Philosophy

You Should Get Information Technology from Information Technologists

The information technology sector is, in the majority of cases, serviced by the wrong type of company.

When you are looking for an IT provider there will be two distinct groups chasing your business:  Professional IT and Reseller IT. Not understanding the difference will be the single most costly mistake you can make when selecting an IT partner. Choose the wrong type of IT services provider and you will rack up tens of thousands of dollars of unnecessary costs, and take unnecessary risks that lead to the IT black holes the many projects become.

If an IT vendor sits down with a buyer to discuss Information Technology solutions, and neither side of the table has any fundamental knowledge of how the technologies actually work, this meeting of “open” minds will produce overpriced and underperforming solutions.

Yet this is the kind of partnership that most small and medium enterprises in New Zealand are locked into. NZ business needs desperately to be buying its Information Technology from Information Technologists. The NZ market, however, is dominated by Reseller IT.

What are Professional IT and Reseller IT?

There are two paths into the IT industry, the technical path and the sales path.

T

he technical path usually begins with at least an interest in (more commonly a fascination with) Information Technology. The motivation of these proto-technologists could be unimaginatively expressed by the following cranial telegram:

“Information technology is amazing. Imagine all that we could do with it”.

A successful technical career in IT will commonly involve 3-4 years of full time study, leading to a tertiary qualification in or relating to Information Technology. This will be followed by decades of technical work, more study and more Industry qualifications. On the technology path the limiting factor will be a person’s ability to learn and understand technology. The ability to communicate this understanding is less important and therefore frequently underestimated, and undervalued.

When those on the technical path start their own company, they naturally create an organisation centred on technology. We call these companies Professional IT, because they closely model themselves on other professional services with rigorous and mandated areas of practitioner knowledge, such as lawyers, engineers, architects and accountants. A Professional IT company’s core competency is based on

1. a clear understanding of the workings, capabilities and limitations of Information Technology, and
2. the trained ability to apply that understanding to help your business.

The Professional IT firm, in other words, is led by technical expertise, and backed by further qualification, training, and experience.

T

he sales path usually starts with the predictable attractant of products with a high demand and large margins. The motivation is concisely expressed as;
 
“Information technology is amazing stuff. Think of the things I could sell”.

A career IT salesperson may start by selling older, established office technology like faxes or photocopiers. These are commodity products, and customers have a clear understanding of what they are buying and what they do. Take the humble, if complex, copier. A successful rep will not have to explain what they do, or how they work. Her job is to remember the machine’s features, and relative costs, and promote them to office staff members who understand how this or that refinement may lead to small but measureable increases in office efficiency. More importantly, in this situation selling machines as complete catch-all solutions becomes a reflex process.

To salespeople working with the narrow margins of function and price of traditional office commodities, the extraordinary range, margins and proliferation of the IT market can seem irresistible, and the conceptual gap between a large Xerox and a small Pentium will consequently seem a small one. They now begin to sell these new machines as solutions, and any technical difficulties that might arise they see as analogous to a breakdown in an advanced copier. This is a tragically incorrect assumption.

In fact, the vast majority of IT Salespeople begin with a large gap in not only their understanding of how computers work or what they do, but also in their comprehension of what any given computer application is really going to do for the business they are pitching it to. This gap becomes canyonesque as they move up the technology/cost scale.

In more than 20 years in the industry almost every IT salesman we have encountered selling computer support services has had little or no idea about such basics as how email works, how the World Wide Web works, how the Internet works, that the Internet and WWW are different, how the Windows operating system works, how Ethernet works, how Citrix works. The exceptions were that almost crypto-zoological breed of ex-technologists who have moved to sales.

When those on the sales path start their own company they naturally create an organisation centred on Sales systems. We call this type of company Reseller IT because it closely models other reselling organisations – office suppliers, or car dealers, for example. The core competency of a Reseller IT company is in bundling up the feature/benefit list of a group of products, and presenting/promoting this list to customers to select based on their own assessment of needs. In cases where customers can not accurately assess their own needs (they may be unaware of this), promotion can unashamedly be replaced by prescription.

A Reseller IT company’s rep will arrive with a well-rehearsed pre-dinner speech extolling a features and benefits list as a placebo for actual understanding. His actual knowledge will be little more (or a little less) than a Brand name rehash of the knowledge that you have managed to acquire as a computer user. His skill is in getting agreement on features and benefits, doing this by inferring knowledge that he (and often the customer) doesn’t have.

In other words, Reseller IT is fundamentally led by sales expertise, and focuses on ease of approach, pre-packaged solutions, and likeability. Technical knowledge is secondary. Technical expertise is something to be catalogued and resold with the rest of the product list, or brought in on an ad-hoc basis as a highly bruited (and highly expensive) “high-tech” solution.