When speaking to our smaller customers, they are continuously expressing how they are evaluating their options in establishing the best type of relationship with their solution provider as trusted advisors to facilitate the success of their software projects. Buyers in the SMB arena are looking for the right mix between industry expertise, local support and pre-defined product capabilities. The question remains whether this can be delivered directly by a software vendor or through its indirect partner channel.  Read the rest of this entry »

So, you’re the guy/gal who’s been put to the task of choosing your companies next enterprise software solution? Well, if you’re reading this, you’re most probably well on your way to choosing that software by now. You’ve made your proposal to your stakeholders; you’ve gathered your requirements and prioritized them; you’ve gotten a handful of software vendors to complete your RFI. So now what? Well, there’s still one very important step that needs to be taken: seeing the shortlisted products in action!

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Customer relationship management (CRM) is more than a technology. It’s a business strategy that aims at identifying customers and their needs and then creating sales and service strategies that are unique to them.

Here is a quick look at CRM—from buzzwords to trends, to some recommended solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Come on, admit it: you read your horoscope. Maybe not every morning. But you do read it, even if just for comic relief, or because it allows you to feel a surge of superiority before you head out the door to scrape your car or pummel your way onto public transport. Either way, reading your horoscope is a pleasant diversion.

But here’s a horoscope for the new year that provides you with more than just coffee-side chuckles. If you read between the lines, you’ll find useful tips about the software selection process, and links to valuable software evaluation resources.

Aries: Don’t just start that software selection process— finish it. But you’ve got to realize that sending out request for proposal (RFP) templates to the vendors on your shortlist, and creating a scripted demo may be more than you can handle alone, no matter how independent you are. Exercise your brilliant leadership skills: delegate to your nearest and dearest Libra.

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Want to join the ranks of the hapless and the crushed?

Want to become an oft-cited statistic in software selection horror stories?

Here’s how, in 10 easy steps.

1. Fail to get user buy-in.
Users, bless their souls, just won’t use an application they don’t want to use. Especially if they feel it’s been foisted on Read the rest of this entry »

I just read Khoi Vinh’s quacking cow dolphin post (by way of Nicholas Carr’s blog) about how unfriendly he thinks enterprise software is (both posts are generating insightful commentary). Vinh makes a point about enterprise applications not receiving the same sort of wide-spread critiques that popular commodity applications do. He attributes this to the idea that the software is used by a less-varied base of people, which aren’t very likely to be merciless with their feedback. He says

“Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users.”

I suppose that could often be the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I can think of at least two ways that situation doesn’t have to come to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you don’t want to read the glowing pros or vicious cons about how vendors address 1433 separate business intelligence software criteria. I think it was for those times that my colleagues came up with the idea of writing a short type of report (the vendor showdown) that graphically demonstrates how different enterprise products stack up, based on a few key high-level criteria.

The recently published BI showdown garnered some strange scorn from readers firing comments at the article. A few thought it was talking about the top three vendors as opposed to three of the top vendors. Some, like in the following comment, thought it needed more detail.

“These ‘results’ offer no information that would give a decision maker any tools to help in the selection process. I guess you get what you pay for. “

In the showdown however, my colleagues write “Your company has distinct needs and priorities that need to be supported by any enterprise solution you adopt.” They’re referring to what you’d want from those 1433 criteria we use to analyze the BI software. They’re recommending you actually do go further than just the showdown and examine the functionality in a way that makes sense for your requirements (in other words, use the BI Evaluation Center). I suppose we need to make this point more clear in future reports.

Still, I’m not sure why some people discounted analyst Lyndsay Wise’s insightful examination of why the vendors scored as they did. She brought up interesting points that you wouldn’t know just from looking at rating scores (or say, a Magic Quadrant).

The showdown offers an overview type of analysis, which is based on 1433 criteria without asking you to consider each one. While it is useful for an idea of the functional areas on which the products tend to focus, its graphs are a product of our evaluation tools, not the tools themselves.

A few online tools make it easy to compare criteria about software, side-by-side. Of course, you probably expect that I think TEC provides the mother of all evaluation tools for comparisons (true). But this is about some of the other guys. Two sites I like, which I recently came across might be useful to you if you’re scanning the horizon for high-level comparison info. The first is Opteros’s EOS Directory and the second is ITerating. Both approach the issue in different, complementary directions to TEC’s. Here’s a bit of what’s interesting about their approaches and why I think they can offer valuable supplementary information.

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It’s a bit surprising that sales teams from some ERP vendors are still under the impression that simply wining and dining a customer is enough to win a sale. It’s this type of hubris that can cost vendors entire projects.

Recently, I was helping with a customer’s software evaluation and selection process. Yes, we have products and solutions that extend beyond the simple self-service tool usage we offer on our website. For this project, TEC was brought onboard to help conduct a comprehensive evaluation and selection process, following our methodology.

This means we looked at vendor RFI data in our software and augmented it with their unique requirements to get to a shortlist. With the shortlist, we looked at the vendors’ market information (for which we have a template), and then added other evaluation components including vendor scripted demos, performance and scale, ease of use, and reference checks. Conceptually we have to take the easily quantified elements, and supplement it with measurable qualitative factors. Some of this work was done on-site, some of it was done remotely, but at the expense of making this discussion too verbose, I’ll focus on our services related to evaluating their finalists.

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