A Focus on Consulting

Back in 1999, the first Prometheans were trying to come up with a name for this venture of ours. Earlier tales have been told of how Promethius came to be a part of it, but what I’d like to discuss today revolves around the “Consulting” portion of that storied name.

You see, consulting has always been a major value that we bring to the table, but many of our clients don’t avail themselves of it. In the early years of the Promethius experience, it was very common for Prometheans to be part of our clients’ teams. We attended staff meetings, board meetings and sometimes even staff birthday parties. We consulted on annual budgets, strategic initiatives and even staffing decisions. As technology progressed, however, it became much more common for small companies to departmentalize their tech. It became common practice to rely on software vendors for advice on software functionality, for instance. Rather than work with a trusted advisor to gather requirements and wish lists, company leaders, and sometimes general staff, would start meeting with software vendors and let the demos do their work.

In recent years, many of our prospects/customers approach us already knowing the products and services they wish to purchase. Too often this sort of thinking has led to computer support being viewed as a commodity. Seeking the lowest-priced help desk support can cause some real problems and has left many small companies in dangerous positions in this age of cyber threats.

The risks today are too great to rely on client/vendor relationships. We need to go back to a world of partnership. We need relationships in which we can have real discussions of threats, problems, options and solutions. If there is no trust, then everything seems like a sales pitch. The fact is that the most profitable solution for Promethius, the vendor, is often the “solution” that we would advise against. It would be easy, for instance, to recommend a time and materials solution to our clients that only reacts to problems after they have revealed themselves through some sort data loss or security breach. This kind of arrangement might be good for our bottom line, but it would be irresponsible for us to recommend such a strategy.

So, the moral to the tale is to discuss technology strategies with your trusted advisors and more importantly, choose vendors that you can trust as the number one criterion. View your technology providers as a team of experts that is there to help you make decisions to run your business. If your website developers can’t work with your SaaS providers or your Managed Services Provider, then some changes might be in order because technology needs to work in concert to be effective. Give us a call if you’re interested in discussing your IT strategy.