World-class PSO: Daily Thought

Day 2 of the TSIA Technology Services World Conference has wrapped up, and it was another day of idea sharing and generation. Some sessions were, of course, more valuable that others. Here are my top five "key take-aways" from today's session:

1. Professional Services within a product team (and probably any PSO) should be in the business of "Value Creation."
2. PS should drive overall business results. $1 of PS revenue should have a multiplier effect on the business through additional product and PS revenue.
3. PS needs to be part of the overall brand of the company - No Second Class Citizens
4. PS and Sales managers need to develop "Deal Attributes" that indicate when/if PS should be included in a deal. The two teams should work together to review major accounts and key deals to ensure the sales team is included when it should be.
5. AVOID true Packaged offerings. Sales is responsible for finding and qualifying PS leads, PS is responsible for educating those leads and proposing solutions, Sales is responsible for closing the deal, and PS is responsible for delivering. At the end of the day, Product Sales will struggle with matching the right PS offering and sizing it correctly leaving PS to clean up a potential mess. Additionally, for publicly traded companies, Package Offerings create VSOE challenges that must be considered.

I look forward to sharing more tomorrow.

World-class PSO: Daily Thought

Day 1 of this springs Technology Services World conference is complete. The day started with a "Value" workshop in which we discussed ways to quantify the value a PSO provides its customers and how to develop a services portfolio designed to add value. While we all agreed that we need to define offerings and services that meet the needs of our companies, the focus of this session was all about the customer.

Marc Lacroix from RTM consulting discussed the Value Model. Additionally, we discussed our teams readiness in terms of delivering value-added services. A lot of the concepts discussed in this session came from J.B. Wood's book, The Complexity Avalanche, (which I haven't read, but I have bought it, and it is next on my reading list).

In the afternoon, Thomas Lah, President of TSIA discussed the implications of Cloud Computing on TSIA members. My first impression is that Mr. Lah is concerned that Cloud Computing is hype that may or may not have a marketable effect on what we do. I got the impression that he felt that, at a minimum, it is a distraction that will make all of our jobs harder. (For instance, he compared the Oracle business margins to Salesforce.com's without acknowledging that SFDC is a growing business forging new paths. They are in investment mode, where as Oracle is a mature business in the top spot in its space.)

After his presentation, though, Mt. Lah brought executives from NetSuite, Oracle, EMC, and IBM who all agreed that Cloud Computing is game-changing and PSOs are poised to capitalize on the change if they think strategically about the needs of the customer base: Business Process Changes and Change Management, Data Migration, and Managed Services.