Picking a software solution and procuring a solution are not one in the same (I found out the hard way). When I have put content management systems in place before – I ran the division. All people reported into me. I said it. It was done. It doesn’t work that way when you are not the top banana.

When we (in marketing) decided on RSuite Team Edition as our content management system, we knew it took about a day to install – so we figured it could be up and running in a week. Not so fast. Our IT people had a process and a schedule – and we weren’t on it. Maybe a month they said.

When a person is drowning and she hears it will be month before a response team can be set up – there can be some hard feelings. How to get past the hard feelings and figure out a win-win is what this part of the journey was about.

The MarkLogic IT team – the guys that keep the internal systems running and the perimeter locked down – is a modest-sized team that overseas a robust off-prem data center on the west coast and a redundant site across the country. The same team manages the telecom for our international offices centrally. As with most IT departments they enact protocols to assure up-time and security – and also to make sure there are not redundancies.

As with many business departments our marketing team is looking for the best solutions to get things done. As new solutions emerge on the market they often come with a free trial – and so we sign up. Or maybe a contractor has mandates and chooses a cloud solution. But for whatever reason, IT doesn’t know about it – so can’t secure it – nor look for the broader good.

In getting mired in our mandates we can forget that the other guy has directives that are equally important. Right Hand meet Left Hand.

After we all climbed down from the ceiling after our little to-do over when things would be ready – we started over. Marketing explained why this new content management and digital asset management system was going to be so helpful: We have stuff everywhere.

When Jeff Thomas our head of IT heard about our use of Dropbox (among a dozen other things) he almost dropped his jaw. “Seriously?” he asked, “do you know how insecure that is!?” “Do you know how inconvenient it is!?” I countered. And we were well on the way to finding common ground.

I explained that we were going to use this to put all finished assets – as well as the elements to create those assets. He listened intently and out of the blue asked if we could secure documents. I affirmed that we could, and in fact, folders with assets would only be visible to people with specific permissions. He had moved on. What type of capacity did we need?

Needed to hedge here. “It’s not simultaneous queries we need to worry about,” I began. “It’s memory.” And frankly, I had no idea how much memory we were talking about. I had no idea what assets we had, I certainly didn’t know the size.

“Do you want redundancy?”

Well, yeah. But I was worried that if we made this too complicated it would take even longer to stand it up.

“We can phase it,” he said. “But can I put the servers behind the firewall?”

I saw an opening. “I have to make sure contractors can have access to it,” I offered.

He didn’t see that as an issue.

“When can I see a demo,” Jeff asked?

“I’ll get it scheduled.”

What I learned from our meeting is that IT procurement may seem to the outside world that it is all process and schedule. But the bigger issue is that my colleague teammate Jeff would have liked to evaluate the product both for technical merit as well as for its place in the company – would it solve problems just for marketing or would it be broader? Does it supplement or replace an existing service? Who else may benefit and what would their requirements and impacts be? Who might be harmed and would that impact be?

Both of us are still flying blind on much of this, which is why we agreed to move with it as a phased rollout rather than a full final deployment.  “I get that it is perceived that IT puts in time delays because we are process oriented — but that is really minor compared to the bigger-picture issues.”

All on the Same Team from MarkLogic.