How to influence the HiPPO

How do you influence the HiPPO? Simply stated. Data.

HiPPO, or the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, often drives decision making in IT organizations. Unfortunately, that opinion isn’t always going to drive the correct decision for the the business, but who wants to get into a fight with their bosses, bosses, boss? I’ll take that fight every day if you make it a fair fight, and the way to make it fair is to use facts. Facts come from data, and data has to be collected and analyzed out of the environment. This can be a lengthy process that may not actually achieve the intended goal. Companies spend thousands and millions of dollars hiring consulting firms to come in and provide an analysis and subsequent recommendations. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7M7A34b6Rw) It’s different with EMC and our partner community. We leverage a wide range of tools to analyze and present the data your team needs to influence your HiPPO. For example, 25% of your jobs are failing. 40% of your environment isn’t even being backed up. We know you will see a dedupe ratio at 15.6X. We are proposing this particularly sized solution because of the the data we collected which resulted in an accurate sizing. We know we will save you this amount of money by moving to this solution because of the data we collected. You can talk to these specific clients to see how much healthier their data protection environment is as result of the data we collected from them AFTER we implemented the new environment. These data points are just a few of the things that we can uncover with our assessments and often at no-charge! So if you know you have a problem (or even if you don’t) and you know you have a HiPPO that doesn’t share your opinion, make it an even fight, and take it to them with data. Your data. Opinions have no fit in a conversation using data.