Picture this: you need some work done on your car. You don’t know anything about engines, or sparkplugs or alternators. You just know that the engine is important, and you need someone with specialised skills to fix or enhance it.
Anyway, you take it into a garage - one that you’ve used before so you trust them. They tell you what needs to be done, and how much that will cost. What choice do you have - you have to trust them as you can’t verify that the work is acutally needed or not.
Now imagine you’re responsible for creating an online presence for your organisation. You know that this means you’re going to have to put your organisation on the internet, and what’s more you know that you don’t have the skills to do this.
There are companies out there that do this sort of thing; some advertise openly, some only through word of mouth. You contact one, and get an estimate for the work to get done based on what you’ve asked for. You can’t check the estimate as you don’t understand Analysis, Build, Test and Deployment, but these guys are professionals and wouldn’t lie to you - right?
This is the way I like to look at situations that my customers must feel that they are in. I try to give them as much information as possible to make them feel part of the IT estimation process without confusing the situation. Happily this seems to help most of the time, but I can certainly see that some organisations can feel quite vulnerable.
This is why many organisations will stay with one vendor, and getting them to change is very difficult. Even if you can show that their incumbent isn’t perhaps as frugal as they could be. Some complacency from IT vendors is there in the market, but along side this is a very New Zealand-like resistance to change from the known.
I’m not suggesting that this is wide-spread in the industry, but would like to point out that most IT vendors are honestly out there to do the best by their customers. We shouldn’t be complacent however as our clients must feel a little uncertain some times.
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