Power to the people?
- Article 40 of 77
- Information Age, June 2002
Are user groups impotent talking shops or viable pressure groups?
Strong-arm tactics and outright rebellion are no longer the style of IT user groups. Disgruntled customers no longer refuse to pay their bills en masse in an attempt to change pricing, release schedules or product features. These days, the focus is on 'education, arbitration and listening' and many user groups are run by the software suppliers, themselves rather than as independent bodies. Is there really any point to joining them any more?
Ian Hugo, who founded the now-defunct Computer User Group Alliance (CUGA), argues that many user groups have seen their power decline as the IT industry has moved on and IT architectures have become more heterogenous. “The structure of user groups at the moment is sub-optimal. They're stacked up behind individual suppliers. That was fine in a world where people ran IBM shops or DEC shops, but it's not like that any more.”
Mike Dean, treasurer of the SAP UK and Ireland User Group, argues that the economic downturn has also had an adverse impact on membership. Many organisations, he says, see user groups as a waste of money and do not want to 'waste' resources seeking knowledge to boost efficiency. “Firms are scaling back on what they see as junkets.”
But Steve Needham, chairman of the Actuate user group (for users of Actuate's information delivery product), says that the few days he spends each month on the group are easily justified to his employer, financial services firm Deutsche Asset Management. “Belts are tightened here as in most firms, but we think this will help us to get more value [from the product].”
So what are the benefits of joining a group? “Most user groups have a conference, and at the conference, the vendor normally states its strategic direction. It's a useful sanity check,” maintains Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group. “You can compare what the vendor has been talking about in private with what it talks about in public. If a CIO believes there's a relationship between himself and a supplier, he's viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses.”
Miles says that networking is an extremely important part of any user group. “It's incredibly valuable what you can overhear in the queue for coffee. It's important to me to get people together to solve stuff, exchange ideas, hear other people's problems and hear what they've achieved.”
Other facilities offered by user groups can include arbitration and education. Business intelligence vendor SAS Institute claims its user groups offer even more, saying that some of the benefits experienced by users include “opportunities to polish their interpersonal, writing, presentation and leadership skills,” as well as networking and idea sharing with other SAS users.
These benefits aside, however, the chance to influence vendors is a prime attraction of joining a user group. But how much notice do vendors take of their user groups?
“It's an interesting question to answer,” muses one user group chairman who wishes to remain anonymous. “You have to question what the vendors' interests are. Some vendors are in the incremental sales market and are more interested in people who haven't bought the software. Others are interested in sales to the current user population. Having said that though, even when you're targeting new sales, if your users are saying, 'you don't do this well,' you'd be foolish not to listen.”
Ronan Miles says that his group represents 3% of Oracle's global revenue and has been able to influence Oracle in a way individual users cannot. It has been talking to Oracle about its licensing model “relatively frequently”, and the company has changed the model several times. “They won't acknowledge it's because of the user group, but the changes do correspond fairly roughly to what the user group was saying.”
The group has also been able to intervene on behalf of users who have received bad treatment from Oracle. “Members accept that Oracle has a large sales force. The quality of sales staff can vary. Sometimes customers aren't listened to. We've helped users who have felt they haven't been treated properly and Oracle has addressed those problems.”
Geographic information systems vendor ESRI has a whole series of special interest groups (SIGs) with varying degrees of power and influence. The petroleum user group (PUG), with its large membership of internationally powerful companies, is the most powerful of all the SIGs; ESRI's president and founder Jack Dangermond admits that PUG has more influence on ESRI's development efforts than any other group. However, ESRI is privately owned and Dangermond is an avowed evangelist for geography and GIS software - he wants to make the software as useful as possible and can do so at the sake of profits without having to satisfy the demands of shareholders.
Other IT vendors have a reputation for being far less accomodating. Personal systems vendor Apple, which has many thousands of user groups and which regularly request feedback from them about their products, has a reputation for ignoring what most of its users want and giving them “what it thinks they should have”. As a result, Apple user groups are little more than help forums for users facing difficulties.
Actuate user group chairman Needham advises checking any potential user group to see who runs it and what they are hoping to achieve. “Don't let the vendor use the group to sell its products. Don't get involved in a bug-fix forum. User groups should look at strategic issues.” Miles of the UK Oracle User Group says the most important thing is to make sure the user group is independent of the supplier so it can get matters that are “genuinely important” to users on the agenda.
User group quality and influence varies. The more members a group has, the greater its influence. But even the most powerful is seemingly only as powerful as the vendor allows it to be.