Ad Maiora Natus Sum: We are born to aim for greater things

Happy New Year! Welcome back! Hope you had a relaxing break. I had plenty of time to reflect on the last decade. And to introspect on what we should do in the coming decade. Let me share with readers some of my reflection, starting with the title of this post.

I am not Catholic, but did study at a school managed by the Salesians of Don Bosco. My wife was born Catholic, but in our travels she seeks out Buddhist and Hindu temples.  She does like to go to cathedrals which offer masses in Latin, which remind her of her childhood in Ireland. As a result, I am exposed to more Latin words than you would think. Recently, I saw the expression Ad Maiora Natus Sum - and I recognized that as the motto of my school. And I had a bit of a flashback. Without consciously recognizing it, it hit me that the motto has guided most of my life.  I have gravitated towards topics of innovation, Six Sigma, progress. That is a common theme in most of my books. 6,500 posts on New Florence reflect that. My advice to clients always pushes for continuous improvement using technology.   

So, in all honesty, I am disappointed at the missed opportunities in the last decade in the two big markets I write and advise about. Over a million on-prem customers have not moved to the cloud, even when their on-prem systems have become compliance and security risks and recruiting liabilities. And even staying on-prem, they could be running them much more efficiently and have not explored third party maintenance, cloud infrastructure, multi-tenancy in application management etc.  Cloud functionality barely covers 20% of the grid of applications by geography and industry. SIs and outsourcers lost the data center market, they missed out on contract manufacturing, they have barely automated their own labor intensive operations - see my notes on enterprise software and outsourcing for more details. 

I had to honestly ask - how much blame do analysts deserve for not screaming louder about these missed opportunities? My initial introspection was not tough enough. In fact, I felt proud our research consistently surfaced opportunities years ahead of others. I have written about the contract manufacturing opportunities, new data center architectures, about automation in every sector in several books. I have been screaming about vertical opportunities for so long that my colleagues crack jokes about it. What more could I have done?

I heard someone recently say we have moved to "slash titles" and "portfolio jobs". Deal Architect has been doing that for 15+ years - we have an adviser/analyst/author model. We have been publishing plenty but perhaps we have not been advising enough about how to take advantage of them.

That was one aha from my introspection. Increase the advisory component of our offerings. Help vendors increase their TAM, their competitive intelligence, help customers modernize, get more value from their technology investment.

Do vendors need more advice?  I don't see it as traditional advice, more guidance about white spaces and efficiencies, but many are afraid to seek advice from analysts. Some see that as a sign of weakness. Others are not prepared to evolve business models. Most CRM vendors missed out on the massive digital advertising market that Google, Facebook, now Amazon have grown to dominate. It did not align with their software licensing models.  Many others have the "help me sell what I have" mindset. When I was a young PwC consultant, a partner told me "a good salesperson sells what is in his bag, not keeps asking for more product". I was not sure about that but was too young to argue. Now I know he was wrong. A good salesperson listens to the market and goes back to R&D/product group and asks for changes and additions.

Will customers accept advice? Honestly, many are happy with traditional services we provide, and have too many conflicting priorities to consider new ones. Others prefer to buy advisory services only from larger "brand name" firms. Still others want it packaged in bite size units.

I have told a few colleagues I started my career when building technology was far more common than buying it. Back then, it was not much fun championing the Buy side of the Buy v Build equation. It has been a lot of fun since. I am afraid, however, I may end my career with the market custom building, insourcing much more.

Hey, pendulums swing all the time and I have no intention of retiring any time soon, but I feel loyal to the Buy side and want to keep helping that "team"

We will keep doing and publishing plenty of research which helps us unearth market opportunities early. But we will also add more advisory services - that will mean new partnerships, new packages of services. I expect I will be reaching out to many of you for input.

Happy New Decade! Let's all aim for Ad Maiora.