Nick Burns was the help desk guy from hell. He could help with your computer problems, but you had to pay the price of being insulted and made to feel stupid. After taking care of your difficulty, Nick would always finish by asking “Was that so hard?”

So why am I writing about Nick Burns today? Here’s why. I’m trying to differentiate what I do for my clients from what Nick does. Most people see the phrase “computer consultant” or “technology consultant” and they think of Nick, the guy from the help desk, the only one who knows how to keep the computers and the networks running smoothly. Maybe they think of someone with a kinder, gentler attitude than Nick’s, but they do think of someone who performs Nick’s role.

Well, that’s not me. Not only do I have a better attitude than Nick’s, I actually do something entirely different. I don’t man the help desk. I don’t configure the servers or run network cable. I don’t install Outlook and connect it to your email account. No, that’s not me.

What I do is to supply a role that’s missing in many small and medium businesses – informed executive oversight for the use and management of information technology. This is the CIO (Chief Information Officer) role or the I.T. Director role, and many smaller companies don’t have such a person in their executive line-up.

In fact, most smaller businesses have little in-house expertise in I.T. There’s no expert oversight, no viable process for defining requirements, and in the end no way for the company to know whether or not a software or hardware vendor has really delivered the best solution for the business.

Yet they’re probably right not to have that expertise in house. They don’t have enough need for a full-time executive devoted that. But that doesn’t mean that they have no need for the role to be performed occasionally. They do. So what usually happens is that it gets shunted off in a direction that’s not optimal for the company.

Here’s how it often unfolds. The company’s executives realize that they have a need. They think it’s for some software and/or hardware to help automate their business processes. They decide to find a vendor or vendors to fill the need.

To make the decision, the company turns to someone they trust but who isn’t really qualified. This is often their accountant (how do you think the original Big 8 accounting firms managed to grow and spin off consulting divisions?) or their computer guy. The accountant typically knows little about the field, and the computer guy, paradoxically, may know even less. Adept at the nuts and bolts operations, the computer guy usually has no experience in optimizing business processes and their automation or in managing relationships with large vendors. Or the company may appoint an executive or committee to choose a vendor to meet a particular technology need. In any case the choice is made somehow, and then they turn the entire project over to the vendor.

This approach is gambling pure and simple. Sometimes the vendor will be willing and able to devote enough resources to find out exactly what the company really needs and to provide it. In other cases (and I’ve seen them, believe me) the vendor just puts in their standard product, assumes it’s going to do the right job, provides a little training, and walks out the door.

What’s missing is informed executive oversight, oversight of the requirements definition process, oversight of the vendor selection process, oversight of the project itself to make sure that the vendor delivers. This is the CIO role, and it can only be provided by someone who understands both the business and the technology. You can’t have one and not the other.

I supply that missing link. As a part-time, consulting CIO, I manage the requirements gathering, vendor selection, and vendor relationship processes. I also give advice on effective use of technology like accounting systems, marketing systems, online marketing campaigns, online customer relationship management, website utilization, and related fields.

And that’s why I am not your company’s computer guy. But I may be its part-time CIO.

As promised, here’s Jimmy Fallon as “Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy”:

Part One

Part Two

Just click the Become a Fan button in the Facebook box in the right-hand margin of this page. (Or you can just click here.) Then post your technology-related question as a new thread on the Discussion tab.

All questions should be related to the use of information technology in small and medium businesses. I’ll do my best to answer what I can, and I’ll at least steer you in the right direction for further research if I don’t know the answer.

Some suggested topics for questions:

• Software choices for particular type of business
• How to manage online customer relationships
• Online marketing best practices
• How to prepare a good requirements document for a software project
• …and many more

The most useful questions will be ones that help you solve real problems facing your business. Be as specific as possible.

This is a limited time offer, which I may withdraw at any time. Get your questions in now!

In part 2, this post, I’m writing about a much larger purchase of custom-developed software. This is a true story of a project that could have turned into a disaster. It could have sunk a new startup company before it ever got off the ground. It could have failed badly. But this one actually has a happy ending. Disaster was averted because the business owner stopped in the middle of the process to ask some key questions, and he acted on the answers.

The Background

The owner had a brand-new startup company with little more than a business plan and some funding. The plan required a unique custom developed website with a high level of complexity. Here are some of the requirements in general terms:

• A set of consumer-facing pages that could be branded with the company’s name or private labeled to business partners. In the case of private labeling, there could be differences in fuctionality.
• A set of pages and communication protocols to manage data exchange with another set of business partners.
• Very secure private communications and protected private logins for consumers and business partners.
• A complex and secure administrative back end to manage the entire enterprise.

The Steps

Here are the steps the business owner took to begin the software project:

• He prepared a Request for Proposal (RFP) that specified the requirements.
• He identified several vendors who were qualified to do the work.
• He submitted the RFP to the vendors and received proposals from them.
• He evaluated each proposal and spoke with each vendor about details.

The Problem

This was a good process as far as it went. But it came to an impasse. The owner identified one vendor that he felt comfortable working with. But the vendor’s proposed price was well over the budget that the owner could commit based on his funding. The price was about $350,000 where the budget called for a maximum of $250,000.

The owner didn’t want to throw away the work spent in establishing a rapport with the vendor, but he just couldn’t agree to the price. It would have jeopardized the entire startup.

The vendor maintained that the system they were proposing met the specifications, and for the system they were proposing their price wasn’t flexible.

They couldn’t move forward.

The Solution

Then the owner made a great decision. He decided to bring in an outside consultant to take a fresh look. That consultant happened to be me, which is how I know the details of the case.

Here’s the process I followed:

• I studied the RFP and the proposal in detail.
• I asked the owner some questions to clarify details of the requirements.
• I got on a conference call with the owner and the vendor to ask the vendor to explain how they were approaching key portions of the project and to explain why.
• I pondered all the information I had gathered.

Here’s what I concluded. The owner had requested a secure, robust, flexible system. The vendor was proposing an approach that would create an extremely secure, very robust, and supremely flexible system. It would certainly work, and work very well, but it was on the order of a Rolls Royce level solution, where a Cadillac solution would have been sufficient.

I proposed some compromises in complexity, especially in the area of flexibility, and made sure that the owner and the vendor understood the ramifications of my suggestions. They did, and they both agreed that the changes in approach were reasonable.

The vendor reworked the proposal according to my suggestions. The new price was about $200,000, a reduction of over 40% and well under the owner’s budget.

Everyone was happy. The company launched under budget and is now well established. But it could have been a total failure, all because the vendor had over-designed the solution because they hadn’t asked enough questions about the real requirements. Another victory for proper requirements planning!

Business Processes

Businesses run by following well defined processes. Let’s look at a wholesale distribution business as an example. Here’s a grossly simplified version of the core processes at the heart of the business:

• An order comes in.
• The accounting department vets the payment, issues an invoice when necessary, records the transaction, and passes the order to fulfillment department.
• The fulfillment department picks, packs, and ships the merchandise, records the shipping transaction, and adjusts inventory quantities.
• The buying department reviews the revised inventory records and places replenishment orders when necessary.

Process Automation

In many cases, business processes can be made more efficient by letting computers do portions of them. Say you’re a small wholesaler with an overall selling process similar to what I’ve described. You know you want to automate many parts of the process. You’d like the computer to do the accounting, keep track of the inventory, alert you when customers haven’t paid and when inventory quantities are low.

So maybe you go to your accountant and ask for advice. The accountant says “Buy QuickBooks. I’ll help you set it up,” because that’s what the accountant is familiar with. So you do.

A month later you have the software installed and mostly configured, and you start to try running sample transactions through the system. You quickly discover that there’s a big problem. QuickBooks lacks the ability to manage multiple warehouse locations (this is a hypothetical example) and you need that badly. The entire automated system is useless to you without that feature.

Failed Project Postmortem

How did this happen? Your accountant recommended a capable and familiar software package without taking the time to define your requirements completely and to compare those with the software’s capabilities. The accountant was never trained in that discipline, and neither were you.

What’s the net result? You’ve lost a month of work setting up the software, and you have to start over from square one. You still have to find or commission the right software and get it set up.

Does this little story sound far-fetched? It’s not. It happens to small and medium businesses every day. This is exactly how software projects fail, how business automation projects fail – by failing to define the requirements formally and to make sure that they will be met by the proposed solution.

In this part I’ve told about one common way that a packaged software acquisition and installation project can fail. Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll cover a more complex project where the business commissions a custom software solution.

But those traditional marketing channels are increasingly empty. That’s not where you find customers in the 21st century. No, they’re online. They’re on Google, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon. They’re blogging and commenting on blogs. They’re forming communities of interest on Digg and social|median.

If businesses aren’t familiar with these venues and aren’t meeting their customers where they hang out and interact, then they’re missing an enormous opportunity to keep building even during these recessionary times.

So stop hiding from your customers^SM. I can help. Contact me today.