I started my working career in IT. Perhaps I should have stayed there; then I would have extra decision-making power over FileMaker purchase decisions.

FileMaker does very well getting into organizations by selling to individuals and small workgroups. But as these internal solutions grow in scope and number of users, the IT departments often end up being asked to “take them over”. Sometimes the original database developer leaves the organization. Sometimes they change roles. Or they may just decide they have other things to do and ask IT to step in.

But this does not mean that IT wants to help out. Far from it. There are still loads of otherwise clear thinking, far sighted, even noble IT staff who persist in “Microsoft, Oracle, or bust” type of thinking. Or the IT team may be open to alternate tools but may not know anything about FileMaker. Or worse, they may think they know FileMaker from the last time they heard about (FileMaker 2.0 anyone?).

Who can help IT over that “I don’t want to support FileMaker” barrier? There are three possible groups: the internal customer who serves as the FileMaker champion (the business owners of the solution), the FileMaker sales team, and our 3rd party developers.

Of these three, the most critical is the internal FileMaker champion. They may be the ones who built the FileMaker solution in the first place. If not, they are at least the owner of the “business problem” that FileMaker is solving. And they are the first to encounter any initial push-back from IT. After some back and forth with IT they may turn to a FileMaker salesperson or to one of our many outstanding 3rd party consultants. This is a huge help, but by that point they may be in an uphill battle. Far better I think to empower the internal FileMaker champion to begin working with IT right from the start.

I should add the FileMaker champion may themselves be a member of IT. Many people who download our trial version do have a technical title. But even then they may need to sell the benefits of FileMaker into their own organization.

Our initial approach to this is to create a public-facing “selling to IT” page. The idea is that the IT person could look for their own information without requiring the champion to guess what they most need. Of course the champion can download information and send it out themselves. The information will also be useful to our 3rd party developers and to the FileMaker sales staff.

A white paper will be the most critical part of the site. In looking at the materials we had available today we determined the biggest need was for a “total cost of ownership” story backed by some real-world data gathered from customers. Our new white paper is in the final stages of development.

We are also looking to increase the number of FileMaker case studies that are written from an IT perspective. FileMaker has many case studies available today but most focus on the problems and benefits from a business perspective, and not enough from the perspective of IT.

FileMaker has lots of other information floating around. The IT site will also act as a way to bring together all the available material in a way that helps IT.

Lastly FileMaker can talk IT language on this site. We can address the “ilities” (scalability, reliability, manageability). We can talk security. We can talk about rapid development cycles. We can talk about ROI.

Now FileMaker is not going to change its overall positioning strategy. We will continue to focus on empowering the Knowledge Worker. They will continue to be our best route for getting initial FileMaker usage inside organizations. And we will rely then on FileMaker’s amazing scalability; FileMaker is unique in its ability to grow from a simple tool for a single Knowledge Worker to a sophisticated development platform that can be used to build and manage critical solutions for large workgroups.

We will focus on making our IT site the strongest one possible. I hope our first pass will be a great first start, and I know it will get better over time. We’ll be looking for lots of feedback from all parties – especially those outside FileMaker who are involved in the sales process -- on how to make it better.