How to convince your crew that Mac as a choice rules

This September, SHI’s Senior Director of Strategy and Product Management, Kevin English, and I joined our team of Apple experts at the 2022 Jamf User Nation Conference, the world’s largest event for Mac® admins. While our team was there to share details of SHI’s services and capabilities with this community, Kevin and I were tasked with delivering a presentation.

So, what to talk about? Our Mobility Solutions Architect, Bryan O’Neill, covered SHI’s capabilities quite ably in his on-demand session, How Mac Admins Can Rise Above Chip Shortages to Bring Power to Their Users. And given our roles – I’m Senior Director of Marketing Operations for SHI – we weren’t going to present something technical.

We talked to our teams, to customers, and to friends who are working with Mac devices and realized what they needed wasn’t necessarily more help with the technology, but with developing strategies to articulate the value that they, and the Apple devices they support, bring to their organizations.

And so, ‘The Art of Persuasion: How to convince your crew that Mac as a choice rules’ was created.

Why Mac?

Then, of course, we had to research, write, rehearse, and present it! We prerecorded the on-demand session, but there were a few changes by the time we arrived in San Diego – and even more throughout our two days rehearsing in the pool bar.

But the key message remained the same: we need to find a better way of convincing others in our organizations to include Mac in our IT portfolio.

It’s one thing to know Apple delivers what end users need and that Jamf products can allow them to seamlessly integrate into IT environments. But persuading stakeholders across your organization – particularly IT and finance – that they will deliver business benefits is another matter entirely.

Almost every organization that uses macOS® also uses Windows – not just for their infrastructure and application layers, but also as endpoints. During our presentation, a survey of the room revealed this to be the case, with most people having Mac as a minority option.

And almost every Mac admin works in a Windows-dominated environment, generally as the only person with Apple expertise. This puts them in a precarious position; naysayers may point out that a single person can’t support users for business-critical functions, or in significant volumes.

The secret to influencing decisionmakers

Mac is a technology that will solve problems – from supply chain constraints to the specific needs of employees in a variety of roles. With the right management tools, Mac can integrate into your existing environment without the need for exceptions and issues.

But this indisputable fact has remained a relative secret within circles of influence. Our presentation aimed to spread the word to a wider audience.

The truth is, the secrets we shared aren’t actually that secret. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, a well-known book by Robert Cialdini, outlines Cialdini’s seven principles of influence. Popular with marketers, these principles can be equally applied to our need to persuade decisionmakers that Mac isn’t a difficult or problematic exception.

In fact, Mac admins have good news: once you’ve properly set up your organization’s macOS devices, you can take a day off, safe in the knowledge that if necessary, your Windows colleagues can cover for you. Policies and security patches for Mac don’t need to be dealt with separately from the rest of your environment.

Mac is a part of your team – not an exception

Key to all this is we’re all on the same side. Everyone working for your organization – end users, IT management, Windows admins, and Mac admins – all aim to ensure customers and constituents receive the products and services they pay for in an efficient and cost-effective manner. When it comes down to it, your teams exist to keep your organization running and deliver on your goals and promises.

Better communication is key to teamwork, and teamwork is key to success. Our advice is to listen, understand your peers, identify areas of commonality, and think about how you can improve communication and relationships. The decades-old “us versus them” attitude of the Windows and macOS discussion is no longer relevant (despite how entertaining the classic “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials were).

Windows and Mac devices coexist in the same ecosystem. Jamf tools allow them to integrate seamlessly. We need to have the discussions about when, where, and how Apple technologies can best serve our organizations and ensure we can prove our arguments are correct.

The key focal points for our team at Jamf User Nation Conference 2022:

• Ease of integration into Windows environments.
• Improving the user experience.
• Reducing the burden on IT teams.

Our Apple team helps Mac admins engage their stakeholders via SHI’s buyback program and asset recovery service, which includes a new CO2Neutral™ option. Mac admins can offer these solutions to their peers and stakeholders as answers not just to Mac concerns, but to the overall need to dispose of IT hardware in a way that is sustainable and financially responsible.

If you want to learn more about how SHI can help you persuade leadership that Mac is a strong choice for your organization, contact our certified Apple experts today.

And if you were at the event, but didn’t join our session, you can watch it on-demand until November 28.