Creativity
- IT's Magic Ingredient
IT solutions in China require more than the
cookie-cutter
Text: Michael Leung
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Andrew
Lavinsky truly believes he can save you money, time and energy.
It’s the oldest sales pitch in the book, but Lavinsky now
pitches it with a Chinese spin. He’s the Director of International
Sales for IT Resources, a joint-venture company providing a suite
of IT services to both foreign and domestic companies in China.
He
says that with a little creativity in the IT department, companies
can fare much better with impacts felt on their bottom line. The
magic ingredient for IT solutions in the Chinese market: Creativity,
he says.
“In
the traditional sense, creative means trying new solutions with
old technologies,” he says. “But then the other thing
is that things in China don’t work like you expect them
to. Take bandwidth for example—it’s harder to get
around here and the options are not as varied. Against issues
like this, companies have to rethink their strategies or else
they get milked. They overpay for substandard services so they
can have a cookie-cutter model of what they would have had in
North America. But for functionality purposes they might be better
off with something more creative.”
In
essence, Lavinsky says companies looking at China as their next
import destination cannot also import their native IT solutions—drag
and drop doesn’t isn’t a feasible way of doing things
given China’s current IT landscape. There are better solutions
out there, he says, that with a little bit of creativity, companies
can tap into realized savings.
Lavinsky
cites an example to illustrate his point. For most companies,
he says, covering “the last mile” is the most difficult
and expensive component of their IT solution. The last mile is
that space between a user’s actual computer and the main
bandwidth hub for say, an entire building or neighborhood.
“Take
ISDN usage,” he says. “Right now, in Europe, ISDN
got very popular for covering ‘the last mile.’ Now,
most home users use it and corporate users use it too. It happens
too that in China, ISDN is also very cheap. But not a lot of American
users even think of using ISDN, it’s just not on their radar.
They’re not even considering nor do they understand what
options are available in China.”
Say
you’re a small-to-medium sized enterprise with just a tiny
budget to spend on an IT solution and you’re extremely hesitant
to do so. For you, the words “IT solution” only conjures
images of expensive new computer equipment, an engineer who only
speaks C++ and expensive flat screen monitors for everyone in
your office including your A Yi. Lavinsky says this is a misconception
and in the above situation it is. But with his magic ingredient—creativity—there’s
a whole lot of savings out there.
“No
one ever looks at their IT solution as a whole--everyone is always
cutting it to pieces,” he says. “Actually, there’s
a lot you can do to bring it all together and if you bring it
all together you will cut your costs significantly.”
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