How many times have you asked a contractor, “Do you know the software package X?”
This isn’t the right question to be asking. They may know it, but that’s not as important as their ability to learn it on the fly.
Anyone telling you that they know everything is lying to you. A company may say that they know everything, but what really matters is the specific resource that’s implementing the technology in your environment.
Even if they’ve worked on a specific piece of software in the past, keeping up to date is a whole task in itself that no one has time for. An engineers greatest asset that you need to look for is their ability to adapt, learn, and augment the technology into what’s in front of them.
I know a ton of different pieces of software. I could easily go into the hundreds, and probably reach well over a thousand (I’m not talking enterprise-only). But when someone approaches me about what I know, I get ready for the explanation. It generally goes something like this:
Company – “Have you every integrated SoftwareX into this IdM Suite before?”
Me – “Nope.”
Company – “Oh, well, we really want someone that’s done it before.”
Me – “That’s not actually what you want. What you want is someone that knows the IdM suite inside and out, has worked with many different types of connected resources, and has lots of hands-on experience in solving integration issues rapidly, efficiently, and correctly. You’ll never find anyone that has implemented your exact requirements before, and no one has ever deployed a vanilla ‘out-of-the-box’ installation. It just never happens. To maximize the benefits of an IdM suite, the installation needs to be custom tailored to your specific business processes. That’s why this IdM suite is so powerful, and why it will help organize your entire corporate backend infrastructure. If you implement it wrong, you’ve just wasted a million bucks. So, do you want someone that’s going to copy / paste an implementation from another client and hope for the best? Or, would you prefer someone that has a proven track record of being able to integrate anything you throw at them, no matter how custom it is, and be successful the first time?
Generally, I hear silence for a while, while I wait for their minds to finish exploding. =)
Identity Management isn’t burger flipping. It’s a Top Chef challenge.
A burger flipper will take a runbook they built from another client (or a coworker gave them) and try to use it to build out your environment as quickly as possible because you both agreed that a fix-bid contract is acceptable (they’ll both loose).
A Top Chef will take all his culinary skills that he’s honed over the years from proven successes and cater a couture solution that will maximize your return on your investment in the most reasonable time possible. You’ll pay more, but it will be right, and delicious!
Sorry… I’m hungry and took my analogy a little too far, but I think you get the point.
So the next time you want to know if a client knows a certain software package, make sure you follow it up with something like, “… and what were some of the biggest integration challenges that you’ve faced in the past and how did you overcome them while keeping the client happy and staying within budget?”
A burger flipper won’t even know where to begin. A Top Chef will smile, rub his hands together, and get ready to amaze you.