System iNetwork

May 1, 2007

A New Channel for Solutions Information

Welcome to Product Lines, a new blog about third-party product solutions in the System i market. You probably know me best from my monthly Product Guy column or various product-related articles in System iNEWS and here at SystemiNetwork.com. While this blog will have something in common with that, it's also going to be a major departure.

I've been covering the products beat in the AS/400-iSeries-System i market for nearly 17 years now, so I have a little experience, you might say. I hope to provide you with a few insights from time to time about the software products that provide solutions for so many people, as someone who's used to looking at product offerings from a vendor-neutral point of view. But far from this new blog being all about me, I really want it to be much more about you, the users (and even the vendors) in our market.

After all these years, it's my observation that despite so many of us being "information professionals," it's kind of surprising how little information we get to use sometimes in making decisions. I've heard so many stories about people at small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) who, pressed for time and resources needed to do a thorough product search, buy a solution for which they took a demo because someone they network with heard of someone else's company that had a good experience with that product. But then they end up with buyer's remorse later because whatever that product was, it really didn't work the way they expected or it failed to meet their actual business needs in some crucial way. I think it's unfair to write this off to lack of due diligence -- there's an awful lot of product information to sift through out there in the world and even the best search engines and portals can sometimes miss crucial information just because of how people state their search terms.

I'm writing this initial entry from COMMON Anaheim and I saw an example of how this sort of information disconnect can happen -- just since lunch. I was standing at the booth of a vendor that, in part, offers a portal product with security features. A woman walked up and started to make a routine inquiry about providing her users with a way to access business information. It turns out that she's the single developer at her shop, is snowed under with projects, but her boss has insisted this needs to be a new priority. So she's at COMMON, looking for product information between sessions. The vendor explained his product, and every time she inquired about a feature, the vendor said, "we have that." They exchanged contact information and she walked away. "See that?" the vendor commented to me. "She didn't even know our product existed until she walked up to this booth."

Is this "mutual ignorance until ten minutes ago" the fault of the woman from the one-person shop? Hardly. She's buried in work and probably wouldn't have even made an inquiry except that her management suddenly shifted her priorities, so she's doing what research she's had time to do so far. Is it the fault of the vendor? No again, it's a company that has advertised in midrange publications for many years and has always seemed to me to be very diligent about getting the word out about its offerings. So it's no one's fault, and had this woman simply bypassed the vendor's booth because she thought of the vendor, "oh, he's busy talking to that guy," an important connection could have been delayed for weeks . . . or maybe forever.

And after talking to vendors for so many years, I see how their problem is that when it comes time to decide what features to include in their next product, or the next release, their feedback is largely limited to comments and requests from customers and prospects and from eyeballing what their competitors are up to lately. Good information sources to be sure, but certainly not the complete story when trying to assess market needs. The real problem that everyone shares is that we've collectively reached the point where there's too much information out there to efficiently sort through it all. We're all limited to doing the best we can with the time and information resources available to us.

So here comes "Product Lines." Yes, more information, but hopefully focused enough to be of use to both buyers and sellers. My goal is for this space to become a forum for discussion of such topics as what makes a product good, what people need from product solutions that they're not finding, and what features a consensus of potential product buyers think should be in the "ideal" application development tool, business intelligence solution, application software package, or what have you. In this weekly blog, I'll try to keep the ball rolling on discussions with a hopefully not-too-long entry about such topics as offerings outside our market that maybe provide a good model for products in our market, new products within our market that are offering the best of new features and functions, and other info of use that happens to scroll across my monitor. I'll try to keep it light, and I invite participation from anyone who wants to contribute, from wish lists to pointers to products that may already exist that meet a need. If the outcome is users getting what they need to do their job and connecting them with vendors selling solutions that satisfy those needs -- and incidentally helping keep our System i market vibrant -- I'll have done my job.

I've spent enough time explaining myself, so I'll close with a general question to the end users among you (that should be everyone, right?), some answers to which will hopefully launch us all on a voyage of discovery of sorts. The question:

"What do you need to do your job, or meet the needs of your business, that you don't have?" Please tell me. Your answer doesn't have to be long, although it can be. But let's just start with that and see where it goes. Hopefully, even if I don't hear from all of you, we can bring at least a little more illumination to the search for useful tools with which to "get the job done."

Posted by at May 1, 2007 4:59 PM