Re: Biggest issue facing YOUR IBM i shop?

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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