What do vendors get wrong when partnering with businesses trying to transform?
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They don't get it. Almost every solution is force-fitted into what they believe they can solve and there's always a big gap between what they say you can do and what you can actually execute. That has been one of my biggest pain points. The one thing that every vendor needs to understand—SaaS or otherwise—is that they need to be there to solve a particular problem or to create an opportunity for the business. If you aren't doing either of those as a vendor, don't waste my time, because the budgets have only shrunk over the last decade or so, and everyone is expected to do more with less.
And I think that trend started after the Lehman Brothers crash and then it was exacerbated by COVID, so the budgets literally disappeared for most people. We had to cut costs as well as people in some cases. In the early days of the pandemic, people were saying that you don't have to invest in hardware because you can use SaaS. But if I have a distributed organization spread across rural, semi rural, and urban areas, I don't necessarily get connectivity at the same level everywhere. I cannot have my organization divided into haves and have nots. I need a consistent process and policy irrespective of location. So give me a solution that works online but also has capability to also work should I lose connectivity.
As software vendors, it’s interesting that we talk about the difficulty of implementing different vendor solutions, because how often are we looking at the ease of implementation for our own customers?
The fundamental problem is that the world is messy, and I'm not sure that people are always realistic about that. When someone says, "Use it out of the box. Don't customize it," that's easier said than done. Reality is messy, so implementations take a while and it's hard. I feel like people want some technology magic bullet and I don’t think it exists.
The business folks can't stop their day jobs for three months to do nothing but this project, and that has as much to do with the reason implementations take a long time as anything else. The most successful implementations I've ever seen have been ones in which people took the project so seriously that they did exactly that. They back-filled people and said, "You're going to do nothing but this." And that's fantastic, but that almost never happens because it's super hard.