Russian businessmen and high technology

Apparently the time has not passed when all business issues were resolved in saunas and taverns. Russian entrepreneurs do not need IT to make money, all that owners are capable of is to implement template solutions without understanding why they need it.

You probably decide that I don’t understand what I’m talking about, this is partly true, but when I decided to write this article, I was guided by personal experience, which means I have no doubt that my colleagues face similar problems somewhere. Now, in order, the lion’s share of sales falls on the oil and gas sector, the second and the banking sector is not going deeper into interest and priority, because These clients have nothing to do with my business.
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The thing is, who in the company makes decisions, if the organization has a board of shareholders and a wide network of various departments, then the decision is made within the approved budget and most importantly, it must be spent, because it does not spend it insanely bad in the first queue for those who protect it. This is a rather complicated coordination system and it is as close as possible to the ideal for sellers of IT products and services. Because there is an opportunity to participate in the tender not only at cost, but also in terms of the quality of the services and products provided.

Example 1: Council of Shareholders or Founders.
I will describe the situation from the inside

1. The Board of Shareholders is tasked with shaping the organization’s budget for the next year.
2. Responsible units represented by heads of departments or divisions begin to calculate the possible problems of their existence. There is a fuss, otherwise I can’t call it that, and each responsible employee has a pronounced desire to “snatch” more from the common piggy bank.
3. As a result, the maximum possible budget appears on the table of the head of the department.
4. Then follows the stage of editing (reducing) this budget within the division, a psychological war begins between employees and management, since any responsible employee in the formation of needs is partly trying to attract investment in himself.
5. In conclusion, the manager has an understanding of what is really needed and what can be dispensed with.
6. With this knowledge, he is now able to describe the risks and possible monetization, having swallowed up the sedative, he goes to the defense of the budget to the supervisor.
7. Further, as a rule, the budget is either simply approved by the council, or if IT is not so important, and for other units there are exceeding the originally planned amounts, then the IT amounts are reduced (usually as a percentage).
8. It is here that the IT department should be glad that it was possible to knock out some equipment upgrades, training or some other “buns”

I have shortened the process very much and maybe a few points are missing, but I tried to reflect the essence.

Example 2: A special case - the decision is made by the owner:
(small organization)

In this example, there may be several initial options. The first is that someone has already been and did something when opening (or later) for example, there is 1C, servers, storage systems and even some kind of network. The owner can very remotely understand what is actually happening and that he needs to spend some funds to maintain the infrastructure. Everything works for him and the main problem is to find a system administrator who can fix it all.
There was a case when I heard from the managing director of one very large (family) company that they spent a whole million rubles on the purchase of new servers, network equipment of all levels, uninterruptible power supplies, and even put 2 air conditioners. It seems to be normal, but not for a network of 89 stores!
Of course, they didn’t go further than the server, but it’s a pity because the plans were ambitious, but unfortunately the role of the IT advisor was played by the head of technical support for the retail network.

In most cases, for the owner, the IT infrastructure generally remains in the shadows, unfortunately they only remember about it when everything stops. In this case, the reaction of the business owner in most cases has an aggressive connotation and changes only when the despair stage is reached. Only then does he begin to understand the importance of budget planning and attracting qualified specialists. To do this, thus the specialists still have to go through all stages of mistrust, suspicion and all sorts of contests. There is even a percentage of unfair customer attitude to the clauses of the contract regarding payment.

So we came to a dense article on the topic, why do Russian businessmen need information technology?

The entrepreneur attracted investments, invited operational management, built up business processes and began the process of opening his own organization. They took into account everything, the central office with leather furniture and European-quality repair, premises for shops, rental of warehouses and the most interesting thing that they took into account the server, namely one server, for the accounting system.
All gathered together, with a clever view in the meeting room, sitting and deciding to find a system administrator. And how much to pay him? Well, no more than 50, and then probably a lot, the main thing is that the server runs. And they plan the opening schedule and take into account 5 days to launch the server. Absurd? No, unfortunately, no.

Typically, this madhouse lasts until the deadline has passed and you need to start, but there is no time and money planned, there is no understanding from the system administrator what they want from him and what to do. In general, no one has an understanding of what is actually happening and how to go through this stage, there are several options, someone knows someone, and now he will call, and can use the Internet and find an unknown system integrator so far? In general, panic begins, and in the head of the owner there is still a tick about buying a server, he bought it and what else do you need now?

The question on the question and, as a rule, deal with these questions, namely, it is necessary to build a strategy either to an IT consultant, or a project from an integrator company, or for a completely bad case to a system administrator who still does not understand what they want from him, since About business, he knows that you need to put products from well-known companies and how to tie them together. At this stage, specialists have to put a lot of effort to achieve the line of understanding that the customer needs to go. Sometimes even heard the threat of liability for failure to meet deadlines, but this is a separate story.

How to explain to the business owner that you first need to study his needs, make a picture of what you have to work with, plan all the stages of the project and only then you can talk about time and money.

No, our Russian man cannot accept such an order; he needs at least an approximate estimate of costs. Well, how much will it cost? And how many days will it take to run? And now we will tell everything, but do not connect our system administrator to speed up the process?

A lot of questions, one answer - no.
Another interesting moment is that when the amount for the project exceeds the cost of the server itself 5 times, the owner begins to get hysteria about saving money and shortening the time. And you can only change the situation by earning confidence in your prof. suitability, no other options. Only by creating a competition the owner can be convinced of the correctness of the price and the loyalty of the offers, then he decides. A month goes by and the specialist receives a call saying that we are ready. And you are at the other end of the country, you have a wonderful project and you have other obligations and agreements. The customer is offered either to wait for the time to appear, or to seek help from competitors. But this is only on the condition that you have good prices and high quality of work, in other cases you will have to settle with the customer.

The customer is gone. And he is unlikely to appeal to you in the future, but the only thing that can be advised him is to learn from the mistakes of others, and not to charge his own bumps.

What is the problem:
1. Lack of understanding among entrepreneurs of the importance of IT.
2. Lack of IT cost planning, they usually boil down to obvious things: servers, cash registers, terminals, computers, monitors, printers, etc.
3. Refusal to accept the final cost of the project, comparing the cost of work of qualified specialists with the salaries of full-time IT workers.
4. Lack of experience in implementing such projects and an ardent reluctance to use someone else's.
5. Low awareness of the impact of IT on the competitive advantages of business.
6. One desire, to save on the necessary and absolutely not to listen to the sad consequences of this practice.

That's all I wanted to say, this article is not out of a series of pain, just shared an opinion.