I'll Do It Myself (Not!)

There must be a male "do-it-yourself" gene somewhere in our DNA.

And as I talk to many IT organizations, there seems to be a certain stubborness in accepting help in the form of consulting or other services.

I think that this sort of thinking will have to change radically in the next few years.  I believe IT organizations will have to become even more adept at figuring out what they want to be really good at, and what things they'll want to turn to external services or expertise.

I'll Do It Myself, Thank You ...

I am not exempt from this stubborn behavior. 

I remember the time I tried to fix my car, and ended up making things much worse than when I started.  I probably got close to burning my house down years ago when I tried to do a little impromptu electrical wiring. 

I don't even want to talk about the plumbing experience.

My wife knows this well by now.  If it's important, get an expert to do the work.  I don't attempt car repair, electrical work, plumbing, home improvement, taxes, legal work, health care, etc.  It's cheaper and better in the long run if we simply bite the bullet and find someone we trust to do the work.

I do reserve the right to do computer work, as well as manage our fleet of AV equipment. 

At least, so far.

Back to IT

So, one of the standard questions I usually ask when I'm getting to know an IT organization is trying to figure out where they use services -- not because they're cheaper, but because they're better.

I try and figure out what they consider "core" (stuff they have to be really good at) and "context" (stuff that needs to be done well enough, but they don't want to invest their own resources in becoming really good).

Occasionally I encounter a customer who has a deep dislike in engaging external IT professionals or services.  I often wonder why that is.

Is it that they don't trust anyone?  Did they have a real bad experience?

Or is it that they believe that they can figure out anything that's important? 

Or is it that DIY gene expressing itself again? 

I don't know, but I do know that it's going to be a costly behavior going forward.

Multi-factored IT Services vs. Traditional Outsourcing

I think the traditional outsourcing model that was so popular in the last decade is nearing the end of its shelf life.  Replacing it will be factored IT services that customers can pick and choose from as they assemble their own portfolio.

Desktop management, print services and end-user help desks are popular targets, but I think we'll see much more here going forward.  From an EMC perspective, we see opportunities in backup/restore, information management (think archiving, compliance, search, etc.), infrastructure management and security event information management.

Other technology vendors probably see their portfolio of new, factored IT services becoming more interesting as well -- something we probably can all agree on.

But I see the traditional outsourcers very challenged in creating these new, factored offerings -- and taking them to market in such a way that customers can pick and choose the pieces they need, without being faced with a traditional, all-or-nothing outsourcing decision.

Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of large-scale IT outsourcing.  And, when I talk to customers who have done it, their experiences have not been uniformly positive. 

The question in my mind is whether the traditional players will make the move, or will we see new players emerge that have built their business on newer, factored IT services.

Consulting vs. Skill Set Transfer

The cynical joke in the consulting biz is that the primary job of a consultant is to find the next consulting opportunity.  This leads to very long-term engagements where the consultants never seem to go home.

Now, in all fairness, there's a role for this kind of long-term consulting.  As an example, EMC offers residencies which are long-term consultants that help with storage transformation, or providing storage management services, or the like.  To my way of thinking, it's just another flavor of factored services, but the intent is clear from the beginning.

The real growth area that I see is skill-set transfer -- how do you do the work in such a way that the client is then able to perform it themselves?  The problem is that this sort of approach kind of may undermine the business model of pure-services firms -- they'd probably like you to retain a certain dependency.

I don't think EMC views things this way.  At our heart, we're a products and technology company.  We're in the services business primarily to help people get the most out of the technology.  So enabling customers -- skill set transfers -- is what we really want.  My belief is that there's always plenty of new stuff to go learn and deliver as services that'll be valuable going forward.

Evolution of Consulting Offerings

I've noticed that consulting offerings tend to evolve over time to become more and more sophisticated.

A good example is information classification -- it's a consulting engagement we've offered for a while. 

When we started several years ago, it was very cost-reduction oriented.  We'd define multiple tiers, establish service objectives, cost points and then work with customers to align the big buckets of information to an optimized tiered environment.

Over time, it's expanded to include notions of information protection (backup, replication), information management (archiving, retention, search, compliance), information security (who can see it, and can you audit access?) and -- most lately -- information exploitation: using existing information for new business purposes.

At the same time, what once was a manual, external classification process is becoming increasingly automated with products like VisualSRM, EmailXtender, dbXtender and Infoscape.  More work to do here, but the degree to which we can apply technology (instead of people) to classify information is steadily progressing.

There are other examples -- even though the category of service remains pretty much the same, what's inside the engagement has expanded dramatically over time.

The Core Questions

I think, over time, most IT organizations will wrestle with a couple of core issues regarding this trend. 

One example is what IT services do we want to provide natively, and which ones do we want to contract for?  Everyone talks about cost-reduction, but I think over time it'll be more about expertise.

As we look at our portfolio of services going forward, where are we going to need help getting good?  And who can help us get good without keeping us dependent?

And, finally, who are you going to trust to do this for you?

Comments

[Kiran Ghag]

>If it's important, get an expert to do the work.

I believe the winner choice between DIY and YDI (Yo-Do-It (for me)) depends a lot on who-am-I, whats-to-be-done (in the context) and what-is-available.

We are a big shop running almost everything. With the years of operations, we are now able to have a trained and skilled pool of resources. This pool can now do tasks which normally would be done by vendor (Infrastructure setup, configuration, planning).

We are now able to do many things on our own and this helps us save time and money both. We try to maintain a balance, between things we do and things vendor solely does for us.

EMC after-sales is certainly a great hand in the process, helping us do things and refining our knowledge. I agree that vendor is still the expert but customer is now reaching the level too.

At present, vendor involvement and expertise is greater. But I see this reducing over time. I believe that as time passes by, there would be more people available who can do intermediate to complex task/designs/recommendations routinely.

Of course there wont be any time when role of vendor would be reduced to "a vendor", unless the storage world truly becomes heterogeneous and interoperable.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Kiran -- thanks for the perspective!

I see more and more things coming over the horizon for IT to do that will be important, and -- generally speaking -- most IT groups seem to be falling behind in key areas.

Now, in specific cases, you may have an exceptional team, or few alternatives may be available to you, so I'm arguing broadly and not narrowly.

One of my favorite examples is setting up some sort of information governance function -- something IT should clearly do to hammer out information mgmt policy in key areas -- but never gets around to doing.

A more narrow example would be designing a remote replication environment -- something most people don't do routinely -- and that's really, really easy to screw up.

And then there's the value-add discussion. I see IT guys spend an enormous amount of time on configuration mgmt and patch mgmt -- if someone gave you an easy service that did it for you, would you be interested?

Thanks again!

[Fred-san]

Pure Consulting play firms are not going to do skills transfer, that's like giving away a chunk of potential business. Furthermore, it's endemic that consulting firms win the business with the partners' impressive credentials and then use freshly minted graduates to actually perform the work. Great way to get rich (for the partners) when you charge $300 / hour and pay the person who actually does the work $80k p.a. Oops ... EMC does that too ;-)

[Chuck Hollis]

A company buying something for one price, adding value, and selling it for a higher price?

Outrageous, it is ... you'd think they're trying to be profitable, or something!

[Stuart French]

I'm coming late to this conversation Chuck, but we have just gone through this situation and I thought I would add my two cents.

We had the experience of defaulting FIRST to external consultants, only to find they knew less about some of the EMC SAN issues than we did after 6-7 hours of reading. Even had an "Expert" approve a LUN configuration that forgot about the OS on the first 5 disks. Ended up sending our network admin on a 3 day course and doing it all ourselves.

There needs to be a lot stronger accreditation of these consultant companies (this one was Dell and EMC approved and recommended) so we know what we are getting. In a large company losing $20k in consultants fees can be very annoying. In a small company, throwing that much money away will lose you your job. It's just not worth the risk of getting a bad apple. Better to work your own way through it and just do the best you can. The job won't be done as well, but at least you will have a job at the end of it.

Maybe this will change once most of the large corporates have virtualised and installed SANs and these consultants have to focus on the SME market, rather than just seeing us as time-fillers for their new techs to cut their teeth on?

[Chuck Hollis]

Absolutely.

We don't tolerate bad doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. -- why would we tolerate poor IT consultants?

I think the industry (and that includes EMC) has a ways to go to certify, accredit and monitor the work done by IT consultants.

And I don't think any company has the formula yet.