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Nice idea - but ... His argument is "I could buy any SaaS service I liked by simply clicking 'Subscribe to Foo-SaaS for 99 / mth' on my AWS dashboard." This i

Nice idea - but ... His argument is "I could buy any SaaS service I liked by simply clicking 'Subscribe to Foo-SaaS for 99 / mth' on my AWS dashboard." This is true - it would solve his needs immediately and would yes lead to thousands of sales. For about a week. Then every purchasing dept in the Fortune 500 would collectively spray their coffee over their monitors, and suddenly one of two things would happen a) AWS would offer Enterprises a "turn off that Sht" option (at a cost) or b) every purchasing department would add even more hurdles* before you could pay out. Yes, it is hard to buy stuff in a corporate - but it is not a bug its a feature.

alangibson 6y ago
I half disagree. I'm not trying to avoid financial controls or any of that. What most people that don't do this stuff don't realize is that just working the process to i.e. create vendors in your ERP are incredibly time consuming. This is even if you have full support of the business. We always had 100% support from everyone and it was still a nightmare.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  I quarter agree :-) I have been through (many) purchase processes and they have always been painful. Especially true the first time you try and make a purchase at any large org. I call this "Director Hazing". Being promoted to Director (US company designation) usually involves a year of administrative hell as you have to learn all the horrific systems that have grown up in the company over time. There is a sort of "sink or swim" mentality and once a director gets through it they are selected for being the sort of person who can operate this system (ie responds to emails quickly) - and that tends to work against promoting people who will fix it. Anyway, as I say I reckon 25% of the time management thinks it should fix the problem and 75% of the time "I can work the system and so can anyone else at a certain level - everyone else has not been promoted and so should not get to spend the cash" I still remain convinced the system works as intended. A side note - there was some study I read about a major supermarket chain that used cameras and POS data to rank their checkout workers - and a small revolt from store managers killed the project. The store managers knew who performed best and worst at that part of the job - but that ranking did not fit the ranking for the other intangible parts of the job. And they wanted the flexibility to decide who to fire / keep / promote. And a clear metric would have got in the way. Similarly management can if they want make sure your vendor is set up, your licenses paid for. If it is high enough up their priority tree. And if it is not having a widely hated terrible system is a good excuse to avoid saying no to subordinates...

alangibson 6y ago

I half disagree. I'm not trying to avoid financial controls or any of that. What most people that don't do this stuff don't realize is that just working the process to i.e. create vendors in your ERP are incredibly time consuming. This is even if you have full support of the business. We always had 100% support from everyone and it was still a nightmare.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I quarter agree :-) I have been through (many) purchase processes and they have always been painful. Especially true the first time you try and make a purchase at any large org. I call this "Director Hazing". Being promoted to Director (US company designation) usually involves a year of administrative hell as you have to learn all the horrific systems that have grown up in the company over time. There is a sort of "sink or swim" mentality and once a director gets through it they are selected for being the sort of person who can operate this system (ie responds to emails quickly) - and that tends to work against promoting people who will fix it. Anyway, as I say I reckon 25% of the time management thinks it should fix the problem and 75% of the time "I can work the system and so can anyone else at a certain level - everyone else has not been promoted and so should not get to spend the cash" I still remain convinced the system works as intended. A side note - there was some study I read about a major supermarket chain that used cameras and POS data to rank their checkout workers - and a small revolt from store managers killed the project. The store managers knew who performed best and worst at that part of the job - but that ranking did not fit the ranking for the other intangible parts of the job. And they wanted the flexibility to decide who to fire / keep / promote. And a clear metric would have got in the way. Similarly management can if they want make sure your vendor is set up, your licenses paid for. If it is high enough up their priority tree. And if it is not having a widely hated terrible system is a good excuse to avoid saying no to subordinates...