The world has gone flat, and enterprises are no exception to the changes. Strategic decisions in the new enterprise are blurred more than ever by multiple stakeholders, competing objectives, and the speed and complexity of change.
But some things haven’t changed. Business Success in the new enterprise still involves three components:
- knowing your customer
- knowing your business
- aligning resources with strategy
These same rules are equally relevant to vendors selling into enterprises. And in the case of vendors, knowing your customer is essential. Especially for vendors involved in large-scale enterprise-level projects. Not fully knowing your customers, their requirements, their environment, and their culture can lead to major problems. Truly, the “customer is king”.
An example of what could go wrong is being reported in the news today in the UK county of Hampshire. In that case, an Open Text LiveLink ECM installation for managing documents related to data protection and the UK Freedom of Information Act (FoI) ‘failed to work’. The implementation was done for the Hampshire Police and they were dissatisfied and tried to return the product. LiveLink is a feature-rich product, so without knowing more details it’s hard to know what went wrong, but typically enterprise implementations fail when the vendor gets out of sync with the customer’s needs.
No matter how many dimensions of the world your customer is living in, quality products and services can only be delivered when you can see the world through your customers’ eyes and you can fully understand the customer’s unique characteristics.
