Home > Enterprise Software Selection Process >
The Software Selection Process:
The Solicitation Phase
Free sample
rating reports are offered by Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).
The history of enterprise software selection is rife with
career body bags. And the vast majority of those bodies were no dummies. There
are all sorts of other ways for the software selection process to go wrong: lack of
product information; lack of user training and buy-in; lack of backing from top
management; and most importantly, lack of time.
Bearing in mind that all projects have their snafus,
set-backs, and screw-ups, you want to achieve the highest degree of
success in the areas you do have control over. The best way to do this is to
break the process down into discrete, manageable steps.
Time is critical in the software selection process. But
that doesn’t mean you need to cut corners. It simply means that you need to
deploy your time resources in the most efficient way possible.
What’s the Next Step?
You’ve
done your homework. Your needs have been assessed, determined, and verified,
and tabled in the form of a request for proposals (RFP) or request for
information (RFI), which was the culmination of the first part of the software
selection process.
In other words, you’ve defined the problem.
Now what?
You find a solution, of course.
Finding a solution is not the same thing as
solving the problem: when you’re venturing into uncharted territory, the
last thing you need is blind faith.
As one CIO recently put it, “if you’re looking for the
magic bullet, it’s already too late.” In other words, once you’ve identified
potential solutions, you’ll need to assess and evaluate them with due diligence.
To evaluate these potential solutions, you need to perform
a solid assessment of the market.
Fair enough, but what does that really mean? In breaking
the software selection process down into discrete steps, you are simply
maneuvering towards an evaluation of solution provider responsibility and
solution responsiveness.
Put another way, you are not only looking to see if the
solution will do what you want it to do; you are also looking to see that it
does it well.
One way to achieve this is to assiduously go through each step of the
process:
-
build a decision matrix
-
rate each solution within the
matrix
-
analyze strengths and weaknesses
-
rank solutions and develop a
short list (the top ten, for example)
-
issue an RFP to the software
vendors in the shortlist
-
develop a scripted scenario of
functionality as mapped to internal business processes
-
invite vendors to on-site
demonstrations
-
rate demonstrations
-
gather RFP responses from
shortlisted software vendors
-
revisit analyses with respect to
evaluation of the demonstrations
Following these steps will ensure that you’ve covered the
bases of the selection phase of the process.
What Are Software Rating Reports?
In order to accelerate
software selection, you may also want to take advantage of existing
software rating reports—meaning RFIs and RFPs that have already been
completed by software vendors.
These reports, which can contain upwards of 4,000 criteria,
are objectively verified and vetted by unbiased analysts. This takes the
guesswork out of RFP evaluation, and can be immensely useful in terms of
resource savings for your organization.
They can also be personalized in a way that allows you to
compare selected vendors head-to-head, which is of the essence when you’re
looking for objective, apples-to-apples comparisons.
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) offers
impartial, analyst-vetted
product rating reports, with up to 4,000 criteria, in such domains as
enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), accounting,
human resources (HR), and business intelligence (BI).
Find out how you can accelerate the software selection process.
