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TCS+ | Braintree on the psychology of software purchases

Braintree’s Grant van der Westhuizen and Heath Huxtable tell TechCentral’s TCS+ business technology show about how to acquire software that solves present and future business needs. This might sound simple, but software purchases are complex and expensive. For companies to get their money’s worth, properly diagnosing the problem a new piece of software ought to solve and ensuring that the solution is futureproof are key to extracting the most value from a purchase. In this episode of TCS+, Huxtable – MD at Braintree – and Van der Westhuizen, the company’s business applications sales manager, tell TCS+ about important considerations companies should take into account when looking to solve business problems through software. Huxtable and van der Westhuizen delve into: • How customers don’t really know what they want because they tend to hyperfocus on solving pain points instead of looking at the bigger picture; • Balancing short-term vs long-term thinking in purchasing decisions; • The importance of unlocking value versus thinking of software as a grudge purchase; • The flexibility provided by the Microsoft suite of business applications; • How to balance personalised solutions with maintaining a consolidated view in multi-faceted business; and • How to deal with resistance from employees in implementation projects, especially where artificial intelligence is involved. Huxtable and Van der Westhuizen are passionate about using software to drive value creation in business, and their energy comes through vividly in this interview. Don’t miss the discussion!

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 10 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: aac

(upbeat music) - I am Ghosna Atindro and when this is TCS Plus brought to you by Braintree. Braintree is an IT consultancy specializing in the Microsoft Techstack. Here with me today are Grant from Fundivestaysen and Heath Huxtable, M.D. and Business Application Sales Manager at Braintree. Gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the show. - Thank you for having us. - Thank you. - Good afternoon. If we could start by way of analogy. I wake up in the morning, maybe I have a little headache and some muscle aches. I decided to go to the chemist and self-diagnose. I'm gonna get some generic pain tablets that I've used before. They've worked for me in the past. Luckily I run into a nurse who encourages me to go in for a consultation and we found out later that there was some deeper problem. Maybe I need antibiotics or something stronger. But when I walked in to the chemist initially, right, I just wanted to solve a particular pain problem and I wasn't thinking about the deeper problem beneath that. How does this translate to software purchases? - I'm happy. I'm happy to take that one. It's actually a brilliant analogy because I think what happens is-- - Are we the doctors? - We are more than doctors. - Are we the nurses? - We are the surgeons. (all laughing) - We specialize, the reality is that analogy is brilliant because from the perspective of businesses knowing or understanding what they require, often what happens when looking for at solutions and systems that are in place, symptoms are what drives the requirement. So they look at the symptoms, be it inventory, be it financial analysis, and they go, how do we solve that? But often when they try and solve the symptom, when you start digging into it, you actually realize there's a lot more to the requirement and there's a lot more that can actually be reached, made possible, and we talk about the art of the possible. And if you don't know, you can't say, well that's what I wanna achieve, right? - Yes, yes. - We look at trying to make sure that businesses don't just treat the symptoms, that we look at the larger solution requirement and how we can address that using a Microsoft environment. - Okay, but now in delving deeper into the problems, there's a difference now between short-term thinking, as well as looking at a long-term view. How do you help your customers see that? - So I think, I think the big thing for us is actually one is to understand what the problem is, and the problem statement has a life span. A large part of what organizations come to us on this is that it's more strategic. So there might be an immediate problem, so I've got the cold, common cold, need something right now, but ultimately, how do I prevent common cold happening in the future? So a large portion of what we do is actually kind of try and understand or unpack the requirements that a company has an organization has to resolve certain problems or to address certain problems going forward. And problem solving is one element, but future-proofing businesses is part of what we also do. And when we talk about future-proofing, it's about unlocking value. And that doesn't ever lie, that doesn't have a timeframe. Unlocking value is infinite. And as long as an organization remains in business, we're always going to be trying to, well, organization is trying to unlock value, software tries to help unlock that value. So we see ourselves as a facilitator in being able to, one, let's understand what the problem statement is, and then two, try and resolve it. So say you're consulting with me, and you've shown me that I have a deeper problem, but you guys said you specialize in Microsoft. Now, are you going to excel my business to the T? Is it going to be dev by PowerPoint? You know, where's the dev going to come from? So probably a common misconception is the concept that Microsoft is exactly just like an office. They just offer products. An interesting point was that one of our shareholders actually came to us probably about two months ago, and they said to us they'd like us to review a implementation contract that they've got for a business application. And they gave us a document, we had a look at the document, and we noticed that it was a competitive product of ours. I said to him, so you do know that Microsoft's a bit more than just offer a suite of products, and that actually we, as you're a shareholder, well, part shareholder in us, is we can offer way more value, specifically in the business application space. And they said, yeah, but we went online, and we had to look at it, we couldn't really find too much information about it, and that's probably the problem, is that there's very little information about additionally what Microsoft can offer. So, you know, obviously, everybody knows office, okay? We, you know, generally classified as a productivity suite, okay? But there's business applications, okay? So thankfully, from our point of view, we got involved at a very early stage before the kind of decision that'd be made, and we started, we went through the process of kind of introducing them to what we do in business applications. And if I look at, if I look at us as an organization, we are probably about 60% of our business is actually business applications, okay? 30% is productivity, okay? And 10% is actually cloud services right now. So the three elements of Microsoft are the business applications, and there's a suite of products that they've got out there, and that's really about, you know, you've got to mention about, you know, optimizing inventory, and warehousing, and distribution, and finance, and treasury, and supply chain, and all those sort of things. That's the business application space, and that's what we've traditionally, or that's, I mean, you asked middle early on is, you know, how long have we been doing this? And our history comes from the business application space. When Microsoft adopted cloud in probably 2014, 2013, 2014, and they started moving a lot of their workloads into software as a service, that was where we got involved in productivity, that was when we started selling Productivity Suite, that was kind of exacerbated with COVID, you know, and everybody went online, and we had teams, meetings, and things like that. So that was basically the Productivity Suite on steroids. - Yes. - Okay. - So we got that, and then obviously the cloud, you know, cloud has been around, or Azure, has been around for probably 2016, not probably 2016, and again, you know, it took an event like COVID to suddenly make people realize, organizations realize that they need to kind of de-set, you know, offload workloads from on-prem environments into the cloud, so it's accessible to everybody and by everybody. - Yes. - Okay, and that's been our natural growth. So as I said, you know, cloud at the moment is 10% of our revenue, but it's a big part of our force, you know, our strategy is a big part of our growth strategy is actually, is cloud enablement. - Yes, but let's go back to the point, we spoke about you being specialists, and part of a specialist solution is having it tailored to my specific needs, or my specific department, how much does personalization play a role in the solutions that you give to your client? - Massive. - Massive. So we don't have one size that's all solution. So you opened up by actually saying to us, well, it's a consulting business, and our fundamental is we're a consulting business. So we take product and solutions, and we tailor for them to customer's requirements. And that's what our consultants do. That's actually the strength of us as an organization. - I also think what's happened is that a lot of businesses as over the years, if you look at where we find a really strong strength in consulting with companies that have got multiple disciplines within an organization. So what I mean by that is that a lot of companies, they started off by going, we sell widgets, or we sell a certain item. But as business grew, they diversified. And then all of a sudden it moved from, we don't just sell an item, we service an item. Or we end up running, and believe it or not, a canteen. So the business actually starts to evolve. And when the business evolves, one size fits all doesn't work. But then how do you get a consolidated view of your organization that's got all of these different facets involved? And that becomes quite a strong point for us to actually be able to give you, he has a single view of your organization. But what's required for a catering business versus what's required for selling a widget. - Yes. - Very, very deeply different. - Two completely different things. - Yes. But now let's talk about the same tech. - Yes. - Same tech. - Different solution. - Okay. So the tech being the same helps you have, as you said, one view. And you can consolidate that. But different solutions help you manage different problems in a specific way. But now let's talk about implementing these things. - Implementation is sometimes difficult because you come along now, I've been using whatever tool X that I've been using for 10 years, right? As an employee in a certain position, you come along and say, all right, we're going to change the paradigm. And this is better, this is faster. But how do you balance that familiarity versus novelty in terms of the solutions and how adoption happens in organizations? - Well, I think you started off by saying about Microsoft being Office PowerPoint Excel. - Yes. - There's, there lies a lot of the ability to actually implement change. Because most people know how to use a Microsoft productivity solution. They know how to find certain things in certain places. Expect to find certain things in certain places. First thing that you do when you walk into any company, what are they doing? Checking emails, right? - Yes. - If you're actually able to take the business application side of it and embed it into an outlook environment, now you're not forcing a user to go out from outlook and move into a different solution. They can actually get their invoicing. They can get a view of the business requirements within outlook. That is a huge plus compared to some of our competitive products where they don't have that direct engagement. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that other competitive products don't do that. But the level of integration. - Integration. - Into operation. - And the ability for users to accept that kind of change is massive. So that goes a long way. - All right. Okay, so you get some of that change from the familiarity with Microsoft products. But I mean, we're also seeing with the introduction of AI that change management sometimes needs a very specific focus. Some projects are multi-year projects and they're big. So what happens in that case where you need to drive change management more directly? - So I think the big thing with AI specifically is it's a big unknown. So from a tech point of view, from an adoption point of view, it's in its infancy. And I think anything that is unknown is a threat. And the minute it's a threat, okay, you have resistance. The resistance is actually what we're required as an organisation to kind of help an organisation through that resistance threshold. It comes back down to the motive of an organisation as to why they actually want an AI in the first place, okay? And when the motive is actually clearly articulated, adoption becomes a whole lot easier. We've come across quite a few instances where AI as an example, okay, is viewed as an opportunity to be able to reduce headcount, okay? That's not a great thing when you try and talk about change management and adoption, okay? - Yes, in fairness. - Yes. So what we're trying to change the narrative of what AI actually is really trying to achieve in an organisation and organisations at large. And that's about driving better efficiency. It's making people focus on the things that they actually didn't have time to focus on previously, could you extend that with it, they need to focus to get better results. So better efficiency, it's work smart, not necessarily always hard, get a lot of the hard work done by technology. - Yes. - And that's, if we can get that message across in what I said, the change management aspect becomes a whole lot easier. And AI is one part of it. Now Grant talks about the business applications. Business applications is the heart of an organisation, okay? Without the business application organisation, the company doesn't, it would be difficult to exist. So Grant has this analogy of the open heart surgery without an aesthetic, okay? Is you take a business application out of an organisation, it's like having open heart surgery. So no organisation actually willingly wants to go through a process of changing their business application. So there has to be a value add, there has to be an opportunity, there has to be a driver, and it's about unlocking value, future value, future proofing businesses, that organisations tend to adopt these processes, and change management in that space is insane, because there, what we found, is staff churn when you start replacing business applications, is massive, and it's because of the fear of the unknown, is people fear that there's an application that's going to help me, that's going to help the business, and it's going to make my job redundant. So they start looking, so they start looking for it, exactly. So, and that puts projects at risk, generally, because you now, the people that hold the business acumen or the IP around what they were doing, now kind of disappears, okay? So, and it becomes more complex, the longer the project becomes. So, you know, in multi-year projects, apart from the traditional project fatigue, staff churn becomes a huge issue. - I also think that the key to change management as well is that we're speaking about technology, right? We're talking about Microsoft as a solution and as a platform. The thing is when it comes to business application and anything that you're doing around change management, you're aiming it not at the technical department or the CIO, you know, it's not, this is not a technical initiative. - Yes. - It's actually a business initiative. - Unfortunately, technical has a big say in it. - Technical needs to have a say in it, but to drive change management, what you need to do though is the business needs to actually drive that down. I think the misconception is that, you know, consultants can come in and drive change management for an organization. It's untrue. What you drive change management through is executive sponsorship. The business itself needs to want to change. It needs to have a reason to change. Because without that reason, consultant walks in and says, "Guys, "we're gonna give you open heart surgery without an aesthetic." No normal person would say, "Yeah, that sounds like fun. "Let's do that, right?" They're gonna run away. So what we do is you need to have change management driving it. And when it comes to AI, the key for me around AI is the fact that the motive should be a business motive, like Heath said around productivity. - Yes. - But more importantly, AI is driven around data. And people don't see it like that. They go, "Oh, AI, we're gonna have a bot "or an android or somebody doing my job." But it's all based on data. Because if you don't base it on data, what's gonna happen is you're gonna have an AI tool or an AI initiative. And this is a term that I actually heard for the first time and I actually started laughing. They say it's not hallucinating. - Yes. - Because it will hallucinate if the data is not grounded. So that's kind of a key concept that businesses need to understand. They need to have the data in place in order to facilitate the change, be it AI, be it a biz app, be it any change within an organisation. - But Grant, you touched on something there, a lot, this tension between business and IT. This also plays out when software purchases have to be made. How does that come through in your... - I think it's actually got better over the years. I think if I go back five, six, seven years ago, there was always a lot of tension because you found technical IT was actually under finance. Finance is driving debits and credits and trying to reduce costs and where the spend is, it needs to be justified, et cetera. Whereas technical is looking at it and saying future-proof the business, we understand a threat, might be security, might be platform, it might be hosting. We saw this initiative where the unfortunate happenings of what happened in Quizaluna tell where business were disrupted by the rights that went down, businesses that were cloud-based, were able to rejuvenate and go forward and pick it up quickly. People that had a server under a desk that now the server's gone, your data's gone, components. The time to get back to business as usual is crazy. So that started stimulating and I think what happened then is you find as the years have passed, the technical department within a business has actually become a self-standing department. Doesn't report into finance, it reports as itself. So you get CIO, it's a role on the board, C-level exec, here we go. So that drives a lot better conversations within, a lot better, that's a brilliant English but anyway. Drives a conversation that is meaningful for the business and it's not seen as a garage purchase as it used to be, does that make sense? Yes and I think what you're saying is it leads to better outcomes in terms of what tools are purchased at the end of the day. Why tools are bought, right? I mean, it's not just, well, I like the shiny thing in the corner, it's new, let me try it, it's not about that, it's about there's a technology shift and Microsoft is brilliant in the way that they trailblaze. So, for us to actually look at that and embrace it and say, okay, this is actually a longer-term view, that becomes the discussion rather than, yeah, let's try to begin the guinea pig and let's see if we can actually make this thing work for us. It's not about that. Okay, but I think there's good conflict between IT or IT and business. And I think the big thing is, is that is the driver, ultimately, in terms of IT should be a support function. Business should drive the requirement. IT needs to support that requirement. And historically, IT used to kind of drive the outcomes as well, so it's different and it has changed. And I look at our success, if I look at our project successes, our most successful projects that we've got are the ones where we deal with the business directly and rely on the IT team to support the initiative. Our least successful is where we actually have a driver, where we're where the IT department is overly strong and they drive the initiative, the outcome, they drive the process and it's that we invariably find that we have a bit of a mismatch in terms of what the business expects versus what we actually deliver. So for us, I think the big thing is, we need to be talking to the business people in the organizations. Yes, yes, and then IT just helps you make sure that you integrate your solutions in the best way. And I think the technology is basically played into that requirement as well. And what I mean by that is, historically, what's happened is that if there was, for example, a reporting requirement from business, it would land up as a request to the IT department and then you would have someone going into SQL, writing SQL reports using reporting services or analysis services. Now with tool sets around productivity where you're looking at Power BI, you're looking at analytical tools that users can actually drive. You're not having to require the IT department to drive the output. You've actually facilitated and given tools to the users that they can actually do it themselves. There's a very cool term on that. It's a democratizing of data. Yes, I can. [LAUGHTER] When I grab them down, we get used to it. And that's the thing, is that data is owned by everybody. Data is owned by the organization, not just a handful of people. So it's about making that data available to everybody. So the tool sets that are coming out provide the consumers of that data to be able to analyze it and slice and dice and present it in a way that makes sense to them. You know, days gone by, you would put in a request for information, OK? And it would go into an IT team or an IS team. And they would go and they would schedule it. And you know, three weeks later, the reporter would come out and say, is this what you wanted? Or the data comes in, is this what you wanted? And then you'd go to iterations of that. And by the time that you actually get the report, you actually don't need the report anymore. Yes. So democratization of data is absolutely-- that's a big thing happening now. And it's about putting the power in the hands of the people that use it. Yes. And it speaks back to that personalization aspect because people using it design a solution that's actually specific to the problem. Correct. But the key, though, is to make sure that the base data is consistent, accurate. Or I've sat in a board meeting where people have actually spent the first 30 minutes discussing that the gross profit percentage differs from someone else in the room because they've used Excel. And who's is right and who's is wrong. Whereas if the base data is accurate and everyone believes in the integrity of the data, then the end user can consume that data as much as they want. But you're not questioning the integrity of the data. That becomes critical. OK. Gentlemen, thank you very much for a lively discussion. No. And your pleasure, thanks for having us. OK. Thank you very much. That is Grant Fundivestesen and Heath Huxstable of Braintree for TCS Plus.