– Make believe businesses, real world problems. 

The idea behind The Adventures of Mark & Greg arose from a dilemma. Today’s organisations exist in a world of increasing technological and commercial complexity. Customers, competitors, industries and markets change in the blink of an eye. Innovation and entrepreneurship is more important than ever.

But the technology used to power business innovation has become so complex and multi-layered that it’s difficult enough for IT experts to track the changes — let alone those who want to take a more distanced, business-focused approach. The IT industry — programmers, developers, IT journalists and enterprise IT suppliers — has been partly to blame for this. We have a tendency to use language and acronyms that obscure, rather than illuminate, the workings of our products and services. Meanwhile, the ‘solutions’ we aim to deliver are often a combination of software, hardware and services, which just adds to the complexity.

Business logic and corporate decision-making require a kind of ‘custom workshop’, or at least a ‘built to order’ approach, specific to each customer. This makes it a tiresome, drawn-out process for those of us who neither profess nor want to be IT experts to make sense of a company’s product offerings and how they help real world businesses.

How do you tell an authentic enterprise technology story, but at the same time cut through the abstraction — short of physically escorting the reader through an organisation and showing them how the business works?

Our idea was to engineer two central characters with everyday problems to tell the story. Captured in the book ‘The Adventures of Mark & Greg,’ the lives of two fictitious CIOs (Talkies client BMC’s target customers) played out. Greg, who is constantly fighting fires in his shambolic, error-prone technology organisation; and Mark, who runs a slick technology operation and shares his words of wisdom with Greg in the hope that it will make Greg’s life a little easier.

The interaction and dialogue immediately shone the light on the very problems faced by CIOs every day and painted a vivid picture of BMC’s value.