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The same way you sell a business anything else: it will raise our revenues and/or decrease our costs. Rather than saying "We should reimplement our core produc
by patio11 13y ago
The same way you sell a business anything else: it will raise our revenues and/or decrease our costs.
Rather than saying "We should reimplement our core products in $FOO" you can often achieve the result of using $FOO while hitting less resistance by implementing one-off projects or support systems in $FOO instead.
e.g. I worked at a Japanese megacorp and, despite us being a Java shop, one of the sales guys sold a customer on "We're certainly the right people to write documentation for your Perl program." This contract only required a bunch of HTML files as a deliverable, rather than getting a team of programmers to speed on something which would be maintained for 30 years, so I successfully convinced my boss that I'd jump on the Perl grenade if he let me use any means necessary to create the HTMLed documentation. I ended up doing it in Ruby. Then I had a "Hey boss remember that time I delivered a $X0,000 project in 1/4th the budget and made you look like an effing hero? I want to use that tech again" case study.
Though for the amount of time I spent on evangelizing Ruby and modern Javascript-heavy UIs at my previous company I could have launched my own. Eventually I did. It turned out to be a much better use of my time.
- mbesto 13y agoThis. Node.js and Rails are sexy right? Show your boss how. Do a video screen capture of the time savings you get. Also, execs like what we used to call "The NASCAR Slide™" - which is a presentation slide with all of the logos of companies who use those technologies. The more Fortune 500 companies, "the faster your NASCAR car goes". Pro Tip - Just give them his link http://www.walmartlabs.com/ http://www.walmartlabs.com/ Note - Be prepared to have the ugly discussion around support and ecosystem. These are arguably the biggest cons to "newish" frameworks. The problem for any technologically lagging organization is that they don't have the resource (both human and capital) to support change.
- simenfur 13y agoA screen capture sounds like a very good idea, as a nice way to visualize. People tend to buy based on emotions, and then rationalize with logic. The screen capture sounds like an appeal to emotions, while "the NASCAR slide" would work as justification.
- rmc 13y agoThe "NASCAR slide" can also appeal to emotions, as a form of peer pressure. "Oh I wanna be like the big guys, and the big guys use this, I should do what they do".
- mbesto 13y agoIn the enterprise world this is done via user groups - http://www.sap.com/communities/user-groups.html http://www.sap.com/communities/user-groups.html You'd be surprised how often competitors (let's say BP and Shell for example) make purchasing decision after discussions at user group events, simply "to keep up with the Jones's".
- rmc 13y ago"Nobody every got fired for buying IBM"