The Applicator

It stands to reason, doesn’t it. The more thorough and rational the buying process for enterprise applications, the better the outcome. For sure. Right?

Well, the other day, Dennis Moore, aka @dbmoore, a well-known figure in the industry, posted a query on Twitter asking for data that would show this is true. The more thorough the buying process, the more effective the implementation has to be true, doesn’t it. But no, the guy wants data. “Not anecdotes,” he said later, “but data.”

He isn’t going to get any. There are three reasons for this. First, there isn’t any reliable data of any kind on whether implementations were successful, at least none that I’ve seen in a career of nearly two decades. Second, most effort expended on pre-purchase analysis of software is misdirected, adding little to the quality or accuracy of the decision. And third, if you work backwards from failed implementations and identify the causes of the failures, it is very rare that the cause is the kind of thing that could have or should have been caught by a more thorough analysis.

The fact that there is little reliable data on whether an enterprise application product works is, of course, a scandal, but the fact remains and will continue to remain just so long as enterprise application companies want everybody to believe that the odds of success ar high and customers are embarrassed to admit failure.

I have been involved in at least two attempts by large, reputable companies to get a good analysis of what value, if any, has been gained after an enterprise app was implemented. The first interviewed only project managers and determined that the project managers found many, many soft benefits from the implementation. The second, a far larger effort, was eventually abandoned.

But let’s say that we had some rudimentary measure, like number of seats being actively used versus seats planned to be used two years after the initial projected go-live date. Would it show that thorough investigation really helps?

I don’t think so, and here’s why. The question of which software application to buy and/or whether one should buy one at all is usually a very simple question, one with a relatively clear right answer, at least to an objective observer. But it is rarely, if ever, treated as a simple question. People wrongly worry about a lot of irrelevant things; they are (usually) distracted by the salespeople, who naturally want the purchasing decision to be based on criteria most favorable to them, and because there’s a lot of risk (A LOT), people tend to create lengthy, rigorous, formal processes for getting to a decision, which do very, very little to improve the accuracy of the final decision.

Honestly, I can usually tell in an hour’s phone conversation what a company ought to do, and I often check back later — sorry Dennis, more anecdotal evidence — and I’d say I’m right at least 2/3 of the time, maybe more. And because of the way my business model works, I don’t even charge for these conversations.

What do you need to look at? Well, it’s a complex question, don’t get me wrong. But because the number of providers is limited, the capabilities are limited, and the likelihood of failure pretty high, there are usually only a few things that actually matter. And when there are only a few things, it shouldn’t take you that much time to figure them out.

Give a call, any time, if you want to test this out.