What Is This Thing?
Sooner or later, you’ll be thinking about a new system. Whether you buy or build, this is a great opportunity: Products in the marketplace may bring to light methods you haven’t considered, and they also may offer more comprehensive data-storage and retrieval capabilities than you ever could have imagined for your business.
Once you’ve narrowed the field of candidates to products represented by reputable manufacturers and confirmed that the systems have solid technical architecture and sound code, it makes sense to evaluate the systems just as you would any other prospective purchase. Business software has a cost of ownership that may bear little relation to its value, and the answers to a few good questions are worth a thousand promises.
If the product is a time-reporting solution, a data warehouse, or any of the multitudes of packaged “solutions” on the market, make sure that every facet reflects an understanding of your business and your professionals, from the executive suite to the loading dock.
Will terminology on-screen and the metadata that will store descriptions and keys to the data repositories resonate across your organization? Will this system help to clarify the complexity of user tasks? Is this really a tool, or is it possibly a technological barrier that will prevent members of my team from realizing their fullest potential?
Just because a system is already installed in other companies in your line of business doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s working in those companies. Make sure you are looking at a proven solution, proven on every level—success in technological performance, in business efficiency, and in its adoption by end users.
If the tool you’re considering has been retrofitted from another business, ask about what changes were made. If it was initially developed for a line of business different from your own, think carefully about your end users. The transactions that the system supports and the structures of its database may translate to your business. But the display tier may speak another language. I have watched numerous clients, seeking innovative new solutions for their business, look to systems designed and developed for businesses outside their own industries. Most of the time the display tier is the area that is least carefully considered, when in truth it’s one of the riskiest aspects of a potential deployment.
—Excerpted from Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate by Harold Hambrose (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York). Order your copy of this book.
