What's Your Niche of Inconvenience?

The other day I stopped by the Lowe's home improvement store to take a look at some new faucets for the kitchen.  I don't normally shop at Lowe's but wanted to see if they had a better selection than the store I where I normally shop.  While I was there I remembered that there were a few things I needed and rather then go somewhere else I figured I might as well get them there.  And that's when it happened.  I got caught in Lowe's niche of inconvenience.  I was caught by what Lowe's is very good at being bad at.  What was it?  Simply the check out process.  It took 15 minutes to buy a bottle of drain cleaner and that is only because a helpful clerk directed me to an open register.  That's also when I remembered why I stopped shopping at Lowe's and went to Home Depot instead.

Home Depot basically sells the same things as Lowe's and their prices are similar.  The Home Depot checkout process is okay,  nothing spectacular, just okay.  What makes Home Depot attractive is nothing they do right but what Lowe's does poorly.  It isn't that Home Depot has a competitive advantage it is more like Lowe's has created their on competitive disadvantage.

With all that time in the checkout line my mind began to wander and it struck me that the Lowe's / Home Depot situation wasn't all that different than our customers face with corporate IT and shadow IT.   Many times our customer choose shadow IT not because they are so good but rather they are simply better than corporate IT.  You don't always have to excel at every aspect.  Sometime just being better than the other guy is sufficient.  Fortunately there is something we might be able to learn from this.

We've talked before about the issues with shadow IT so I won't repeat them here but concentrate instead on how we address them.  The first ways is to take a look at our niche of inconvenience or competitive disadvantages, the things that drive our customers away.  Some examples might include:

• We make callers to the Help Desk maneuver through an interminable menu compared to just talking to the shadow IT person
• We make people fill out forms and go through a justification process before installing PC software versus shadow IT buying it at the local computer store and simply installing.

Take a look at your service and see where you might have developed a competitive disadvantage.  If you can figure out a way to improve those services (while still meeting the concerns of security etc.) perhaps you can get some of your customers back.

The second thing is to take a look at shadow IT's niche of inconvenience.  They have them too.  For example:

• Since IT often isn't their official job sometimes their availability for IT work is spotty.
• Often they are self-trained and their expertise is limited to what they've done previously.

By demonstrating your normal capability in these area you may find it is a competitive advantage.

I should mention one last caveat.  Please don't interpret these comments to imply that your strategy should be to simply be slightly better than the competition.  You have to be careful in applying when be just Okay is the right approach.

How do you compete against shadow IT?

"Checkout at Mbolo Shopping Center" photo by friel

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Shadow IT Revisited
• How We Can Become More Like "Shadow IT"
• IT Needs To Become More Like "Shadow IT"
• Or the posts in the "Organizational Development" category