Need What You Want?

Our consumerism mentality gives us the illusion that our wants are similar to our needs. A friend of mine who is a consultant asked my opinion about whether he should invest in an exchange server, a salesforce CRM solution and other IT applications. Keep in mind that this is a single person operation. He believed that he “needed” to spend thousands of dollars to ensure he has systems in place to manage and synchronize his different e-mail accounts, calendars, client portfolio and be able to access these from anywhere he wants including his laptop, a public internet browser or his BlackBerry. Once I helped him understand his business requirements, he was able to see that he already had everything he needed at his disposal. Sure it was not perfect, but again an expensive set of solutions is not guaranteed to be perfect either. Basically, his MS exchange account with 1and1 was good enough for his Outlook, gmail and BlackBerry. A free application from Google allowed him to sync his gmail calendar to his Outlook, another free application performed the same function with his BlackBerry. Finally, a free service from Soocial allowed his contacts to be synched between all three platforms. All that at the cost of less than an hour of his time, $6.99 per month for the exchange server, and a $1,000 bill for my advice (I did not charged him but I SHOULD HAVE).

In today’s panic mode and still remembering the internet bubble burst, companies are reluctant to spend more on IT. However, there is not doubt that IT remains key for strategic success. One cheap solution is to perform a holistic identification of business requirements and compare the findings to the functionalities of systems in place. A key question that companies tend to miss is what do you already have and what is necessary versus what is unnecessary. Surprisingly, you might find out that your existing systems already give you needed and necessary information that your management is not able to leverage due to inconsistencies or non-standard interfaces and reporting tools.

If you still believe that you do not have all the needed functionalities, the next step is to evaluate necessary versus “nice-to-have” versus unnecessary requirements. Spending should be focused only on achieving competitive advantage. Your decision should be based on obtaining those necessary functionalities that you do not have today.

Once you know exactly what is needed, the next abyss to avoid is overdesign. You should always seek simple solutions to get the necessary functionalities. The simpler a system is, the more flexible it will be and the less maintenance it would require.