SaaS, bad parents and not invented here syndrome

 

A few days ago I blogged about the analogy between SaaS providers and babysitters. Sinclair left a comment pushing the analogy further. …what about bad parents…any babysitter more capable at child-raising than the parents may suffice… he wrote.

While I agree with this, it is unlikely you will tell a parent: “based on your parenting skills, you should really let the babysitter take care of your kids” (i.e. based on your IT expertise, you should really let a SaaS ISVs operate your software); you really want them to discover it by themselves J. Interestingly, (based on my anecdotal evidence) the larger the company, the less likely they will believe that someone else can do a better job than themselves, it’s not denial, it’s classic Not Invented Here Syndrome (NIHS). (before I upset all the large enterprise IT folks here, let me caveat this by stressing that this is anecdotal evidence and not the general rule… you know who are! J)

So, as a SaaS provider, in addition to be as trusted as a babysitter, you will most likely need to “fight” against many CIOs / enterprise architects who believe that they can do a better/faster/cheaper job than you are.

One way of mitigating NIHS is to talk to the bean counters, or the business unit managers, they usually have little sympathy for NIH arguments.

Are you seeing a lot of NIHS when you pitch SaaS?