Profit Purchasing Becoming skillful in purchasing for IT

New Suit

I recently came to the conclusion that I needed a new suit.

Being the tightwad that I am I started my search at my favorite second hand stores. Why spend hundreds when you could spend tens. After a frustrating half hour I remembered why. I wondered to myself: when Jefferson wrote "...all men are created equal..." had he ever tried to wear another man’s suit?

Eight years ago I bought my best suit to wear on my wedding day. The man on the commercial guaranteed me: "You’re going to like the way you look." More important to me at the time was if "she'll like the way I look." I purchased the nicest suit I could afford and if I had the budget I would have selected a finer quality, more expensive suit. This suit seemed, pun intended, like it could come apart if I wore it every week like I would a pair of blue jeans (or my black shirt on Mondays.)

My assumption was that I needed a suit that would hold up. But hold up to what? I hadn't given that much thought to how or when I would wear the suit. Perhaps by the time I needed finer suit this one would be obsolete. It turns out that has been the case. -For nearly eight years this moderate-priced suit has not worn out hanging on its hanger, it is worn perhaps twice a year. In retrospect the only thing that kept me from overspending on that suit was the limit imposed by my budget.

Entering software agreements is like buying a suit. The criteria for purchasing should first be "what is the purpose for these this licensed assets?" not "well, what's left in the budget?"

"A good customer representative won’t do that." you say? Lest we forget these are sales persons, and any good sales person will sell you the suit you need, but keep showing you the suit that the "more successful customers" are buying, the suit you could be wearing next year when your budget permits. You really would look great in that one. "Wait a minute! Why is the budget deciding for us what software we need, shouldn't that be set by the business objectives and those objectives set the IT budget not the economy?

We need to be very cautious coming out of the recession. I expect software publishers will make a great deal of money selling license agreements to customers who’s IT decision makers have grown accustomed to spending every penny of the paltry budgets. If organizations are not careful they will find themselves owning the Armani suit they've always wanted only to admire it on its hanger where it will stay and become obsolete waiting for their business initiatives to invite them to wear it. By the time the business really needs the software, it might be out of fashion/obsolete.

Of course one might avoid this situation by adding a maintenance agreement (expense not capitol) which will assure you have the latest release in a year or two when the business starts using the product. Don’t look now but effectively you will have paid twice for the software you are finally using, and you did it at a time when you could have used that spend most strategically coming up out of the down-turned economy.

Slide Rule

Do you know how to use a Slide-Rule?

Can you believe these things sent rockets into space and put a man on the moon?

I keep this one around as a conversation piece, I smile when I see it knowing that someone somewhere knows how to use this thing - and I am happy its not me.

Using a slide-rule can be confusing, like software licensing. When employed with skill these  simple yet complex tools are employed to plot a course and keep your mission on target.

What's your mission? Are your budget thrusters pointing you in the right direction? Will you have enough fuel to get home? This recession or economic downturn or what ever you wish to call it can be as formidable as the depths of space to an organization marooned out there unable, to provide the IT resources to the organization, these resources can be the difference between success and failure.

The mission of Profit Purchasing is to take hold of your agreements and, like a slide-rule handled by one with skill and experience, accomplish license compliance and set the IT department in the right direction to accomplish future initiatives.

Think about this slide-rule and your Volume License Agreements and wipe that smile back onto your face because you know that someone, somewhere knows how to read it - your smiling because you know that it doesn't have to be you.

the story

Once upon a time, Eight years ago…

“You need to come and see what's going on at Dawn Food Products,” Brian said. "they just acquired the foods division of a large company and they have more work than Tony and I can do, and they need someone who knows how to build a PC to come and help out!"

Why not? My shift at Performance Automotive didn't start until 3PM, so I need an excuse to get out of the apartment. $250 a month does not give you a room with much of a view.

So at 6:30 in the morning I put on a clean shirt and my cleanest pair of pants and Brian picked me up. This might be a chance to put a few bucks in the bank before my wedding lnly four weeks away.

The Admin building seemed small, Maybe built for 70 or so desks… but there were cars parked everywhere, clear out into the Trailer storage parking lot of the Manufacturing building next door.

After shaking hands with about 50 new people (which made up about a quarter of the occupants in that building) I had given up remembering names, faces, or titles. After all, I might be here a few days or weeks if they really have a lot of projects.

Around Noon Craig Cumbow pulled me aside and asked me if I knew Lotus Notes, AS-400, JBA, and tried a few other spoonful’s of alphabet soup before he gave up and switched over to asking about customer service skills.

"I have a guy in the waiting room wearing a very nice suit a briefcase and a wallet full of credentials but I cant hire him! I am afraid to hand him the help desk phone cause I don’t know what he might say to the customer!"

"We'll,” I replied “at the auto parts store you answer the phone, the person on the other end is probably standing in traffic saying something like ‘it goes clunk-clunk-clunk-BANG, can I drive it home or not?’”

Craig smiled with a nod.

“The first thing,” I continued, “Is to get them off the highway, then talk them through a work around or at least provide enough details so that you can offer the right fix. Eventually if they ever make it into the store you build them up to believing they can fix it themselves and sell them a part.”

"Ok, Your hired." he said.

I’m not sure at that point that I quite understood that I was being  interviewed, much less hired. Or that I was looking for a job, much less a career.

After all Wedding plans were being made and then Bible School starts back up just a few weeks after that, then Lord knows what, International Missions? Church Leadership? The only thing I could count on is that I was not in charge God was. So there was not much point setting much less pushing my agenda.

In the Beginning.

Eight Years ago, at desk made of cardboard boxes with a broken PC, I started my IT career at Dawn Food Products. My first chore (after building a desk in the mail room out of paper boxes) was to call Dell support and dispatch the repair of the 2 year old desktop which would become my workstation. (They did a swell job fixing it by the way!)

My second task was to take $350 worth of PC hardware that had been purchased at NEWEGG.COM and build a spiffy desktop workstation for the new Windows server engineer. Third on my agenda I was to call Microsoft and see if the 3 retail copies of MS Project 2003 Pro that had been purchased on eBay were legit or pirated before we installed them on our executives laptops? Eight years and nine MS Volume Licensing Agreements later. The first chapter of my IT career is coming to a close.

But before I turn the page and find out whats next, I will take a few minutes and remember what has happend to me and to Dawn over the past 8 years.

You should really read The Story

God was in charge, and still is, and has been very good to me and to my family during my tenure at Dawn Foods. In 2004 I was wed to my wife Kimberly. In 2005 we purchased our home in Hanover MI. In 2007 I donated a kidney to a dear friend who has since thrived as a Husband and a Father of two beautiful girls thanks to the gift I was able to give. In 2008 my wife gave me a son and in 2010 a daughter and in 2011 we purchased a house next door for a rental, and eventually use for family care should we need it someday.

Eight years ago I joined an 18 person IT team at Dawn Food Products which now has over 75 team members, Dawn’s enterprise of 900 PCs scattered around 8 countries has grown to 2644 scattered across the globe with sites in 16 countries. Our 500GB File Server (which was smaller than the Hard Disk in the PC I am using to tell this story) has been traded in several times and is now 300TB of SANs storage feeding 300 VM servers hosted on a Cisco UCS computing platform.

Where will I go from here? I can only imagine. Hey! Wanna come with me?

Tim Lindley

616-929-0247

Microsoft Agreements

We are about to execute my 6th MS Volume License agreement at Dawn Food Products since 2005.

Practice makes perfect.

Good thing Microsoft keeps changing the rules. If they didn't my job might get boring.

#7 is coming in June and then December next year will be #8

plug and play

I was prepairing to write a new piece attempting to explain "the cloud" to people who don't care so I thought I would do some reading first.

I came accross this and remember fondly my first Dell Laptop... a 386 25 megahertz with a "pocket modem" which screwed awkwardly to the com port and connected me to the WWW (thats world wide web to the non-geeks in the room). I too had my fights with Windows 95 on that blasted thing. eventually at about 4:30 AM I think I conceded the win to Windows 95 and went to bed.

I don't know if I my kids will ever appreciate how far superior ICQ was to a webpage based chat room.

I do admit I am kinda looking forward to life after facebook.

A much deserved Thank You.

This past week I attended a 3 day training and certification for ITIL v3: Foundations co-sponsored by ServiceNow and Fruition Partners. Randy Michael, founder of Knowledge Tool Works, was our trainer and he was in a word fantastic. His in classroom presentation left nothing to be desired. The ITIL concepts can be a bit dry and nebulous as you can imagine. I found it challenging to uncouple my own process experiences and bias so that I could learn it the "right" way... at least right according to "the Queen" as Randy puts it. His tongue-and-cheek approach to some of the less well established "good-practices" was my cue to pay attention because this is not as "common sense" as the other peices.  As if his classroom delivery were not enough, Randy outdid himself by providing links to the training materials available on his website. The videos and crossword puzzles really did provide the alternative learning methods that I needed to pass my certification with flying colors.

It is my intention to tailor my IT purchasing to plug into existing ITIL workflows when interacting with the business and the IT Service Organization.

When is the best time to Start strategizing on your Microsoft Agreement

The answer for everyone is Now.

Whither you've just signed an agreement or you are in the final days of your existing Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement, you should be keeping a finger on the pulse of Microsoft Volume Licensing.

Especially now as old agreements are being shoehorned into new SaaS methodologies. Some of these transitions are better than others.

New developments in server hardware are changing the landscape for Processor based licensing as well: Microsoft will be changing SQL Licensing models in 2012 release from Per Processor to Per Core.

SCCM 2012 brings user centric focus to software delivery

Microsoft system center 2012 just in time to help make sense of the chaos which is office 365. 

Just have to wait for the q1 or q2 release in 2012 meanwhile holding pattern for those considering changing there purchase strategy from Office Volume License to Office 365 subscription. 

Stay tuned