RE: Biggest issue facing YOUR IBM i shop?

[Dan Kimmel <dkimmel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting (perhaps) corollary: Those of us who are in the software business are not selling our product to "IT people" anymore. Our buyers are the business units. We sell to the AP department, or Purchasing, or Sales or Accounting. IT is there to provide the necessary infrastructure.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Naughton
> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 5:11 PM
> To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
> Subject: Re: Biggest issue facing YOUR IBM i shop?
>
> +1 to Booth and Buck.
>
> I especially agree with Booth's comments about strategic advantage, which
> tie with Buck's comments about how the IBM i has a lot of strategic potential,
> but nobody sees it that way.
>
> Maybe I would add, based on Joel's comment that people "don't want to be
> in the software business", that people think you have to be "in the software
> businesss" to have a custom setup. Yes, in a way, you do, but people who are
> only "in the software
> business" write compilers and operating systems. As has been pointed out
> on this list before, most of us are in some other business -- we just use
> software to help that business survive and grow.
>
> I'm in the wire business -- I use software to help my busines the same way
> the sales people use Excel and the engineers use AutoCad and the
> maintenance guys use welders. My job is to build tools that help my
> business, and software is just the medium that
> I do it in. The challenge is to get management to see it that way (luckily, here
> they mostly do), so that they're thinking about what tools they'd like to have
> rather than how expensive I am and how much space I take up.
>
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