I was at a prospective client’s office a few weeks ago.  This client is a very large (20,000+ employees), global and conservative company.  They’ve been around for a long time (roughly 100 years).  When we walked through the doors, it was exactly what you expected:

• Security desk
• Old school lighting
• Uniformed carpeting throughout
• Drab safe neutral tones on the walls
• Ridiculously large historical prints ads and paintings
• Meeting rooms that looked like classrooms
• Everything was made of dark marbled wood
• Business casual to business formal was the dress code

You’re getting the picture; traditional, stodgy, predictable and not a whisper of innovation.  It brought back memories of my roughly 3 years at ConAgra Foods.  While I enjoyed working at ConAgra Foods, the “office space” wasn’t what you’d call inspiring.  It was cube farm after cube farm with bad lighting, IBM laptops (ironically though no wireless access) and a decided look backward instead of forward.

With that kind of a setup, you can understand why I was completely floored to hear from their Director Of Communications explain that they’ve completely moved away from Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes.  Huh?  A 100 year old company with an office design that would bring an agency creative director to tears has dropped traditional tools like Office and Lotus Notes in favor of a 100% cloud driven infrastructure that leverages Google Apps?  Huh, I say again.

I was intrigued to say the least.  I probed a bit deeper and the Director Of Communications shared with me why they made the switch.  It really boiled down to 3 simple things:

1. They’re a global company with offices in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.  Trying to standardize software versions  across those continents was a nightmare.
2. More importantly it was far too costly to outfit their 20,000+ employees with that software.  They’re in the business of selling “X” not in the business of software.  They wanted to free up capitol from infrastructure (I can’t share the dollar amount, but it’s very expensive) and redirect it to product innovation, marketing and new market penetration.
3. By operating in the cloud their employees could access what they needed, when they needed it, from wherever they were located.  In full disclosure, I still think the cloud is often limiting, and while I was there they client was experiencing an entire Gmail outage that basically negated the ability for 20,000+ employees to use email.  Conceptually though, it was explained to me, that operating in the cloud was a path to eventually having an office-less working environment.  The value of an office-less working environment is tremendous.  You cut down on real-esate and insurance costs, which again free up dollars to put against marketing and innovation.

OK, so where the hell am I going with this post?  At the end of the day, you/your company is in the business of selling something.  You’re not in the business of software or infrastructure.  Hell even if you’re company sells software, you’re not in the business of software.  You’re in the business of selling the software

One of the key plot points I often share with my clients is the need to shift their interactive spending away from maintenance and infrastructure and put their money against content.  We’ll execute a budget analysis that looks at how much they’re currently spending against:

• Infrastructure
• Maintenance
• Creative
• Development
• Content
• Innovation

I can tell you, that the overwhelming majority of clients are spending 40% of their budgets against infrastructure and maintenance.  Ouch.  Think about that.  Even if it’s 25%, that’s a lot of money being put against things that are not in your sweet spot.

You have goals.  You have objectives.  Rarely does the budget increase.  That means we need to be more prudent with the dollars we do have to spend.  Give some thought about what you’re spending in infrastructure.  I think you’ll be surprised by how much of your budget is being eaten up by infrastructure and maintenance.  With the vast number of options available to us for hosting, content management systems, etc. why are you/we spending so much money against the things that aren’t your/our sweet spot?  Doesn’t make sense does it?