| 6.
Software Purchases
One
of the most important aspects in your company’s day-to-day operation is
the software you use to manage the data that runs the business. In this
article I would like to talk a little about the process of choosing
software and making the right buying decision.
In
the large corporations (say Fortune 500 types) there are teams of so
called “Solutions Architects” that follow standard methodologies to
get from the current state of the operation to the desired solution and
then finally to the buying decisions. Naturally, any small or medium sized
business doesn’t have the resources or financial means to support this
approach but there are quite a few principals that apply, at a smaller
scale, to those companies as well.
The
significant point is that the work is typically driven by an architectural
model that is a commonly accepted industry view of how IT fits into the
business.
To
boil it down to the essential:
-
View your business as a tower based on the data that
represents the basis for decision-making.
-
The data is manipulated by applications that provide functionality
to support your processes.
-
The processes determine the course or action you take with every
decision you make.
What does that mean? – It means that you want to start your
software evaluation process not with obtaining samples of the available
products but rather with an analysis of the processes you want to support.
Or in other words: What do you expect the software to do for you?
(read
on ...)
Copyright (c) 2008 by In Scope-Solutions,
Inc.
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