CIO needs an Internal Sales team

Cost cutting and simplifying IT landscape are top priorities of a CIO. Reusing existing software solutions can help achieve these goals.

However, despite having “Reuse” as an architecture principle, more often than not projects end up implementing new software solutions. Here are some of the possible reasons I can think of:

1. Project team is not aware of the existing solution
2. Existing solution is not upgraded over time and hence lacks some key features and modern UI
3. Incumbent vendor sales team are either not invited or don’t take active interest (they may only get compensated on net new…)
4. New solution vendor sales team do their best to make a deal
5. It is easy criticise what you have deployed and used, rather than marketing slides

In many cases If we explore newer version of the existing solution, we will find that it has some of the new features users are looking for and meets most of the requirements.

 Here are some of the recommendations to improve reuse:

1. Maintain a central application repository mapped to key capabilities.
2. Move to cloud where sensible to ensure software is kept up to date and new features are available on an ongoing basis.
3. Move from perpetual to subscription based license model. This will keep vendor interested in continued software use and customer satisfaction.
4. Assign and train product owners as internal salesman for the existing solutions.