Perspectives & Strategy

Vendors of both software and hardware products are known for disappointing their customers. Often promised features do not exist or are delivered late. In a recent poll IT Leaders have stated that they need their vendors to be truthful about how products meet requirements (34%) and would like vendors to take time to understand requirements better (16%). Source: A Measure of Satisfaction as published in Information Week (Jan 26th 2009).

Within an end-user organisation there is increasing pressure to deliver more complex budgets to a tighter time-line. It can be argued that IT must shoulder blame for bad communication – incorrect people at presentations, not asking the right questions, etc. This is one of the reasons why when I go to such a presentation I may take on the role of asking the dumb question (and this may not be out of ignorance, but because a message needs to be conveyed to the business).

We are still facing the same problem of vendors not living up to their promises. In fact this is one of the worst delivery faults in the history of IT. In my past career have been technical liaison for pre-sales and have spoent some time following salespeople around, and beleive me they promise some complete bull to the prospect with the hope of making the sale. My job was to tell the truth about product capability. All too often sales folks are selling next version capability for a product that will not be in beta for at least 6 months and in unlikely to hit the streets for at least a year.

From an IT perspective it is necessary to take a carving knife and get to the real picture of capability based on existing product. This is where the IT manager needs to ask questions regarding capability on reference calls.

Vendors need to be up-front about how their product meets the requirement at the RFI or RFQ stage. Your product will not be discounted because it does not have a 100% capability match. Few products can deliver 100% of the requirements. I have managed projects where none of the vendors acheived 60% of the functional requirements – we still selected a solution and implemented it successfully.

One of the key areas for project deployment today is integration. Data movement between systems is increasingly important and sometimes this is the only was a requirement can be delivered. Software vendors need to show what data they feel their product is the master of and what data should be supplied for a successful implementation. This goes back to vendors taking the time to understand the requirements of the system they are expected to deliver. It is important to understand the data integration resources that the customer has to call on when they are providing a deployment estimate. Many corporations do not have adequate data integration specialists on the team.

The watchword for vendors is don’t over-promise and do understand your customer.