Hello again, and I am back from hibernation. After two months, I almost drowned in my primary task of doing workshops, product launches, and planning for more events. And of course I also managed to insert a sweet diving holiday in may, that's why i disappeared for a while (again).
The past month I've been going around, meeting customers, talking about InDesign, InDesign Server, and Adobe's technology (anything from Flash, to PDF to our new AIR). These are the things that get me to wake up in the morning and my brain just starts whirring while I enjoy my cup of coffee. The possibilities of what you can do with these wonderful technologies are endless. From just being able to seamlessly deliver information in a file format that you are comfortable and confident in, to creating simple scripts to help automate some repetitive tasks, to building a full-muscled runtime managing data... it's almost like magic...
But then, i finish my coffee and I dump my cup on the sink getting ready to leave for the office. The reality hits me. My customers might not be as excited. There are many reasons. Some of them obvious, some of them are not. Some of them reasonable, some of which I don't quite understand.
It could have something to do with the corporate culture, the attitude towards technology, the feeling that creeps up when we think of changing something. For those who know how things work at the back end... how to read some lines of code, and how to tinker and tweak settings here and there, its unquestionable that updating and using new technology is the way to go. Only because we trust and we are confident that it works... in fact, not only does it work, it makes everything so much better.
It streamlines the workflow, it makes it easier to access information, it secures your data, saves versions, fixes errors, traces history, all sorts of things you can think of. A system can make a process feel like heaven.
So maybe it's not the question of whether the technology is good enough... but it's a question of whether our customers have the confidence (and the budget) to trust that an upgrade will bring them a better way of doing things and in return allow them to scale their business and earn more revenue. No company would like to spend money as an expense. They'd like to spend it and consider it an investment.
If we can prove that to them, by handholding, or just by giving them that confidence... we may be able to finally convince them to change the way they do things. Give up manually doing things and pushing paper, and believe that the computer can automate and that technology is there to back it up and make sure things are in working order.
After all, even if the current way our customers are working works... it doesn't mean that they are doing it in the best most efficient way there is... and yes, we don't have to fix what's not broken, but maybe we have to improve what we can. At the end of the day, when the customer sees how streamlined a process could be, they're happy... and you'll be proud you've helped them realize it.
For some inspiring stories, take a look at how a lot of other Adobe Customers have seen the light :)
If you have a success story, we'll be proud to write something up and show it off... just send me a note!
Take care!
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