SharePoint Sunday: Microsoft Geeks and Sales
December 28, 2009
Not much SharePoint excitement last week. I have been sitting on a post called “The Problem with Sales Guys… (A Peek into Complex Adaptive Systems). The write up is by Paul Culmsee. My hunch is that the point of the essay is to explain that engineers need the sales person, and the sales person needs the engineer. I agree. There was one passage that provided me some food for thought:
If SharePoint were a fast food, it would either be one of those giant steaks that you get your name on the wall if you finish, or the Guatemalan chili that sent the normally invincible Homer into the spirit world. It is so seductive to the sales guys because it is in demand, but their distance to the assholes means that they will think it should be just like any other IT infrastructure oriented project to install. Therefore, some integrators will be doomed to repeatedly bite off more than they can chew and by the time they realize it, the long term damage will be done.
When I read about this, I said to myself, “When Microsoft Fast meets up with SharePoint, there’s going to be a run on Guatemalan chili.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 28, 2009
No one paid me to write this. I would probably not eat Guatemalan chili if it were offered as an inducement. I will report this to the manager of the GSA’s cafeteria outsourcing team. I think Guatemalan chili is on the GSA menu every second Tuesday of the month.
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3 Responses to “SharePoint Sunday: Microsoft Geeks and Sales”
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Hiya
I might have been crude but I was trying to make a serious point. The point of the essay was that making decisions to optimise one particular aspect of a system (such as give sales guys inducements) will, according to the notion of complex adaptive systems, change the system in ways that cannot be predicted (hence the ring of fire analogy).
Therefore taking a command and control view and optimisng a process might give you short term gain, but in the long term may end making you less resilient and adaptive.
There are lots of examples in ecology, like the everglades in Florida, where we are now paying the price of past attempts to try to optimise a part of the system, which in the longer term created more difficult and costly problems to deal with. Unfortunately, we tend to persist with the known methods for too long, until the system is near collapse because looking at the bigger picture, is damn hard work and requires real collaboration
Regards
Paul
gracias por su cuento..