Years ago I was given a wise saying on a tile as a gift. I could not have imagined at the time that the text would acquire so much meaning. It has to do with change, where you want to be innovative but the outcome is different. What did it say?
“If you do what you did, you get what you got”
The lack of will
This saying took on a deeper meaning when I was responsible for IT change projects for a number of very large financial institutions. My experience afterwards was that these large organizations remained the same for years and reacted with surprise when a project did not lead to the desired result. There was simply no willingness and consensus to really change. But what does that have to do with the cloud you might think?
It’s somewhere else, but are you doing it differently?
In cloud implementations, processes and applications are in many cases transferred from on-premise to the cloud. “If you do what you did, you get what you got” often applies here as well. In fact, in many cases the only change is that all information and working methods have remained the same, but are located elsewhere. It is much more interesting to investigate the real benefits of the cloud, for example by inventing and developing new, more efficient work processes with the help of apps. My feeling is that it has often remained at ‘transfer’ and that the benefits of using the cloud have not (yet) been taken into account.
Getting something different starts with a good personal conversation
That’s why I believe in better ways to get real change. That starts with a good conversation and understanding the underlying question of the question. A good example is how a few years ago a customer came up with a request to deliver a new telephone system. In the end we advised to leave the old system for the time being and supplied a storage system. The need was completely different from what the demand initially led us to believe.
If the customer demand is a cloud solution, that sometimes also means ‘selling no’. After our advice, a customer who was so convinced of the modern advantages of the cloud decided differently when it turned out that they were rather in an outlying area in terms of infrastructure (little available bandwidth and unreliable connections). This put them at far too great a risk due to the limited accessibility of the information needed on a daily basis.
You do something different together!
In most cases, after an extensive inventory, we can arrive at a well-substantiated proposal. CloudAvenue specializes in Unified Communications (UC) solutions, Voice over IP (VoIP), telephony, speech, chat and mobile integration. Because we are part of the Chronos Group, an ICT organization with more than 200 affiliated companies, we can always bring real change, in any ICT area.
That is why my personal tile wisdom and the way I like to work has become:
“If you stop doing what you were doing, you really get something else!”
Knowing more?
I would be happy to make the best choice together with you, whether it is on premise, cloud or hybrid. It’s about delivering and properly implementing a solution that really delivers a different result.
Wiecher Akkerman, Managing Partner