Compelling Events

Selling the IaaS dream can often be a long process, but it’s a process we enjoy and thrive on.  We can be talking to companies for 6 or 7 years before they make the plunge to transform their IT operations and consume cloud services – maybe we aren’t very good at “sales”?

All too often the turning point comes from a “compelling event”, you know – an on premises hardware meltdown, a fire in the data centre or just a complete failure of an out of warranty single point of failure piece of kit that causes mayhem and chaos.  These compelling events lead to a call to us to see if we can help out – of course we can help – and we do.

It’s a great feeling for us to be able to help people out at their time of need, our team just leans in and gets the job done restoring their services on our platform in record time.  Its even better when a few months later they tell us that everything is working so much better now, and that they should have made the move to us years ago.  And that’s kind of the point of this blog.

Wouldn’t it have been so much better to have avoided the compelling event entirely? Sure, everyone has 20/20 vision with hindsight, but time and time again these compelling events have been risks that are well understood and even documented.

So the question then is why did it take the compelling event to essentially create the business justification for the move to IaaS? Having been an engineer, an operations manager, and a CIO in previous roles I suspect it is one of a few reasons:

Conflicting Priorities

I’ve never seen any IT team in the world that doesn’t have conflicting priorities or that doesn’t have a list of “must do” works on their backlog.  Ultimately, it’s a resource challenge, but we will always have resource challenges. The thing is though, moving to the cloud will free up resources so kind of makes it a no brainer.

Cost Model

Whether it’s a belief that its too expensive, or that the funding model is misaligned to how the client operates – or just that the work has not been done to fully understand how the cost model works, for example knowing where costs will go up and where they will come down etc. the fact remains that after the compelling event, the cost model is magically accepted and seen as having value.

So that means that the cost model can’t have been the reason for not making the change earlier, it may have been perceived to be a challenge – but in reality, it was not.  And this is what leads me to what I think the most common challenge is.

IT Leaders Can’t Sell

Us IT leaders tend to be “Left Brained” types, logical facts-based thinkers and communicators – great for dealing with highly technical solutions that have many moving parts – terrible for getting others outside of our game to understand our priorities, risks and the impact on the business if we don’t get it right.

It is essential as an IT Leader that you learn how to sell and communicate your ideas and plans – and its way easier than dealing with the fall out of a large systems outage! We need to become better communicators and story tellers to better engage the business in what we need to do to maintain and grow operations.

So what’s your next compelling event that is just waiting to happen? And more importantly, what is the thing that you can do to avoid that compelling event happening?

We’re always happy to help you after and during the compelling event, but we would far rather be helping you resolve the problems before they become an event. Need help with telling the story?  Give us a yell, we have plenty of experience in this.