New Location

The http://tru-evalmethod.blogspot.com has moved to the Eval-Source website. All previous posts have been moved to the blog page on our site.   Continue to check for new posts. 


www.eval-source.com

Would you a like beverage with that installation ?

As IT costs of installation, support and the services that IT provides seem overly difficult to track with regards to a dollar value a new way is being proposed. 
It seems that organizations have a difficult time measuring the cost of their IT department.  There are 3 common ways that It cost is measured today.  An article here that explains the 3 ways and a possible new way to "serve it up" Ways IT gets funded.
Our interpretation of this methodology is that IT must come up with a price list similar to that of a menu in which are the array of services they provide can be costed out.  The implications of this are that IT must categorize its services by organization as to the most common tasks they do and support for the organization with enough dollar value granularity to make it accurate for accounting purposes.


In this scenario common support for hardware,software, upgrades, the cost of installing and configuring and administrating a new system, integration, development, testing, are all component costs that will have to be valued on this new menu.   The article mentioned above recommends that all IT services be broken down into 12-24 items with actual prices.  This seems manageable.


As organization consume IT services, IT would then give them a bill for the cost of that service. This can then either be charged to department, project or overall IT costs for the organization.  This methodology may not be too bad as this could provide actual costs of IT's involvement in projects, which departments consume the most services, which employees, and identify anomalies that might ordinarily be missed.  Overall it seems reasonable in the fact of how IT can get funding for new projects as costs will be identified accurately and incorporated into projects as a component of the overall project expense - but more accurate.


If this methodology were to catch on then the only problem organizations would have is how to categorize and actually come up with a costing method for the diverse services that IT provides.  An example of this would be is an architect worth more per hour in designing the overall infrastructure of the business as opposed to the support of hardware, software and administration of environments, applications, installing patches and updates, configuration for software, development for interfaces of new systems, user testing etc.  


All though this makes sense in theory will it translate to actionable and usable data to get IT projects funded.  If its not one problem its another.  Looking forward to feedback on this if you think this approach can work or not.   I can reached at info@eval-source.com

Lesson learned from improper software evaluation

There are many reasons for a failed implementation and today's blog post will highlight a few lessons learned from not doing a proper software evaluation.  A methodology that is clear, concise, systematic and provides qualitative results are the starting point to avoid these mishaps during a software implementation - after all it starts with an evaluation leading towards software selection. 

Lessons learned from not placing the correct importance on this step have far reaching and sometimes detrimental effects if not done properly.  A few lessons learned from our past experiences on not using a methodology for selecting software and some of the consequences are listed below.

• Strategic Fit: A company that had just engaged us in an evaluation. It turns out the company's CEO was coming back from a business trip and as luck would have it he was sitting next to an SAP account executive.  After several hours of speaking with SAP it was decided by the CEO that this was the system that they selected and the evaluation process was subsequently scrapped. This was a mid-sized company and they were sold the Enterprise Business Suite.  After implementation was completed a follow up with company revealed that the system was too large for their capacity.  The external scope creep, clouding of objectives, management of the project (both internal and externally), budget over-runs, time delays  and administration proved to be problematic in this installation.  It turned out that SAP was too much of a resource drain on this particular company for financial resources, people and essentially paying for what was not used.   The lesson here strategic vendor fit, and software fit are crucial when selecting enterprise software.   

• Wrong system type:  We had a customer contact us about how slow their ERP system was.  We had tried some database tuning techniques to speed up the system.  This proved this was a slow and costly process as outside programming help was needed to tune the proprietary database.  This however did speed up their ERP but that still was not the problem.  After speaking with the company in more detail we discovered they were sold a discrete ERP type system and they were indeed a contract manufacturer as their core business. The ERP they had selected was not the correct fit for what they had set out to accomplish originally. The lesson here is don't let scope creep or a fancy vendor demo win you over, stick to your guns.

• Unnecessary vendor disqualification:  A lesson learned from doing a proper software evaluation is that do not withhold information on how you run your business to vendors.  After all vendors are future business partners not just suppliers.  The vendor would also like for you to be a customer who is truly happy with their software purchase and can be used a reference site.  When organizations hold back information and see if the vendor can fill in the blanks within their industry and own company can disqualify a very capable vendor.  A best practice here is to fully disclose what your needs are so that the vendor can guide you as well as put forth their best effort to solve what you are looking for. 

• Previous selection experience becomes the method for evaluation:  A common mistake made by organizations is that people who have been through a software selection at previous companies become the subject matter expert for the software evaluation. Often a familiarity will introduce biases (political, organizational, technical) in the evaluation process. An evaluation procedure is a procedure that precedes the implementation.  This is a certain set of skills validated with a proven method that drives consistent results to finding the right software for your company.  While someone with previous experience is a valuable tool it should be added in conjunction with a proper systematic method of software selection.  If also that person were to leave for another company as is now quite common you may be stuck with system that does not have full support and does not meet the original intended requirements.  The lesson here is take under advisement the previous experience and add that  to the methodology of software selection to create a full functional roadmap for the selection process.

As can be seen there are many reasons why companies struggle with software selection but hopefully these lessons learned can help mitigate some of your own dilemmas and make you more successful at selecting the correct enterprise software for your business. 

Actual Cloud Spending - fact or fiction - you decide

Gartner released their numbers for the estimates of the cloud computing market and looking at the number it seems way high to me.  That could be possibly be because of what is included within their definition we do not consider part of the cloud market.  The IDC numbers of predicted cloud marketshare seem very reasonable as to the breakdown they used for the estimate of their own market size for cloud products and services.

While I do not disagree that cloud is a fast growing market and looks to rapidly increase over the next few years (which we agree with) it seems that the estimate has surpassed the current ERP market.  This is also in-line with Meryll Lynch estimates for market valuations  of the cloud computing.

In many reports and articles posted a lot of C-level executives are expecting to investigate cloud computing options and possibly invest in such.  Although that is what they are saying is the market moving that rapidly really?   Are the executives actually spending that money they say they will on cloud or is it speculation to give those services and applications consideration within the evaluation process. The hype surrounding this market may be just that rather than actual spend on cloud applications and services.  Is all this speculation actually translating into spend within the cloud and translation of a growing marketshare. 

An informal scan of the current material available of online resources and publications of vendors posted should imply that cloud applications and services are being signed left right an center and in record numbers to surpass the current market numbers for ERP.  Many companies would have to sign cloud contracts and services with multi-year SLA's totaling millions and into the billions of dollars at a fast and furious rate.  I guess this will always be a point of contention between analysts. 

I am looking forward to feedback from the communities on this issue at www.twitter.com/eval_source or info@eval-source.com

CRM’s new extension........Social CRM

What does the term "Social CRM"  mean ?  As defined by some wisdom from fellow advocate Paul Greenberg Social CRM Definition

We prefer Paul Greenberg’s definition of Social CRM, which he summarizes as:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” (also read his 2009 review of this space on ZDnet)

CRM has evolved to incorporating a social aspect by adding the features and functions of most popular social networking sites.  Contact management now includes customer interaction, internal and external collaboration, locating experts, soliciting feedback, extended customer service are some of the social aspects taht are evolving out of of traditional CRM with social components.

One of the problems faced by organizations is how to incorporate these benefits of SCRM and manage it accordingly. These problems stem from additional administration, storage and retrieval, meta-tagging, archiving and content management are a few additional extra pieces that are added to social CRM.     

Traditional CRM vendors are trying to adapt to this new business model and this new enterprise created software.  As put by fellow analyst  Jeremy Owyang SCRM vendors are not cutting the mustard.  There are a few categories that are mainly considered social CRM

1. Traditional CRM with Social integration 
2. Community platforms offering CRM
3. Brand monitoring offering social CRM
4. Social media with Twitter capabilities
5. Social Customer experience
6. Sales 2.0 and Social graph aggregation
7. CRM applications and plug-ins
8. Social networks and others

These are considered the main categories in social CRM.  As organizational usage increases and evolves to newer, integrated and collaborative sharing vendors will be playing catch-up for a little while until this market matures a little bit.  Then mobility on top of this is a rapid evolution that will occur within this software arena and how they react may affect marketshare and success in this area.  As any software matures newer vendors will enter and traditional vendors will be at an advantage more towards the brand recognition side of the software market.  

With whatever changes occur in this space from the market and organizational usage evolves and differs from company to company it still becomes an exercise in finding the best fit for the organization and catering to the specific functions you are looking to solve.  A software evaluation methodology will still need to be considered as it just keeps getting more complicated and sometimes unnecessarily so. This is a software name that is ahead of the actual software being delivered for now.  


Organizations should create, review, monitor social network strategies and policies as there is no magic formula to convert buzz to ROI and money for the business.  Sure there are many ways to do convert buzz but is that an included part of the strategy?  This can be detrimental as well as it creates a possible time wasting scenario as perceived by C-level employees.  

If you feel we forgotten a category feel free to contact us at info@eval-source.com or for vendor briefings for your CRM product.  Also see our related post platform provides foundation for growing your business - Well maybe