In Part 1, we discussed the many things IT has to “sell” internally. What makes selling IT particularly difficult is that those things we have to sell can be costly to purchase, implement, and maintain. This forces IT to argue on the basis of return on investment (ROI), rather than immediately realizable cost-savings or profits. Much more difficult, however, is that IT often has to promote behavioral changes to employees that aren’t necessarily beneficial to either the individual or firm in the short term, but are tremendously so in the longer term. Promoting proper e-mail management and document profiling often feels like trying to sell paying down the national debt.

Training in particular is the great bugaboo for attorneys and other professionals, who often cite the alpha excuse of billable time to avoid sitting in a training session. However, they think nothing of the lost productivity (i.e. billable hours) when they cannot use the application or have lost data because they did something incorrectly. IT also has to sell the value of “profiling” documents for DMS systems, which has negative value to the individual because of the time involved, but has tremendous beneficial value when that document is retrieved much quicker later on.

One suggestion: don’t just sell on the merits alone. Get allies. In particular, find a non-IT champion who is a partner or peer that has high credibility within the firm. Sell them, and others will follow their example. Your allies can also help translate the benefits into terms non-technical people can understand.