Still Looking for that Simple Answer

"A

QUICK ONE," said this neighbor, for it was a roaming call, and I

was out of the country. "I think I need a scanner, which should I

buy?"

I tried a "quick" long-distance answer on a depleting battery. What

application? What budget? Need high-res prints...? Then we gave up. I promised

to drop in when I was back.

Scanner, PC, printer, modem… it’s the same question I’m asked dozens of

times in a year. And each time, I re-discover how complex "all this

computer stuff" still is.

Now listen to that question coming from the CIO or CTO, roles that I

sometimes play for my company, and the complexity gets scary. "Simple"

questions like which app to standardize, or which messenger to deploy, get mired

in debate, meetings and controversy. Copper or microwave? How do we connect our

branch offices? Those take months to answer, even with all our tech expertise.

For IS managers in thousands of less-than-tech-savvy businesses, imagine the

problems. Simple question: Which server? The most useful answer for his business

is the server brand and model, configuration and price. If he does get so simple

an answer, it was probably from the vendor selling that server… so he ignores

it and gets down to weeks of reinventing the wheel.

IT consultants and services do play a role–audit business need, take the

mass of specs, jargon, conflicting benchmarks…and recommend. But few mid-size

businesses use them, and few consultants are completely unbiased.

Magazines play a role too. But our "answers" often pack jargon that

CIOs have to struggle to relate to real business needs. An IS manager of a

mid-size business asked me: "Do we really need this storage stuff? Our six

servers have lots of storage." A DQ article peppered with NAS and SAN

buzzwords didn’t tell him what he needed and why and how much.

Another CIO said he was tired of seeing lists of exporters in Dataquest.

"What about those working in India? I need someone to set up our SCM, and

don’t see a single list that tells me the best vendors for that…"

The first thing all this suggested was that there’d be much use for a CIO

handbook that could answer some of those questions. Just the basics, some of the

tech, some resources, some services listings, to start with. That’s how this

annual issue was born.

The second was that vendors have some way to go to simplify their offerings,

to market, communicate and sell in a useful and credible manner. Show how a

messaging system investment will cut long-distance communications costs over

three months. This requires work–it’s not easy to turn a complex issue into

a short answer. But it works. Simple specs, clear value propositions…and half

the sale’s made. As with a consumer PC sale, package deals are good,

especially if the vendor takes responsibility for all parts of the package.

Let’s go back to simplicity!