IT Consulting
A second opinion from somebody with nothing to sell you.
Most of what I am asked is a decision rather than a problem. Whether to replace it, whether the quote is fair, and whether you can do it with what you already have.
The question is usually already on the table
By the time somebody calls me, there is generally a quote sitting in an inbox, or a board meeting in three weeks, or a server making a noise it did not used to make. The question has been asked. What is missing is somebody to answer it who is not also the person hoping you say yes.
That is most of this work. Not expertise nobody else has — expertise that is not pointed at a sale.
The four I am asked most
Should this be replaced?
Usually not. Age on its own has never been a reason to spend money, and a great deal of equipment gets thrown out while it is still doing exactly what was asked of it. The exceptions are real and I will name them — something that no longer receives security updates has stopped being old and started being a liability — but the honest answer is more often that it has years left in it.
Is this quote reasonable?
I will read the proposal line by line and tell you which parts you need, which parts are padding, and which parts are fine in themselves but solve a problem you do not have. Vendors are not usually being dishonest. They are answering the question they were asked, with the products they happen to carry.
Can this be done with what is already here?
Surprisingly often, yes. Organizations buy capability twice because nobody realized the first purchase already included it. I would rather move what you have than sell you more of it, and moving something usually costs a little in cable and an afternoon.
What does this look like in three years?
The question almost nobody asks in the room. What the renewal costs once the first-year discount ends, whether your data can be got back out, and what it takes to leave if the vendor changes the terms underneath you. Getting in is always easy. Getting out is the part that is designed.
I do not resell hardware
This is worth saying plainly, because it is the whole reason a second opinion is worth anything.
A great deal of technology advice arrives from people who make their money on the thing being recommended. That does not make them liars. It makes them human. When somebody’s advice and somebody’s income point in the same direction, the advice starts to bend without anybody deciding to bend it, and the person giving it is usually the last to notice.
Mine point in different directions. If the answer is that you already own what you need, or that the right move is to wait until next year, or that nothing needs doing at all, then that is what I get paid to say — and saying it costs me the larger job. That is occasionally inconvenient, and it is the only arrangement under which my opinion is worth asking for.
Why experience is the product here
Anybody can install what has already been decided on. The expensive mistakes are not made during installation. They are made in the meeting beforehand, by people who had no way of knowing that this particular idea has come around before under a different name.
I have been in this industry since 1978 and running DataStream since 1995, and I have sat on both sides of the table — as the consultant selling the work, and as the executive who had to sign for it. Most of what that buys you is not knowledge of any specific product. It is having watched enough things that were going to change everything to have some idea which ones did.
What it actually looks like
Sometimes an hour on the phone is the entire engagement, and the answer is no, do not buy that. Sometimes it is a written recommendation plain enough that a board can read it without a technical person sitting beside them explaining the words. Sometimes it is sitting quietly on a call with a vendor and asking the three questions nobody in the room knew to ask.
What you get at the end is a document in ordinary language: what I would do, what I would not, what it would cost, and what happens if you do nothing. That last one is a real option and it belongs on the list, because it is frequently the right answer.
And the recommendation is yours afterwards. You are free to hand it to somebody else to carry out, or to your own staff, or to put it in a drawer until the budget allows. It is written to be useful whether or not you hire me to do any of it.
Have something on the table right now?
Send me the quote, or describe the decision, and I will tell you what I think of it. The first conversation costs nothing and it does not commit you to a second one.