Business of IT

Buyers and Sellers Agents in IT

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When dealing with real estate purchases, we have discrete roles defined legally as to when a real estate agent represents the seller or when they represent the buyer.  Each party gets clear documentation as to how they are being represented.  In both cases, the agent is bound by honesty and ethical limitations, but beyond that their obligations are to their represented party.

Outside of the real estate world, most of us do not deal with buyer’s agents very often.  Seller’s agents are everywhere, we just call them salespeople.  We deal with them at many stores and they are especially evident when we go to buy something large, like a car.

In business, buyer’s agents are actually pretty common and actually come in some interesting and unspoken forms.  Rarely does anyone actually talk about buyer’s agents in business terms, mostly because we are not talking about buying objects but about buying solutions, services or designs.  Identifying buyer’s and seller’s agents alone can become confusing and, often, companies may not even recognize when a transaction of this nature is taking place.

We mostly see the engagement of sellers – they are the vendors with products and services that they want us to purchase.  We can pretty readily identify the seller’s agents that are involved.  These include primarily the staff of the vendor itself and the sales people (which includes pre-sales engineering and any “technical” resource that gets compensation by means of the sale rather than being explicitly engaged and remunerated to represent your own interests) of the resellers (resellers being a blanket term for any company that is compensated for selling products, services or ideas that they themselves do not produce; this commonly includes value added resellers and stores.)  The seller’s side is easy.  Are they making money by somehow getting me to buy something?  If so… seller’s agent.

Buyer’s agents are more difficult to recognize.  So much so that it is common for businesses to forget to engage them, overlook them or confuse seller’s agents for them.  Sadly, outside of real estate, the strict codes of conduct and legal oversight do not exist and ensuring that seller’s agent is not engaged mistakenly where a buyer’s agent should be is purely up to the organization engaging said parties.

Buyer’s agents come in many forms but the most common, yet hardest to recognize, is the IT department or staff, themselves.  This may seem like a strange thought, but the IT department acts as a technical representative of the business and, because they are not the business themselves directly, an emotional stop gap that can aid in reducing the effects of marketing and sales tactics while helping to ensure that technical needs are met.  The IT team is the most important buyer’s agent in the IT supply chain and the last line of defense for companies to ensure that they are engaging well and getting the services, products and advice that they need.

Commonly  IT departments will engage consulting services to aid in decision making. The paid consulting firm is the most identifiable buyer’s agent in the process and the one that is most often skipped (or a seller’s agent is mistaken for the consultant.)  A consultant is hired by, paid by and has an ethical responsibility to represent the buyer.  Consultants have an additional air gap that helps to separate them from the emotional responses common of the business itself.  The business and its internal IT staff are easily motivated by having “cool solutions” or expensive “toys” or can be easily caused to panic through good marketing, but consultants have many advantages.

Consultants have the advantage that they are often specialists in the area in question or at least spend their time dealing with many vendors, resellers, products, ideas and customer needs.  They can more easily take a broad view of needs and bring a different type of experience to the decision table.

Consultants are not the ones who, at the end of the day, get to “own” the products, services or solutions in question and are generally judged on their ability to aid the business effectively.  Because of this they have a distinct advantage in being more emotionally distant and therefore more objective in deciding on recommendations.  The coolest, newest solutions have little effect on them while cost effectiveness and business viability do.  More importantly, consultants and internal IT working together provide an important balancing of biases, experience and business understandings that combine the broad experience across many vendors and customers of the one, and the deep understanding of the individual business of the other.

One can actually think of the Buyer’s and Seller’s Agent system as a “stack”.  When a business needs to acquire new services, products or to get advice, the ideal and full stack would look something like this: Business > IT Department > ITSP/Consultants <> Value Added Reseller < Distributor < Vendor.  The <> denotes the reflection point between the buyer’s side and the seller’s side.  Of course, many transactions will not involve and should not involve the entire stack.  But this visualization can be effective in understanding how these pieces are “designed” to interface with each other.  The business should ideally get the final options from IT (IT can be outsourced, of course), IT should interface through an ITSP consultant in many cases, and so forth.  An important part of the processes is keeping actors on the left side of the stack (or the bottom) from having direct contact with those high up in the stack (or on the right) because this can short circuit the protections that the system provides allowing vendors or sales staff to influence the business without the buyer’s agents being able to vet the information.

Identifying, understanding and leveraging the buyer’s and seller’s agent system is important to getting good, solid advice and sales for any business and is widely applicable far outside of IT.

Business of IT, Storage

The Emperor’s New Storage

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We all know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.  In Hans Christian Anderson’s telling of the classic tale we have some unscrupulous cloth vendors who convince the emperor that they have clothes made from a fabric with the magical property of only being visible to people who are fit for their positions.  The emperor, not being able to see the clothes, decides to buy them because he fears people finding out that he cannot see them.  Everyone in the kingdom pretends to see them as well – all sharing the same fear.  It is a brilliant sales tactic because it puts everyone on the same team: the cloth sellers, the emperor, the people in the street all share a common goal that requires them to all maintain the same lie.  Only when a little boy who cares naught about his status in society but only about the truth points out that the emperor is naked is everyone free to admit that they don’t see the clothes either.

And this brings us to the storage market today.  Today we have storage vendors desperate to sell solutions of dubious value and buyers who often lack the confidence in their own storage knowledge to dare to question the vendors in front of management or who simply have turned to vendors to make their IT decisions on their behalf.  This has created a scenario where the vendor confidence and industry uncertainty has engendered market momentum causing the entire situation to snowball.  The effect is that using big, monolithic and expensive storage systems is so accepted today that often systems are purchased without any thought at all.  They are essentially a foregone conclusion!

It is time for someone to point at the storage buying process and declare that the emperor is, in fact, naked.

Don’t get me wrong.  I certainly do not mean to imply that modern storage solutions do not have value.  Most certainly they do.  Large SAN and NAS shared storage systems have driven much technological development and have excellent use cases.  They were not designed without value, but they do not apply to every scenario.

The idea of the inverted pyramid design, the overuse of SANs where they do not apply, came about because they are high profit margin approaches.  Manufacturers have a huge incentive to push these products and designs because they do much to generate profits.  SANs are one of the most profit-bearing products on the market.  This, in turn, incentivizes resellers to push SANs as well, both to generate profits directly through their sales but also to keep their vendors happy.  This creates a large amount of market pressure by which everyone on the “sales” side of the buyer / seller equation has massive pressure to convince you, the buyer, that a SAN is absolutely necessary.  This is so strong of a pressure, the incentives so large, that even losing the majority of potential customers in the process is worth it because the margins on the one customer that goes with the approach is generally worth losing many others.

Resellers are not the only “in between” players with incentive to see large, complex storage architectures get deployed.  Even non-reseller consultants have an incentive to promote this approach because it is big, complex and requires, on average, far more consulting and support than do simpler system designs.  This is unlikely to be a trivial number.  Instead of a ten hour engagement, they may win a hundred hours, for example, and for consultants those hours are bread and butter.

Of course, the media has incentive to promote this, too.  The vendors provide the financial support for most media in the industry and much of the content.  Media outlets want to promote the design because it promotes their sponsors and they also want to talk about the things that people are interested in and simple designs do not generate a lot of readership.  The same problems that exist with sensationalist news: the most important or relevant news is often skipped so that news that will gather viewership is shown instead.

This combination of factors is very forceful.  Companies that look to consultants, resellers and VARs, and vendors for guidance will get a unanimous push for expensive, complex and high margin storage systems.  Everyone, even the consultants who are supposed to be representing the client have a pretty big incentive to let these complex designs get approved because there is just so much money potentially sitting on the table.  You might get paid one hour of consulting time to recommend against overspending, but might be paid hundreds of hours for implementing and supporting the final system.  That’s likely tens of thousands of dollars difference, a lot of incentive, even for the smallest deployments.

This unification of the sales channel and even the front line of “protection” has an extreme effect.  Our only real hope, the only significant one, for someone who is not incentivized to participate in this system is the internal IT staff themselves.  And yet we find very rarely that internal staff will stand up to the vendors on these recommendations or even produce them themselves.

There are many reasons why well intentioned internal IT staff (and even external ones) may fail to properly assess needs such as these.  There are a great many factors involved and I will highlight some of them.

  • Little information in the market.  Because no company makes money by selling you less, there is almost no market literature, discussions or material to assist in evaluating decisions.  Without direct access to another business that has made the same decision or to any consultants or vendors promoting an alternative approach, IT professionals are often left all alone.  This lack of supporting experience is enough to cause adequate doubt to squash dissenting voices.
  • Management often prefers flashy advertising and the word of sales people over the opinions of internal staff.  This is a hard fact, but one that is often true.  IT professionals often face the fact that management may make buying decisions without any technical input whatsoever.
  • Any bid process immediately short circuits good design.  A bid would have to include “storage” and SAN vendors can easily bid on supplying storage while there is no meaningful way for “nothing” to bid on it.  Because there is no vendor for good design, good design has no voice in a bidding or quote based approach.
  • Lack of knowledge.  Often dealing with system architecture and storage concerns are one off activities only handled a few times over an entire career.  Making these decisions is not just uncommon, it is often the very first time that it has ever been done.  Even if the knowledge is there, the confidence to buck the trend easily is not.
  • Inexperience in assessing risk and cost profiles.  While these things may seem like bread and butter to IT management, often the person tasked with dealing with system design in these cases will have no training and no experience in determining comparative cost and risk in complex systems such as these.  It is common that risk goes unidentified.
  • Internal staff often see this big and costly purchase as a badge of honour or a means to bragging rights.  Excited to show off how much they were able to spend and how big their new systems are.  Everyone loves gadgets and these are often the biggest, most expensive toys that we ever touch in our industry.
  • Internal staff often have no access to work with equipment of this type, especially SANs.  Getting a large storage solution in house may allow them to improve their resume and even leverage the experience into a raise or, more likely, a new job.
  • Turning to other IT professionals who have tackled similar situations often results in the same advice as from sales people.  This is for several reasons.  All of the reasons above, of course, would have applied to them plus one very strong one – self preservation.  Any IT professional that has implemented a very costly system unnecessarily will have a lot of incentive to state that they believe that the purchase was a good one.  Whether this is irrational “reverse rationalization” – the trait where humans tend to apply ration to a decision that lacked ration when originally made, because they fear that their job may be in jeopardy if it was found out what they had done or because they have not assessed the value of the system after implementation; or even possibly because their factors were not the same as yours and the design was applicable to their needs.

The bottom line is that basically everyone, no matter what role they play, from vendors to sales people to those that do implementation and support to even your friends in similar job roles to strangers on Internet forums, all have big incentives to promote costly and risky storage architectures in the small and medium business space.  There is, for all intents and purposes, no one with a clear benefit for providing a counter point to this marketing and sales momentum.  And, of course, as momentum has grown the situation becomes more and more entrenched with people even citing the questioning of the status quo and asking critical questions as irrational or reckless.

As with any decision in IT, however, we have to ask “does this provide the appropriate value to meet the needs of the organization?”  Storage and system architectural design is one of the most critical and expensive decisions that we will make in a typical IT shop.  Of all of the things that we do, treating this decision as a knee-jerk, foregone conclusion without doing due diligence and not looking to address our company’s specific goals could be one of the most damaging that we make.

Bad decisions in this area are not readily apparent.  The same factors that lead to the initial bad decisions will also hide the fact that a bad decision was made much of the time.  If the issue is that the solution carries too much risk, there is no means to determine that better after implementation than before – thus is the nature of risk.  If the system never fails we don’t know if that is normal or if we got lucky.  If it fails we don’t know if this is common or if we were one in a million.  So observation of risk from within a single implementation, or even hundreds of implementations, gives us no statistically meaningful insight.  Likewise when evaluating wasteful expenditures we would have caught a financial waste before the purchase just as easily as after it.  So we are left without any ability for a business to do a post mortem on their decision, nor is there an incentive as no one involved in the process would want to risk exposing a bad decision making process.  Even companies that want to know if they have done well will almost never have a good way of determining this.

What makes this determination even harder is that the same architectures that are foolish and reckless for one company may be completely sensible for another.  The use of a SAN based storage system and a large number of attached hosts is a common and sensible approach to controlling costs of storage in extremely large environments.  Nearly every enterprise will utilize this design and it normally makes sense, but is used for very different reasons and goals than apply to nearly any small or medium business.  It is also, generally, implemented somewhat differently.  It is not that SANs or similar storage are bad.  What is bad is allowing market pressure, sales people and those with strong incentives to “sell” a costly solution to drive technical decision making instead of evaluating business needs, risk and cost analysis and implementing the right solution for the organization’s specific goals.

It is time that we, as an industry, recognize that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.  We need to be the innocent children who point, laugh and question why no one else has been saying anything when it is so obvious that he is naked.  The storage and architectural solutions so broadly accepted benefit far too many people and the only ones who are truly hurt by them (business owners and investors) are not in a position to understand if they do or do not meet their needs.  We need to break past the comfort provided by socially accepted plausible deniability or understanding, or culpability for not evaluating.  We must take responsibility for protecting our organizations and provide solutions that address their needs rather than the needs of the sales people.

 

For more information see: When to Consider a SAN and The Inverted Pyramid of Doom

Risk

Disaster Recovery Planning with Existing Platform Equipment

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Disaster Recovery planning is always difficult, there are so many factors and “what ifs” that have to be considered and investing too much in the recovery solution can itself become a  bit of a disaster.  A factor that is often overlooked in DR planning is that: in the event of a disaster you are generally able and very willing to make compromises where needed because a disaster has already happened.  It is triage time, not business as usual.

Many people immediately imagine that if you need capacity and performance of X for your live, production systems that you will need X as well for your disaster recovery systems.  In the real world, this is rarely true, however.  In the event of a disaster you can, with rare exception, work with lower performance and limit system availability to just the more critical systems and many maintenance operations, which often includes archiving systems, are suspended until full production is restored.  This means that your disaster recovery system can often be much smaller than your primary production systems.

Disaster recovery systems are not investments in productivity, they are hedges against failure and need to be seen in that light.  Because of this it is a common and effective strategy to approach the DR system needs more from a perspective of being “adequate” to maintain business activities while not enough to necessarily do so comfortably or transparently.  If a full scale disaster hits and staff have to deal with sluggish file retrieval, slower than normal databases or hold off on a deep BI analysis run until the high performance production systems are restored, few people will complain.  Most workers and certainly more business decision makers can be very understanding that a system is in a failed state and that they may need to help carry on as best as they can until full capacity is restored.

With this approach in mind, it can be an effective strategy to re-purpose older platforms for use at Disaster Recovery sites when new platforms are purchased and implemented for primary production usage.  This can create a low cost and easily planned around “DR pipeline” where the DR site always has the capacity of your “last refresh” which, in most DR scenarios, is more than adequate.  This can be a great way to make use of equipment that otherwise might either be scrapped outright or might tempt itself into production re-deployment by invoking a “sunk cost” emotional response that, in general, we want to avoid.

The sunk cost fallacy is a difficult one to avoid.  Already owning equipment makes it very easy to feel that deploying it again, even when a newly designed system is being implemented, outside of the system designs and specifications is useful or good.  And there are cases where this might be true, but most likely it is not.  But just as we don’t want to become overly emotionally attached to equipment just because we have already paid for it, we also don’t want to ignore the value in the existing equipment that we already own.  This is where a planned pipeline into a Disaster Planning scenario can leverage what we have already invested in a really great way in many cases.  We do have to remember that this is likely very useful equipment with a lot of value left in it, if we just know how to use it properly to meet our existing needs.

A strong production to disaster recovery platform migration planning process can be a great way to lower budgetary spending while getting excellent disaster recovery results.

Business of IT, IT Management

Understanding Bias

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I often write about the importance of alignment in goals between IT and vendors and how critical it is to avoid getting advice from those that you are not paying for that advice, because that makes them salespeople, basically the importance of getting advice and guidance from a buyer’s agent rather than directly from the seller’s agent.  This leads to questions about bias; clearly the idea is that a salesperson is biased in a way that is likely unfavourable to you.  But, it should be obvious, that all people are biased.

This is true, all people have bias.  We cannot seek to escape or remove all bias, that is simply impossible.  In fact, in many ways, when we see advice whether it be from a paid consultant whose job it is to present us with a good option, from IT itself doing the same or getting feedback from a friend on products that they have tested – it is actually their biases that we are seeking!

What we need to do is strive to understand the biases and motivations of the people with whom we speak and receive advice, be self reflecting to understand our own biases, have a good knowledge of what biases are good for us and attempt to get advice from people who have a general bias-alignment with us.

Biases come in many forms.  We can have good and bad biases, strong and weak ones.

The biggest biases typically come externally in the form of monetary or near-monetary compensation for bias.  This might be someone being paid as a sales person to promote the products that they are available to sell, commission structures would take this to an even more acute level.  Someone paid to do sales might face two of the strongest biases: monetary (they get money if they make the sale) and ethical (they made an agreement to sell this product if possible and they are ethically bound to try to do so.)  These are the standard biases of the “seller’s agent” or sales person.

On the other hand a consultant is paid by the buyer or customer and is a buyer’s agent and as the same monetary and ethical biases, but in the favour of the buyer rather than against them.  (I use the term buyer and customer here mostly interchangeably to represent the business or IT department, the ones receiving advice or guidance on what to do or buy.)  These biases are pretty evident and easily to control and I have covered them before – never get advice from the seller’s agent, always get your advice from the buyer’s agent.

If we assume that these big biases, those of alignment, are covered we still have a large degree of bias from our buyer’s agent that we need to uncover and understand.

One of the most common biases is one towards familiarity.  This is not a bad bias, but we must be aware of it and how it colours recommendations.  This bias can run very deep and affect decision making in ways that we may not understand without investigation.  At the highest level, the idea is simply that most anyone is going to favour, possibly unintentionally, solutions and products with which they have familiarity and the stronger that familiarity often the stronger the bias towards those products will be.

This may seem obvious but it is a bias that is commonly overlooked.  People turning to consultants will often seek their advice from someone with a very small set of experiences which serves as a means by which the resulting recommendations are likely drawn.  In a way, this is effectively the buyer preselecting the desired outcome and choosing a consultant that will deliver the desired outcome.  An example of this would be choosing a network engineer to design a solution when that engineer only knows one product line; naturally the engineer will almost certainly design a solution from that product line.  In choosing someone with limited experience in that area we are, for all intents and purposes, directly the results by picking based on a strong bias.  This happens extremely often in IT, presumably because those hiring consultants base this decision on what they think are foregone conclusions about what the resulting advice will be and forgetting to step back and get advice at a higher level.

Of course, like with many things, there is also an offset bias to the familiarity bias, the exploration bias.  While we tend to be strongly biased towards things that we know, there is also a bias towards the unknown and the opportunity to explore and learn.  This bias tends to be extremely weak compared to the familiarity bias, but far from trivial in many IT practitioners.  It is a bias that should not be ignored and is important for helping broaden the potential scope of advice from a single consultant.

Of course there are more biases that stem from familiarity.  There is a natural, strong bias towards companies that we have found to have good products, have good support or interact well.  Companies with whom we have experienced product, support or interaction issues we tend to be strongly biased against.  These, of course, are highly valuable biases that we specifically want consultants to bring with them.

One of the worst biases, however, and one that affects everyone is marketing bias.  Companies with large or well made marketing campaigns or that align with industry marketing campaigns can induce a large amount of bias that is not based on something valuable to the end user.  Similarly, market share is an almost valueless and often negative factor (large companies often charge more for equal products – e.g. you “pay for the name”) but can be a strong bias, one often brought to the table by the customer.  Customers commonly either directly control this bias by demanding only well marketed, seemingly popular or large vendor promoted recommendations be made or fail to react properly to apparently alternative solutions: both reactions heavily influence what a consultant is willing to recommend.  This is known as “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” from the 1980s, and is often an amazingly costly bias and a difficult one to overcome.  Of course it applies much more broadly than only to IBM and does not primarily pertain to them today, but the term became famous during IBM’s heyday of IT.

Of course the main bias that we seek is the bias of “what is the best option for the customer.”  This is itself, a bias.  One that we hope, when combined with other positive biases, overpowers the influence of negative biases.  And likewise there is a prestige bias, a desire to produce advice that is so good that it increases the respect for the consultant.

Biases come in many different types and are both the value in advice and the dangers in it.  Leveraging bias requires an understanding of the major biases that are or are likely at play in any specific instance as well as having empathy for the people that give advice.  If you take time to learn about what their financial, ethics, experiential and objective biases are, you can understand their role far better and you can better filter their advice based on that knowledge.

Take the time to consider the biases of the people from whom you get advice.  Likely you already know a lot of which biases affect them significantly and may be able to guess what more of them are.  Everyone has different biases and all people react to them differently.  What is a strong bias for one person is a weak one for someone else.  Consider talking to your consultants about their biases, they should be open to this conversation (and if not, be extra cautious) and hopefully have thought about it themselves, even if not in depth or in the same terms.

The people from whom you get advice should have biases that strongly align favourably towards you and your goals.

 

The Information Technology Resource for Small Business