Netizen Blog and News
The Netizen team sharing expertise, insights and useful information in cybersecurity, compliance, and software assurance.
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Sales today is not what it was twenty or even ten years ago. Organizations have become leery of the cold call (or email) and direct mailing often goes direct-to-landfill without so much as a cursory glance. A couple decades ago, and still in many places today, sales was all about volume. Business development people would estimate that, for example, for every 100 doors slammed in their face, 10 or 12 might open and let them in, of which they might close 1 or 2 deals. This is the shotgun style of sales – sporadic and dispersed. It may have been effective in the pre-internet days of yore, but there are better uses of your business development time nowadays.
The so-called “hard sell,” for the most part, is thankfully on its way out in many industries. The type of pitches and coercion they use to sell people timeshares aren’t conducive to high-touch industries where customers have options and engagements are longer term. This is where relationship building comes in. Customers nowadays want people they can trust, people who will provide a solution for them, even if it isn’t in your own best interest. They want companies who will go the extra mile to truly understand them, and take the time to get to know them personally and professionally. Romance them so to speak, though in a professional, not physical, way.
Customers should be our partners. We should get to know them like family, and have their best interests in mind all the time, not just when they can are forking over their hard-earned cash. The size of their budget shouldn’t matter as much as their long-term potential. This is because you never know when that 2-person shop down the road will turn into a 200 person corporation or that entry-level administrative assistant will become the next vice president of something, and they will remember how you treated them and helped out in those early days.
However, in order for this to work, you have to choose your customers carefully, just as they evaluate you. Find ones that share values and ideals. Ones that understand that sometimes the lowest bidder isn’t the best option for a particular type of work (being lowest-cost provider is seldom the best place to be for any business in terms of sustainability, but that is a topic for another post). A customer that doesn’t take advantage of your time and expertise or mistake your occasional generosity for being a pushover target. This also means “firing” clients who violate this partnership trust, as well. In the end, these long-term provider-client relationships bear more fruit and provide a vibrant source of referral work, but require a lot more up-front investment and time. You have to be patient, not pushy, and guide the potential client in a direction which suits them best, not force them one direction or another solely for your own selfish benefit.
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We live on the cusp of an era which could be booming with troves of freely available data and other resources, created and curated lovingly by technical experts of all types, and made easily accessible through a web browser or mobile device. We need an Open Source and Open Data revolution in government to make this a reality, but it needs our help to happen.
Government is still (and will probably forever continue to be) replete with archaic procurement mechanisms and privacy rules dating back decades, even centuries. New regulations are piled on year after year, and few are ever removed. Data of all flavors and formats are hoarded, even stuffed into old coal mines, without any concern for accessibility because of pre-internet practices established when Amazon was just a forest in South America. But there is a new hope on the horizon, as many agencies are starting to awake from their decades-long innovation-less slumber starting at several levels, but most pronounced in cities large and small.
Starting some years ago with crime and zoning maps, such as those compiled by the City of Chicago, to the recent implementation of an SMS text citizen survey system in Philadelphia and data collection applications such as those created for citizens to report on everything from potholes to storm damage, there is a municipal renaissance underway which has the potential to improve access of citizens to their government in an unprecedented manner. But it needs evangelists from individuals and companies alike.
It’s not like it is charity work, either, with reputable analysts estimating so called “Smart Cities” to be a $200 billion industry which encompasses everything from cloud computing and Big Data to the Internet of Things (sensors) and website platforms specifically designed for data accessibility and citizen communications. There has never been anything like it, but we need to find ways around ridiculous procurement mechanisms and a risk-averse culture to reach its full potential.
We need to bring data out of its current moldy storage bins and into the open for citizens and companies alike to build upon it with all the power of the population. We need to find ways to create lower barriers to entry in order to overcome entrenched personnel and burdensome procurement processes. We can do this by proposing change in multiple smaller doses instead of an overnight revolution and finding ways to make such changes easier for civil servants to implement with limited budgets and siloed organizational authority. Only then can we change things city-by-city, agency-by-agency until our government is as we need it to be – full and open for all to learn, build and explore.
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Very often IT professionals have to pick up where many others have left off. All things started somewhere, but very few of us actually get to experience the ground floor and understand the mentality during the time a system was first conceived and created, especially in large organizations. What started off as a novel idea or approach to accomplishing something may now be a hodge-podge monolithic system of bolted on (or loosely tied together) features bound together by the technical equivalent of duct tape and first-aid bandages. This happens everywhere all the time; from the smallest mom-and-pop shop to the largest federal government agency. It seems to be human nature in dealing with technology to try and avoid starting over but often at the cost of endless complexity later on.
Sometimes it’s best to just rip the bandage off straight away, unfurl the reams of tape binding all the little pieces together and start anew. This doesn’t mean, however, that you lose your data or the precious knowledge built up across the years or decades. What it does mean is that you find a way to port that information to a newer, faster and simpler solution either in bulk or as a phased migration. That new solution needs to, this time, be built with modularity in mind in anticipation of being replaced (or wholly upgraded) one day in the not-too-distant future.
Modularity in IT systems is the key to success (and future cost savings), and with the proliferation of web services (how computers “talk” to each other over the internet) there is no need for proprietary protocols and obtusely complex interfaces. All that should remain is your data, but the format (how it is stored) and logic (how it is processed) can and should change to k
eep pace with modern advancements. I’m not saying to do such a thing for every passing technological fancy, but at least once every 7 to 10 years a formerly shiny “novel” technology becomes so outdated that costs to maintain it skyrocket, as does its inherent risk in supporting it. This is because your vendor has probably moved onto something else much more modern long ago and does not provide adequate patching or security fixes (or does so only at an extreme, untenable cost).So, all that being said, we must plan and budget with replacement in mind from the start no matter how large or small the technical infrastructure may be. The simplest way to do so is to build IT system
s of limited complexity, but high modularity as previously stated. This makes replacement comparatively easy because these coupled technology components can be upgraded one-by-one over a period of years without having to throw thousands (even millions) at a large monolithic system upgrade all at once. The mega-upgrades of yesteryear have proven to be a recipe for failure. The approach to build with the entire lifecycle in mind, in a modular, standards-based manner that focuses on the data, not only the logic, is what adds value, not complexity, and thus saves tremendous costs over the lifetime of the system. -
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Things change. That is inevitable. Whether for the better or worse is generally a matter of perspective. For example, on one hand, the price of goods that used to be outside of the buying power of the average household or business 50 years ago has generally come way down and, thus, affordable to millions who otherwise would never have even considered such a purchase (think cars, computer hardware, software, or mobile phones). However, on the other hand, prices on some of these goods have been suppressed heavily through the use of cheaper overseas labor and, more recently, automation which has lead to job losses in once formidable sectors of the economy. How you perceive this change in the economic landscape is mostly a matter of where you look at it from – as a consumer who can afford incredible things once reserved for wealthy people and corporations or as a former producer who lost their business or job because of the ways things changed.
That being said, shifts in economic trends happen all of the time, pushed by the forces of technology. If
you aren’t paying attention and educating yourself constantly in preparation for them, then it is almost a certainty you will eventually find yourself or your business obsoleted by the competition, regardless of your industry. These types of dramatic changes used to happen over periods of decades, such as the decline in the steel industry or railroads, which generally allowed for people and businesses to have enough forewarning to update their skills and infrastructure over time. But the pace of these shifts has sped up abruptly in the past several years due to a number of factors, including the most recent recession which has left companies scrambling to cut costs by any means possible and the advent of on-demand computing platforms such as “the Cloud.”These forces and resources are the reason why we are seeing a sudden shift to technologies that can adapt and scale up or down based upon current needs, versus the technologies of yesteryear with huge upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, even if your business need or level of use decreases dramatically. The problem with the latter scenario of yesteryear is that these older style systems have the same (or even greater) costs over time without any consideration for how much use of the system is actually occurring. It’s like the computing equivalent of having three of the five members of your family move out, but you’re still stuck with a six bedroom house for life that you have to maintain indefinitely on your own – oh, and did we mention it has cracked walls, lead paint, and leaky pipes? That doesn’t make a whole lot of economic sense to continue to maintain, but companies still do it with their legacy IT systems instead of choosing to migrate to something far more modern, secure, and cost efficient. It could be the other way around as well. Imagine your five person family suddenly becomes ten when the in-laws move in, what then? An on-demand, scalable system will grow with you easily, but the older way of going about things will require thousands, even millions, in extensions, patches and enhancements to accommodate the increased demand.
We, as business owners and employees alike, have to accept that we live in an era of almost constant technological evolution and it requires that we build our businesses, processes and systems with this flexibility in mind. Adopting or developing software, products and computing systems with near limitless potential scale that can be essentially streamed on demand to end users on a month-to-month or even day-to-day basis has become far more of a competitive advantage in this landscape, one which has made the difference between merely surviving and thriving for many. Those people and companies who have gained this fluid adaptation response to technological change are the ones who typically come out ahead of everyone else in the market. So, is your use of technology as flexible and efficient as it should be to ensure your success? If you aren’t so sure, perhaps it’s time to bring in a professional in this area to make a quick assessment (which we can do for free or at very low cost).
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