Because You Know Vendors Doesn’t Mean You Know Software Evaluation

In an effort to to increase revenues all companies are looking for additional ways to facilitate organic growth. Within these efforts consumers are being fooled by complementary services offered around the core business to entice clients to sign on.

Organizations that implement software and make their main revenue on professional services have moved to the evaluating and selecting software for clients. By doing so this has caused copycat companies that have directory listings of enterprise software vendors and comparisons via matricies by vendor by function to mislead customers by offering software evaluation services.

To that end, the business models of lead generation and demand generation for vendors to consume is in transition of changing away from this model. Organizations that compare vendors by just feature/functions often do not have the skill set to evaluate specific system and verticals and most importantly a solid proven methodology with a mathematical backbone to give definitive analytics. This will support the process of decision making for your software purchasing decision. While these organizations may help you to narrow down potential vendors expertise in project management, a definitive documented evaluation method, mathematically backed, market knowledge on trends, vertical specific expertise, past implementation experience to warn against the gotchas, current and future integration techniques and infrastructure advice is often lacking or does not exist from the vendor doing the implementation to help them find the best fit for their organization. Organizations that implement software rarely know of more than a handful of vendors themselves. This does not mean they know how to evaluate enterprise software. The guise of software evaluation is thrown in with professional services and coupled with other project related consulting to snag the customer. The problem that introduces is that if an organization resells software of particular brands such as MS AX, SAP, Oracle, etc how impartial can they be when it they are evaluating software ?

It would seem that the best interest of the company that is providing the introductory part of the project ie. software evaluation will have a tendency to lean towards the software they resell. While evaluation is the afterthought not the initial fix of finding the right software for the company to solve their business problem.

Software evaluation is part of the entire project that concludes with the implementation and “go live” in a software purchasing decision. Software evaluation should be considered as a mini project in the scheme of an overall implementation of choosing the right software, getting it implemented correctly and then dealing with support and maintenance. A best practice approach suggests that the evaluation portion of the software selection project should be approximately 10% of the project budget for the overall implementation. If this guideline is followed by impartially selecting the correct software the chances of a fialed implementation are drastically reduced and your organization can be assured that it has made the best decision possible.