SOFIns allows technical experts to standardize and automate their delivery of IT services in order to sell their services:
to customers in new locations
more frequently than current time-based delivery permits
at a lower price to end users, but at a higher margin for the expert
The current working relationship between technology providers and purchasers is inefficient and limiting for the provider and frustrating and risky for the purchaser. These flaws arise when the providers require knowledge of the purchaser’s site-specific or confidential information and manually deliver time-based services.
Restricted to Limited Talent Pool
Trust requirements limit the talent pool of Experts that a User is able to access.
The number of well-known companies, business associates or family members that the User is able to hire is small when compared with the wider talent pool of “un-trusted” Experts.
An un-trusted Expert may provide superior services and even a lower price than trusted Experts, but a User will forgo the opportunity to hire an Expert in today’s approach when the brand, business, legal or family element is missing.
It is important to observe that an un-trusted Expert is not necessarily untrustworthy; the Expert simply lacks the required relationship to give the User a basis for trust.
User “Lock-In” to Expert
In business scenarios, the User may become "locked in" to an Expert.
This may occur because the Expert’s work was not fully documented and only that single Expert knows how the whole system works. As a consequence, the cost and complexity required to switch providers is too high and the business User must unwillingly maintain the relationship.
No Assurance of Expert’s Skills or Solution’s Quality
A User is generally unable to rate the technical quality of an Expert’s work, as by definition a User is a non-technical individual.
While the required functionality may exist, the service’s delivery may have been flawed. Such flaws would not appear immediately. Flaws in design and implementation appear when a system is compromised due to security lapses or when a User is unable to modify or upgrade the system due to design defects.
Reputation and referrals provide the User with some gauge of an Expert’s skill or assurance of a solution’s quality, but no two IT solutions are alike. The User would need to hire a second Expert in order to fully assess a solution’s quality.
SOFIns Benefits to Businesses
By converting manual IT procedures into a form that may be automatically and reproducibly deployed, business benefit by obtaining:
Trusted services from a broader range of providers
Full documentation that allows another provider to understand how a system was developed, eliminating vendor lock-in
Assurance that the services delivered will produce the desired result
