How are your language skills? Apart from English (obviously), some Irish, possibly a bit of French, German, maybe? The reason I ask is that you could be called upon, in a professional capacity, to demonstrate some special language skills if you want to keep your customers happy and spending.
Why? Because you will need to help customers that are suffering from ‘innovation inertia’, a term coined by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) to describe the difficulties companies face in knowing where to invest to transform their operations to survive and flourish in the digital economy.
Research by HDS found that 81% of companies surveyed were not prepared for the arrival of the digital age and 75% of business leaders were incapable of making informed decisions “because there was a lack of clarity over strategy”.
Richard Gadd, UK managing director at HDS, said the survey showed that technology played an integral role in helping organisations “transform to thrive in a digital economy, but only if there is consensus about which technologies are relevant to future growth and about the ability to adapt to these known priorities”.
He stressed it wasn’t a case of innovating for innovation’s sake but about having “the ability to garner valuable business insights to make informed technology investments that will drive future growth and enable organisations to redefine business agility”.
So, what we have here are confused customers frozen into inaction. But what could possibly have caused this state of affairs? Could it be the fault of suppliers or the wider messages emanating from the industry itself? It’s not unfair to say that the IT industry has been guilty on many occasions of trying to drag customers on a headlong rush into the future on the back of the latest innovative technology. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s usually lining up another technology to hype to the skies even as it’s selling the latest vision to customers.
HDS calls it innovation inertia. I prefer to call it innovation fatigue.
Recharge
I think channel partners have a role to play providing customers with the information to make informed decisions about how they apply IT in their businesses. I have no doubt technology can help businesses but I’m not sure that it actually transforms them. It definitely doesn’t transform them every year.
Partners can help customers to steer a path through the fog of uncertainty and confusion but only if they explain it to them. Which is where the language skills come in. If partners can talk to customers in a way that helps to convince them something is worth doing, that’s great. If they can’t, that’s probably great too as it shows they don’t have a powerful enough argument to make customers part with their money and buy whatever technology the industry is hawking.
If it’s a case of innovation fatigue, I think the onus is on channel partners to reinvigorate and re-enthuse customers. Again, it’s a question of language. Far too much of the industry’s approach to innovation relies on stoking customers’ fears of being left behind by rivals that implement whatever this year’s (or month’s) latest and greatest technology is. The risk with this approach is that the genuine benefits of the technology are not articulated properly in the rush to adapt it or, worse still, the risk of being left behind overshadows the fact that the benefits of the technology aren’t really worth the investment.
Channel partners also need to be careful that what they are promoting and supporting on behalf of their vendors really merits being labelled innovative. One reason customers are confused is that they are being swamped by innovation when, realistically, most of the technology advances being marketed so relentlessly to them are more akin upgrades or improvements.
Yes, it’s partly semantics but when you are confronted by a continuous, near hysterical barrage of ‚innovation’ from a ‘fast-moving’ and ‘rapidly changing’ industry that experiences ‘paradigm shifts’ so frequently that they make your head spin, it’s only natural that some people will find themselves overwhelmed to the point of near helplessness.
The best way to change this state of affairs would be to strip away the bombast, tone down the near apocalyptic language and apply a more down to earth, easy to understand vocabulary. Customers would benefit from being presented with a calmer, more level-headed perspective on technology and what it can and can’t do for their business.
Channel partners aka ‘trusted advisers’, have the opportunity to become even more valuable to customers by stripping away the hyperbole to give technologies and trends a label more appropriate for what they are so they don’t scare customers. In other words, they can become interpreters. All they need is a dictionary that helps them translate ITspeak to English.
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