A good friend of mine is in the market for a new car. In the conversation about this significant purchase we talked about how when we were younger we would always look at what was under the bonnet. It turned out that my friend had decided and bought the vehicle without ever even thinking about doing this. He simply fully trusted that the car would do what it told him it would in the brochure.
This experience is not new to us, the same is true of our home telephone; the satellite TV we buy; the electricity our children consume so much of etc. We buy them and use them when most of us do not have clue about how they work, we simply trust the provider will supply what we want. 99% of the time this works for us but occasionally there will be a feature that we don’t like or that we feel is missing. When this is the case we put up with not having it because the rest fulfils our need.
The problem comes when someone knowledgeable about the inner workings of a service is asked to organise procuring that service. This happens quite frequently within organisations when the architect that designed the previous exchange system is asked to outsource email for example. Their perception of what is necessary is coloured by their previous experience and often has a highly technical flavour, something that the end user will probably never notice. Small, often infrequently used, facilities that are available in current services are held up to be vital. This leads to hosted services being customised by vendors at the insistence of the specialists, even though the vendor has not operated the service like that before. Doing this adds additional delay and quite often makes for a service that does not operate as expected.
When considering the use of cloud services this lack of customisation is often the key objection within the technical areas. Missing features are highlighted as an absolute no go, despite the fact that they are not often used. This is the equivalent of rejecting the car purchase because an otherwise perfect vehicle does not have a folding rear arm rest. The truth is when buying into services as with buying a car you must expect to make some compromises. If your requirements are for a car that does 200mph on a fuel consumption of 100mpg then you either have to wait for something to come along that can do that or compromise on one of those figures. When buying a car you can usually customise various things but only within a manufacturer controlled range of configurations, this too is true of services.
If you have a long list of things that have to be changed about a service that are not yet on the vendors option list then either you are not realistically compromising or you are looking at the wrong service. If this is the case do not be tempted to persuade the vendor to modify the service for you, walk away. It’s really important that you trust this service and that it just works, persuading the vendor to do things they have never done before is not a great way of achieving this. I have seen this happen too many times now and I have not yet seen it work out well. If you cannot find a service that matches your requirement and you are certain you are not being too uncompromising then the market has not yet matured to a point that suits you.
It is worth noting here that sometimes staff with technical skill can focus on options that they know a cloud service will be unable to provide simply to obstruct the concept. You need to be sure that the requirements you are unable to meet are business requirements not technical ones. You can be sure that if business users themselves go out to buy IT services they would be unlikely to look under the hood. They will assume that the service does what it says on the tin
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