Faith + Reason = Truth

A certain company that shall remain unidentified here has been advised by me on several occasions to upgrade their business intelligence system.  I stand to gain nothing financially from their doing so, and they are aware of this.  First, I wowed them with the gee-whiz features common to many of the current offerings in this space.  Predictably, I got "cool!  how much does it cost?" in response.  Too much, apparently, as the answer was no.  I next tried the fear tactic of "this is OLD hardware, unsupported at this point due to its age, and the version of the software is causing conflicts with newer versions of other software (Windows, Office, the ETL package for interfacing with the Oracle transactional system, etc.)".  Again, a polite "no thank you, it's not in the budget.  Finally, I went with the nebulous "new hardware and software will be SO MUCH FASTER, it'll change the way the departments can do their jobs, and allow to do jobs they SHOULD be doing but don't have time to.  Things like taking 20 minutes for an update [or even faster] versus 7-8 hours, which is only done overnight."  Nada.
The past 2 weeks may have won them over, however, as my nebulous argument/scenario of a new speed paradigm changing the very way they do business (internal financial business, not customer/product business) came to fruition.  In testing the system's workings with a new ETL package, the going was rough.  And each non-passing result gave the opportunity for roughly one theory/idea of what the problem might be before waiting until the next DAY to see if the fix worked or not.  This gave, at best, 1-2 chances PER DAY to fix the problem.  With the upgraded hardware alone in place from my earlier recommendations, they could have gone through 10 to 12 troubleshooting iterations per day and had the problem nailed in a day or two, rather than holding up the entire project with all of its high-priced hourly external consultants at a standstill for 2 weeks.  Would have EASILY paid for itself with this snafu alone.  It's that kind of inside the box, how much does it cost, what cool feature does it have mentality that drives me nuts, as opposed to the willingness to spend a little to change the way you do business and accomplish things the organization has never had the time to even contemplate wanting to accomplish.  Sigh.