Well, it’s been a while, but I’m finally back to conclude this run down of our ideal customer profiles with part four – the Department Head. I’ve already looked at the process guy, the tech guy and the budget guy.
To recap, the process guy is usually our first point of contact. He wants to improve process, drive down IT costs, improve efficiency and so forth, and realizes that he needs to understand, empirically and backed up with real data, what the IT department is doing. The tech guy comes in to verify that what we claim SMI Suite can do, it can actually do, and that we really can deliver an out of the box solution with none of the data warehouse, BI team, dedicated DBA nonsense that you would usually expect. Once they’re both on-board, they’ll bring in the budget guy to approve the spend – which, given the cost of the alternatives, is rarely a big ask.
But often there’s one final person we need to convince, and that’s the department head. He’s the guy with overall responsibility, the one with the vision for how he wants his department to operate. Often we find that he simply isn’t interested in the level of detail that speaks to the other three. He isn’t immediately concerned with exactly what SMI Suite does, or how it does it.
He is, however, concerned about what the implementation of SMI Suite will mean to the big picture, because he’s the ultimate big picture guy. He wants to know how much money SMI Suite is going to save him, and how long it’s going to take for him to get a return on his investment. He wants to know which other big players – and particularly those in the same sector, or those of a similar size – are using SMI Suite and what their experiences are. The flipside of that is that once SMI Suite is up and running, and the ROI well demonstrated, he is usually happen to give us the sort of customer testimonial that we can then use on the next department head we encounter.
That concludes this little series, which I like to think of as a sort of latter day Charles Dickens kind of a deal. Shorter than A Christmas Carol. Slightly less tedious than Bleak House. I hope you enjoyed it.
Tom
