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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Several years ago I found myself in a dispute with my local telephone company. Without mentioning names, it was one of the long-distance carriers that had acquired some local telcos to mismanage, mine being one of them.

The dispute arose because the telco had cancelled my service after waiting a week to post my on-time payment, and planned to charge me a reconnection fee. The call center agent couldn’t help me — no surprise there, so I asked to speak to her supervisor, who also couldn’t help me, or chose not to. “I’m stuck with your local service,” I informed the guy on the other end of the line. “But somewhere in your company is someone who cares whether I continue to use your long distance and cellular service. I’d appreciate your connecting me with that person.”

He did, she did, and the telco waived my reconnection fee.

In IT, we deal with monopolies and monopoly-like vendors (MLVs?) a lot. Any time a vendor can reasonably deduce that you’re locked into what it’s sold you, you’re dealing with an MLV, whether the product in question is SAP’s ERP suite, Oracle’s DBMS, or IBM’s Websphere. You’ve made the choice, investing lots of money integrating whatever-it-is into your technical architecture and training your staff in its use.

Many CIOs figure that unless you’re at least the size of Bank of America, you have no leverage and have to take whatever the MLV dishes out.

But, in fact, you do, and therefore you don’t.

Like my local telco, only some of the products and services most MLVs sell are exclusive. Microsoft is a great example: It certainly qualifies as an MLV with respect to desktop operating systems and office suites. So do you have to accept whatever price and contract terms it deigns to offer you?

Before you do, consider everything else Microsoft wants to sell you and has sold you. It wants to sell you the operating software for your servers, instead of Sun, HP, IBM or one of the many Linux-based alternatives. It wants to sell you your relational database management system, MS Exchange, Visual Studio, and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can take as much of your business elsewhere as you’d like.

That ought to give you some leverage. It wouldn’t, though, if you were dealing with the MLV, for which the incremental value of your non-MLV business (or decremental value of the non-MLV business you’re threatening to take elsewhere) is chump change — a rounding error. If you were dealing with the MLV you’d be dealing with a bureaucrat who cares more about applying all rules consistently than about the company’s profit-and-loss statement.

But you aren’t dealing with a bureaucrat, or the MLV itself. You’re dealing with a sales representative hired by the MLV, and sales representatives care about commissions, not rules. That gives you another button to push.

Even if you can’t take your business elsewhere due to vendor lock-in you still have some control over sales volume. “I’m under a lot of budget pressure,” you might say. “I’m going to have to hold off the OS upgrade for a year.” Or, if that doesn’t fit the situation, you’re thinking about server or processor consolidation to reduce software maintenance costs. Or …

I don’t know exactly what the specific bit of leverage you have is. I’m pretty sure of two aspects of your negotiating situation, though. The first is that there’s some carrot or stick you can plausibly brandish at your MLV’s sales representative. The second is that your MLV’s sales representative cares about how much you buy from him or her.

It’s a shame, really. IT executives and managers spend quite a bit of time negotiating with vendors. Even if they’ve gone to business school, though, they’re unlikely to have learned how to negotiate. Heck, many business schools don’t even include coursework in negotiation, even though it’s one of the most important skills a manager can acquire.

So here’s the starting point: You have something the other party wants, just as the other party has something you want. How well you recognize what you have, how much they want it, and how plausibly you can threaten to withhold it compared to how well the other side does the same thing pretty much determines who wins the negotiation.

What’s that? You’ve read that the best negotiations end in win-win situations?

Maybe they do. But that doesn’t mean one side doesn’t win better than the other.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

It was a landslide. Not even close. The outpouring of requests for the full lyrics of Tech Weenies in the Sky (credit KJR Club member David McKay for its acronymical name, TWITS) outnumbered the nays by a ratio of nearly three-to-one.

To those who would have preferred otherwise … I’m pretty sure I’m with you on this, but The People have spoken. To those who requested an MP3 download, look out your window. Until you see a bunch of flying pigs, don’t get your hopes up. My loving wife’s comment, upon hearing the first few bars, was, “I’m glad you have your column as an outlet. Otherwise I’d get a lot more of this.”

Without further ado, to the tune of Stan Jones’ immortal Ghost Riders in the Sky, here’s my paean to CTI (computer telephony integration, as if you didn’t know):

TWITS

A computer and a telephone were sitting on a desk,

Every time he looked at them he just got more depressed,

‘Cause they couldn’t be connected, and nothing did the trick,

When the telephone was ringing,

The computer sat there like a brick.

Chorus

Yippie yi Yaaaaay! Yippie yi Ohhhhh!

Tech weenies in the sky.

The tech he had a vision and he tried to make it real,

Wiring the two together should have very great appeal,

So screens can pop and calls can route and messages can play,

Keeping all the telemarketers,

And other pests at bay.

Chorus

He couldn’t get it working despite everything he tried,

He opened up the box and found the motherboard was fried,

The software it was buggy and cabling was a wreck,

And in his deep frustration,

You could hear him cry, “Oh, heck!”

It took a lot of duct tape, Band-Aids, chewing gum and sweat,

He hasn’t got it working but it hasn’t beat him yet,

The amount of troubleshooting effort turned out to be huge,

And when he finally finished,

He knew it was a kludge.

Go into any call center and you’ll see CTI,

From Little Rock to Bangalore the connection’s riding high,

But on average users’ desktops we can see the standard twist:

If it ain’t built into Outlook,

It simply don’t exist.

Chorus

If you want to be a hero; if you want to save the day,

You won’t become a cowboy shouting “Yippie yo cayay!”

You’ll do it in the wiring where no one else can see,

Solving all the mysteries,

Of computer telephony

Now it’s wired with fiber optics and it almost seems to glow,

Though outside it’s Minnesota with a harsh and driving snow,

Yes the nights here in the Northland are a bitter freezing cold,

But with computers hooked to telephones,

You’ll never go on hold.

Chorus

If you’re wondering, I came up with this demented notion before a meeting of the Minnesota Telecommunications Association where I was scheduled to speak, explaining the otherwise puzzling connection between cold weather and CTI. Luckily for all concerned, I chickened out just in time and left my guitar at home.

There is, in the middle of this nonsense, a question worth asking. In the mid-1990s I described the potential for desktop CTI. It’s like this: You’re on the phone and your boss calls. A window opens on your screen telling you so. You’re talking to a client, so you click a button and your boss hears your voice say, “I can’t pick up the call right now — I’m talking with a client. I’ll call you back as soon as I’m off the phone.”

You call your boss back and the phone rings — a different client. You click a button and see a list of colleagues who can handle the call. You choose the best fit, click the “Transfer” button next to his name, and the client hears, “I’m on a call right now, so I’m transferring you to Fred Smith who can help you right away.”

Then the phone rings again — it’s your proctologist, calling to schedule your colonoscopy. Click! And, “I’m sorry — I’m away from the office right now. Please leave a brief message and shortly after the Cubs win the World Series I’ll call you back.”

This was all entirely achievable a decade ago (Harry Newton even published the description in Computer Telephony, although he didn’t give me credit for it). It probably wouldn’t be all that hard today if anyone wanted to do it.

But as the song says, If it ain’t built into Outlook/It simply don’t exist.

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