I was reading an article this week about an event back in the good old days when computers were brand new and we all got excited by a little blinking cursor that said c:/> or something similar.

This article was about a couple of guys who won a computer back then and had no idea what to do with it. A friend duly showed up, and gave them a demo of the latest word processing – which at that time was not far short of all it was good for.
However the demo fell flat – the reason being these guys had never even used a typewriter – and so couldn’t see any use for such an easy to use, simple to correct, spell-checking replacement for a machine they didn’t own in the first place.
This got me thinking about our own situation with potential new clients. They seem to fall into some familiar camps:
1. We don’t currently have any intranet at all ( unbelievably we still get a lot of these – really a lot ).
2. Somebody wrote one themselves, but really it needs replacing – or – a slight variation – the person who wrote it has left and we have no idea how to maintain it.
3. We have a product but we all hate it.
Of course we treat all of these with equal interest – but in reality there are some big differences in our engagements with these different types of new customers.
In general I would say that those in the first camp – Group 1 - will start off Googling away and come up with a list of what they expect we will be able to provide, because someone out there has written articles or summaries about what in their view is really essential from an intranet provider. I tend to refer to this as an “outward focussed” approach – in the sense that they look out to see what is possible, and then probably find a few suppliers and ask them to tender against this somewhat arbitrary list of ‘features’ that has little to do with the business they are in, improving their innovation or driving their business forwards.
Group 2 vary a lot – often they are not sure if what the employee created really is “an intranet” in the first place, or if it should be taken seriously – but at least they have some experience of using something.
Group 3 are interesting – their frustrations probably relate to legacy software that uses old approaches like i-frames, or isn’t being improved, or where the vendor has gone bust – but at least they have real ideas about “what a better solution should do for them”. Notice the “for them” – they do have real ideas about what their own company needs, not just a checklist of arbitrary functionality. I refer to this as an “inward focus”
Paradoxically “inward focus” in this sense sounds somewhat negative, as if they lack vision – but of course this is not the case at all, and in many business senses a company that is always spending some time looking to analyze itself and improve has a great attitude.
The truth is that for us engaging with all of these types of new customers is interesting and varied. The world of intranet software is a large one and we do our best to explain it as honestly and professionally to all companies that ask about our products and services - whether they ever saw that blinking green cursor or not!
Prod-Intranet
intranet software