhead | 14 Jul 2008 | Permalink |

In my first post in this series, I wrote a bit about the trends challenging the widespread adoption of BSM, CMDB, ADM and others, and where Tideway and other companies are today in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC). Let’s expand on this a bit, starting by listing the constellation of players involved in purchasing our solutions:

A. The Technical Buyer, in the form of systems and database and application administrators or perhaps an IT Management tools specialist, or even an ITIL practitioner
B. The Economic Buyer, specifically the CTO, CIO or, indeed in the case of clear cost benefits or compliance, the CFO
C. The Users, who include not only all of the Sys Ads, DBAs and app owners but also their departmental managers and periodically the Economic Buyer themselves
D. The Departmental Managers, who in our environment are the Program Managers or Heads of Configuration Management, IT Ops or Enterprise Computing that have responsibility for the efficient and effective operation of the teams of users, and report to the CTO or CIO.

The adoption of new technology infrastructure is about a wholesale forklift replacement of existing approaches. In our case those existing approaches have been in-house developed configuration repositories, technology specific configuration managers, disparate log file storage and analysis tools and ill-suited asset and inventory tools. Such a fork-lift upgrade is no easy task and requires demonstration of both innovation and superior solution completeness, and both these require focus.

To get this far we have demonstrated product capability and leadership. We now must shift to a focus on customer intimacy. What are the key steps required then?

A. Intimacy is Better One on One – a.k.a. Segmentation. Our key focus must be on senior execs managing end-users whose current way of getting things done is broken…causing great pain to their management.

B. Blood from the Jugular is Good – a.k.a. Compelling Reason To Buy (CRTB) – What this means is that not just any old pain will do…we need a particular type. First, we must find an economic buyer, either the departmental manager or his boss, where the issue is so great there is blood gushing from his jugular…the point is that this particular problem needs urgent attention. Second, this pain must be sufficiently great that it exceeds the pain of the forklift upgrade and adoption…and then some. Third, this better happen within a year…and these days perhaps more like 6 months. Getting to the bottom of the CRTB requires serious forensic empathy and judgment…it’s really hard work!

C. Complete the Job – a.k.a. The Whole Product. If you are working on a team or in a mature industry, you can lean on others to plaster and paint, bring the dessert; clean the dishes…whilst you stick to the sexy bit…whatever that may be. In forging a new market, you must cover all the ingredients: content; hardware; software; peripherals; new integration; legacy integration; pre-sales services; project management; post-sales services & support; consulting. Critically, this must be done with respect to a single segment or application. Fortunately it can be achieved with partners, but with you as expert ringmaster.

D. No Squabbling – a.k.a. Fight the Old World Order not Each Other. Something easily misunderstood at this stage of market maturity is who is the competition? The real competition is with the incumbents, with the technology that has to be fork lifted out, not with the other innovators in the market. You can do each other a flavor through sharing the burden of educating the market about how to do things right, for the moment. The incumbents can also do you all a favor by speaking out against the new world order – and thereby publicizing it.
So after all that this process is not about finding the segment that has the most compelling reason to buy or has the most to gain. Instead it is about making the hard choice NOT to invest in a whole bundle of compelling segments for the sake of FOCUS. Now that’s hard…and more on how to do it in my part 3.