In this article, we explore a number of the common technology procurement mistakes also as steps you’ll fancy to avoid them.
Purchasing technology for your business is often a classy and nuanced process. Here are a number of the foremost common technology procurement mistakes our clients frequently make, and recommendations on the way to avoid them.
Not Understanding Requirements
Imagine you’re having a banquet , and choose you’re getting to make a roast chicken. you’d probably take a glance in your pantry and see what you’ve got , pull out what you would like to shop for , then attend the shop to shop for it.
This is essentially requirements gathering. you recognize the result you would like (a roasted chicken), you evaluate how close you’re thereto now (what ingredients does one have?) then you go use the supermarket to plug any gaps (buying whatever you’re missing).
And yet, when it involves tech procurement, this basic process is typically curtailed. Oftentimes, the top results are understood at a high level (e.g. “we want our sales reps to onboard faster” or “we want our documentation better organized”) but on the other hand we are good at buying.
If we return to our banquet example, it’s like deciding you would like to form chicken and immediately getting to the shop to shop for the ingredients, no recipe, cooking method, or planning full-clad .
It means technology gets purchased that ostensibly fulfills some requirement, but actually , doesn’t really do everything that the tool must do.
How to Avoid
Requirements gathering may be a crucial part of any digital project. We highly recommend getting help from technology procurement experts. to collect requirements, you would like to:
- Identify everyone who will use the software and everybody who’s getting to be impacted
- Work with each stakeholder individually to know how they are doing their jobs today, and what their ideal new reality will appear as if
- Map the requirements of every stakeholder to create an inventory of must-have features and nice to possess features. These become your requirements for evaluating solutions.
While this process is often time-consuming, it’s invaluable to know what you would like the tool to try to do at the beginning to streamline procurement processes down the road.
Not Budgeting for workers
Even the simplest technology requires someone to have it, and therefore the more complex the technology, the longer, effort, and expertise is required to fulfil that function. ERP is a superb example of this. Enterprise Resource Planning software is the lifeblood of finance teams. And yet, implementation is usually done by a third-party and management is dumped on existing IT teams. A result, a tool that doesn’t fully have an owner since the finance team is the ones who use it, chose it, and implemented it, but it’s to be those to seem after it.
This story plays out across multiple dimensions though. In marketing, it’s often a bit of selling technology that gets purchased, but other teams are needed to implement and integrate it properly. Likewise, implementing something across-teams is rife with an equivalent challenge, where everyone’s a stakeholder, but no one’s an owner (think of a few websites).
How to Avoid
There are a couple of belongings you can do to stop this issue (and the budget overages):
Hire a fanatical staffer. If it’s an outsized enough project, hire an indoor staffer and bake their salary into the continued maintenance costs of the tool.
Outsource management. Most robust tech markets have an equally robust market of value-added resellers (VARs), consultants, freelancers, and other after-market services. you’ll prefer to use these, post-implementation to stay you running for fewer .
Stick with tools you’ll manage. The last option is to avoid this challenge altogether and solve it by sticking with the tools you have already got . Leveraging applications and add-ons to your existing tech stack is the best thanks to do that .
Not Planning for Future Integrations
Broadly speaking, enterprise software largely comes right down to managing data so it is often used and evaluated in new and exciting ways. However, increasingly, businesses have to check out and use data from multiple sources to unravel their problems — and that’s tons easier when data can flow smoothly from one repository to another.
What’s more, there’s no telling what new technology goes to stumble along and transform entire industries. for instance , before Salesforce, a cloud-based CRM just wasn’t really a thing… however, now, it’s a must have integration. When you’re reviewing technology, you ought to look not only at who they will integrate with, but the way to make sure that your new tool will continue as you go.
How to Avoid
Focus on the small print of how the integrations work together with your new tool. Right now, REST APIs are generally best, with SOAP APIs and a few other solutions also offering flexibility and scalability.
Avoid point to point, custom integrations. Invariably, something changes, and you’ll find yourself locked into a selected release.
… embrace the very fact you’ll eventually be “outdated”. Nothing lasts forever. Ultimately, you’ll have to upgrade because something new and better has come along. You’re better to embrace that fact early.
Final Thoughts
Tech procurement isn’t easy. There are many mistakes to form , but most of the pain we see a day in organizations come from just three:
Poor understanding of requirements
- Not budgeting for service staff
- Not planning for future integrations
- The good news is, this is often all extremely avoidable. By lecture your team, understanding what your needs are for post-implementation maintenance, and using better of breed integration technology that’s designed for flexibility, you’ll streamline your tech procurement significantly.
And another thing…
You’ll notice that nearly all of those happen early within the process. So here’s the one thing you’ll do to de-risk your tech procurement: take some time. Take some time identifying what you would like, what proportion you’ve got, who is impacted, and who’s getting to own it. Time spent upfront thinking through strategy is serious cash saved further down the road.
Happy buying!
