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ChangeForge | Ken Stewart | Where business and technology collide » Are Your Solutions Sales Part of the “In-Crowd”?

Started by ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 10 months ago

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4 comments

  • Dan Keldsen

    1 year ago

    Hi Ken - well, it's about time ECM/DMS/etc. gets a bit more attention, eh? The fastest growing source of "digital stuff" is the unstructured world of documents, content, information and knowledge, and yet the ratio of database and operations people to the unstructured world is entirely flipped around...

    Great to see a conversation about solution selling, and honing in on the combined needs of both business and IT. Of course, are those teams aligned? Perhaps, perhaps not - so always wise to uncover how the parties involved in this decision interact, and how to affect useful change by being a bridge builder between those parties, and into a solution that will fit their needs.

    Hard work to be sure, but well worth it, all around.

    Cheers,
    Dan
    reply
  • ChangeForge | Ken Stewart

    1 year ago

    Dan, those are great observations to be sure! With printed documents rising at an estimated 11% and reaching a staggering 3,500+ billion (with a 'B' folks) pages in 2006 alone (according to Gartner), you bet unstructured data is everywhere... However, I will be interested to see the evolution of 'tagging' and 'Google-type' search tools become more prevalent as well... (but that's another post).

    Solution selling is key, and even in our very own sales force, the paradigm hasn't completely shifted away from selling 'the box', as it were. We can debate all day long with this, but there is a very viable business model still in play and a lot of palms are being greased so far. Does everyone agree the margins are shrinking - sure, but the transition is a slow, a lot of work, and painful to be sure.

    On the subject of bridge-building, I just ran across an interesting statistic in a fairly recent article of Information Week (I think) that showed more re-alignments of CIO positions under either a CFO or COO - away from the CEO!

    An interesting case might be made that many IT leaders still don't know how to build bridges and bring value to the business operation.
    reply
  • Dan Keldsen

    1 year ago

    Ooph, CIOs reporting to the COO is bad enough, but MAYBE good. To the CFO? Been there, really mixed bag...

    Having sales and marketing skills are awfully handy for any technical role. Completely changed my role, when I took that to hear. Out of the weeds, and into executing on the business vision.

    Bridges don't build themselves - at least not until we get nanotechnology working! :)

    Cheers,
    Dan
    reply
  • ChangeForge | Ken Stewart

    1 year ago

    All I have to say is, Amen! I stepped out of the server closet and into the boardroom as I like to say.
    reply

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