Vendor Selection
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How you you pick a vendor for a product?
Here's how I've seen it work at some companies. A contract is coming up for renewal or a new need arises and some IT guys are asked to make a recommendation. So being good professionals, you do some research, download some evals, run some tests, and then try to pick the product that works best for you. "Best" is hard to define since the product needs to do a good job, meaning meet the goals set for it, but also be something you want to administer. You write this up and send it to your boss.
Then about half the time, the product you hated gets selected. Even if you gave it a bad review or thought it couldn't do the job. So why is that?
My guess is that often someone played golf with someone else, or takes them to dinner or other entertainment and the decision maker makes the decision that's best for them personally, not necessarily the company. I hate to be so cynical, but I see it happen over and over.
I could be wrong and maybe one of these strategies is in place. Maybe someone is making a more strategic long term decision that it appears to be from the perspective of the IT worker. I'd like to think so, but I see so many other decisions made for the short term and not necessarily for the benefit of the company.
Choosing vendors to be partners is hard, especially since they vendors are trying to sell software and make their numbers, not necessarily be a great partner for your business. And it can get worse if you are not a large customer. I have friends in the sales side of software and they readily admit that the smaller customers suffer since they just don't produce enough revenue over time to receive the custom support they've often been promised during the sales cycle.
I'm very much a believer in buy software and then maintain it yourself. And I think you can do this with Microsoft and an ERP package like SAP as well as you can with an Open Source package.
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Im sure some of the golf things goes on, but probably not as often as you might think (short of the ERP sized deals!). IT people are good at evaluating from an IT perspective - security, admin, does it seem to scale, but they will rarely be able to look at things from a business point of view (and rarely should have to). The person making the final decision needs a variety of inputs (IT, ops, sales, etc) to help arrive at a decision. It's easy to feel disenfranchised when they don't take your recommendation but it's not realistic to think every recommendation you ever make will be accepted.
This extends beyond products to internal problem solving. I've seen developers yell, pout, etc, because the business elected to 'do something stupid'. I get the frustration! I've also seen a good bit of proposing gold plated solutions when a 10 minute hack might have sufficed. I've even seen IT people recommend one solution/technology over another simply because they either wanted to use something they had not used before, or DIDNT want to use something they had not used before.
This isn't an IT failure as much as an ill formed request from the boss/somewhere combined with human nature. Reshaping the request to something like:
Evaluate these x products in the areas of security, ease of admin, performance, and provide those notes back to me along with what you see as the pros & cons of each product, plus a final recommendation about which product you would pick from a pure IT perspective. Please also indicate any bias you have for/against any product (have worked with vendor before, you love Linux, etc). I'll be using your input along with evals from other people in the business to make my decision.
For all that, the business may well make a short sighted or wrong decision!
The challenge with maintaining code from a vendor is that you either spend a lot of time trying to tweak it but stay eligble for upgrades, or you just use it as starting point and forget about upgrades. A lot of the reason to buy COTS is to get those upgrades, they have a lot more R&D dollars than you do.
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In most companies I worked for, when they chose a product, they had the salesmen coming in to do a 'wonderful' demontration and promised that they could do anything you asked for and the implementation only took ' a few days'.
The most unfortunate thing was the product was chosen by the upper management and most of them did not have any technical background. They saw the pretty graphic and listened to the salesmen's sweet talk and bought the product. I think it should involve the IT people to evaluate the product, they are the one using it. They know how to ask the question.
Anyway, my company just purchased 'Hyperion' and we are trying to implement it. Everyday it is liked working in a 'sinking' ship.
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In some ways this is actually a relief to see it happen at other places (maybe it shouldn't but it is). I worked on a budgeting application where the decision was almost a done deal and everyone was happy with the outcome. Then out of nowhere someone passed something to a VP and the vendor that was passed along was selected without any real review of the product. The funny part is when the software was breaking down on a weekend when the vendor's support wasn't on call (or the VP pushing the decision for that matter) I asked my lead how many references we called on the product. His response "None". Wise decision there Skipper. Anyway that project came in over twice what was budgeted but the decision makers came out unscathed.
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I've been in the room while managers seemed to be picking a development consultancy by hourly rate! sheesh
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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I guess that we are lucky. We are vendors to our customers of hardware supplied by our partners. While we do first line support if that does not get it done then it bounces up to the supplier or manufacturer. We are not at all shy about turning on the heat when it is required. We have that clout for several reasons. First our partners know that they can take what we say about an issue "to the bank". Second we do a lot of volume and the partners don't want to give that up. Third they know that we are advocates for our customers.
Now as to stuff that we buy for ourselves; Katty bar the door! It's gotten better in recent years as our reputation grows. Vendors know that our customers ask us for reccomendations and that we pass on our expericences. Good or otherwise.
ATBCharles Kincaid
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This brought back memories of choosing a reporting package to handle our increasing need for reports (prior to SSRS
). We brought in two vendors to show off how well their product could handle re-writing one of our poorly performing reports. One vendor insisted that we pay for their consultants' time if we bought their product. The other donated the time. The one who donated the time not only was able to re-work that report and a couple of others, but their attitude going in was much more positive. The one who had insisted on reimbursement couldn't even re-produce that one report, let alone any others in the time allotted. That, plus their poor sales attitude lost them the bid.I think this was a great test because it gave a chance for people who knew the product well to come in and prove their case before we paid a lot of money. Overall, we were pretty pleased with our selection and the process worked really well because there was little opportunity to get a better deal one way or another. The results of the 1/2 day test couldn't really be argued with at that point.
In another similar case, some friends of one of our management team worked for a company that provided a solution we needed. After looking at their product, the IT staff and developers insisted it was inferior to another product. We finally brought both out to do a comparison and those friends saw the demo and wanted to load up code and samples on their USB keys so they could do some analysis. Needless to say, they were asked to leave and were not invited back.
It's good to have managers who will listen to recommendations of the people who will use the product. Wish it was that easy in other places, though I can see that some people will never try something new and some will always fall for the new/shiny effect.
-Pete
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