Make the Case for FileMaker Pro to Corporate IT Departments

FileMaker Pro solutions often spring up in departments to solve immediate problems for users. But what does a corporate IT department need to know about FileMaker Pro before adopting it as a standard?

By Stephen Gallagher, FileMaker Inc. senior director of systems engineering and field sales

If you develop FileMaker Pro solutions for an organization with an internal IT department, at some point IT will want answers to some legitimate questions. Understandably, applications that are new to the organization or have been used “under the radar” can cause concerns. To maintain your relationship with these organizations, it’s important you understand the role of IT departments in specifying or guiding the use of workgroup applications throughout the enterprise, and you address their spoken or unspoken concerns — sooner rather than later. The FileMaker field sales organization can help you make the case.

This article provides some guidelines for explaining the value of FileMaker Pro in an organization’s IT strategy.

Acknowledge the IT group’s role

It’s effective to open a dialog with IT by asking for the IT group’s questions about FileMaker Pro. It isn’t necessary to answer the questions as they’re asked; you simply want to let IT know you understand their concerns. Typical questions include:

• How can we integrate FileMaker Pro into the application development environment?
• Why haven’t we heard of FileMaker Pro?
• How does FileMaker Pro scale to fit into the organization?
• What are the boundaries we should put around FileMaker Pro development and deployment?
• What kinds of projects provide the best return on investment (ROI)?
• Why should we add FileMaker Pro as a standard when we already have standards such as SQL Server, Oracle, Java, and Visual Basic?
• How can we avoid data silos when using FileMaker Pro?
• How can we control the proliferation of inappropriate application development with FileMaker Pro?

Introduce FileMaker Pro and its vision

FileMaker Pro is a toolkit designed to help people build solutions that make data more meaningful and rapidly provide a return on investment (ROI). FileMaker Pro solutions address tactical business challenges ranging from tracking scientific experiments to grant management to purchase-request tracking systems.

IT groups that use FileMaker Pro are in good company: FileMaker has sold more than 12 million copies globally, and 70 percent of unit sales in North America are licenses. Customers tend to be “thought leaders” who use FileMaker Pro to gain a competitive advantage and improve their knowledge workers’ productivity.

Contrast FileMaker Pro with existing DBMS standards

Explain that FileMaker Pro solves a different type of business problem than other IT standards. DBMS standards such as Oracle and SQL Server are intended for strategic business problems involving largely static business processes, such as cash register systems, transactional systems, and financial systems. The development technique used with these standards is commonly referred to as the “waterfall” technique because a detailed specification is completed before development begins and development steps happen in sequence.

FileMaker Pro, in contrast, is designed to solve tactical rather than strategic business problems. Development can be based on a much looser specification, is iterative, and lets developers create a functional prototype in hours or days. The FileMaker Pro development technique is known as the “spiral” technique because development is iterative rather than sequential. The spiral technique produces excellent results for companies that have dynamic business processes. In a recent survey of FileMaker Pro users, 67 percent said they modified their solution at least weekly and 85 percent at least monthly. Such flexibility simply isn’t possible with any other DBMS in the organization.

Explain the FileMaker Pro value propositionFileMaker Pro gives users and workgroups a faster and less expensive approach to building applications that support their own job functions. Traditional database solutions require at least three different skill sets: database architecture, business logic, and user interface. FileMaker Pro encapsulates all three elements into one product, wrapping them in a graphical user interface (figure 1). Most FileMaker Pro development is point and click. You can think of FileMaker Pro an integrated development environment (IDE) or a rapid application development (RAD) tool rather than just a database.

Describe how FileMaker Pro can integrate into IT environments

FileMaker Pro is unique in that an IT professional can develop a single-user solution on the desktop and then, without code modification, scale it to serve a 250-person workgroup. All you have to do is deploy the solution on FileMaker Server or FileMaker Server Advanced.

Built into each copy of FileMaker Pro are connectivity standards such as ODBC, JDBC, and XML so IT can easily exchange data between FileMaker Pro solutions and existing corporate database management systems. You can also build FileMaker Pro solutions to include the corporate data dictionary and corporate schema.

Some IT groups choose to become actively involved with FileMaker Pro development and others do not. IT groups that want to publish standards so FileMaker Pro co-exists in their environment can take advantage of a rich suite of products, services, training, and certification.

You might mention to IT that users tend to genuinely like using FileMaker Pro solutions, which can help IT groups increase user satisfaction. Why? FileMaker Pro solutions readily address problems that knowledge workers previously had to solve on paper or with a spreadsheet.

Make the ROI case

FileMaker Pro provides ROI by improving the productivity of knowledge workers who aren’t served by other DBMS. If the IT group is typical, 80 percent of its application development budget affects less than 20 percent of knowledge workers (figure 2). The majority of knowledge workers — in marketing, research, real estate, and other departments — are using and abusing spreadsheets to keep track of their information. If the company can improve workgroup productivity with a tool that integrates with the IT infrastructure, these productivity improvements go straight to the bottom line.

Ask for a presentation sooner rather than later

IT organizations need answers to key issues before they adopt FileMaker Pro as a standard. It’s most effective to answer IT’s concerns about FileMaker Pro as soon as the questions arise. When developers invite me to present to an internal IT organization, the invitation tends to come only after IT has become concerned enough to consider banning the use of FileMaker Pro. Please don’t wait for a crisis before inviting FileMaker to make a presentation to the IT department.