We’ve all been witness to some major shifts in software procurement practices. Gone are the days when almost all software was packaged and delivered on-premise. With the rapid adoption of software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), your company’s technology decision-makers find themselves on a new journey—joined by frontline IT professionals from inside and outside of your organization.
It’s true that many technology buyers still depend on traditional forms of evidence. They lean on product benefit descriptions, technical documentation, and industry references. But in addition, most anyone can now get their hands dirty if they want—through demo environments and full-featured, customized product trials. This is especially the case with many cloud solutions: You can test-drive them yourself, do your own deep research, and move quickly from initial evaluation to deployment.
This direct access has allowed more companies to adopt an all-hands-on-deck approach to software testing and acquisition. Namely, it has allowed more CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, and Chief Digital Officers to proactively engage their own employees. These leaders are asking their developers to validate the scalability of cloud applications. They’re asking their business intelligence analysts to test drive the statistical horsepower of SaaS data-mining tools. And they’re asking their community managers to ensure that marketing automation technologies will integrate seamlessly with existing CRM databases.
This new state of procurement represents a big win for the enterprise. Getting feedback from knowledgeable employees can help you build a powerful technology stack, while avoiding needless IT complexity and waste. It also fosters a culture of technical excellence where upper management, ground-level employees, and everyone in between understand the tangible business value of new tools and platforms.
At the same time, practitioner-driven procurement raises its own set of challenges. If you have multiple employees evaluating a product, whose feedback should you trust most? And if you have many stakeholders pushing their own imperatives (e.g., your CIO needs to reduce costs quarter-over-quarter, while your CMO wants to invest more in breaking down marketing data silos), how do you gracefully balance and choose between them?
Answering these questions isn’t always straightforward, and the best answers will hinge on your own technology context. That said, whether you’re looking to refine or otherwise transform your IT decision-making, here are a few tips to help you succeed:
1) Trust Your Developers’ Expertise
Here’s one thing that I’ve learned from members of the millions-strong
Take, for instance, the proof point of real community. Most developers favor technology solutions that are tied to thriving communities. Which makes sense—when a developer needs immediate support, a reliable venue for sharing product feedback, or resources for learning from fellow professionals, they expect that their software providers will have more to offer them than a mere “Contact Us” form. These practitioners look for clues such as thriving customer forums, and they expect that a vendor’s community management and product development teams will respond to their questions promptly and thoughtfully.
So, don’t hesitate to use the eagle-eyed discernment of your developers. In addition to inspecting the technical nuts and bolts, they can help you determine if a vendor has a track record of heeding feedback and fostering authentic community on behalf of its end-users—which is the ultimate proof that the technology in question will actually meet your business needs over the long term.
2) Engage Product End-Users Throughout Your Company
If you work at a large enterprise, you’ve probably faced the challenge of competing with agile startups. You might have more engineering resources—indeed, you might have orders of magnitude more resources—but these startups sometimes possess the curious advantage of being able to fail faster without facing serious repercussions. Particularly from a technology adoption standpoint, these companies have more leeway to place all-in bets, release rough prototypes, and pivot drastically.
How do large organizations compete effectively against this? If you’re an IT leader, say, at a Fortune 500 company, you simply don’t have the luxury of making a hundred wagers in terms of your actual software purchases.
Two things to keep in mind, though. First, it’s worth repeating an earlier point: Your practitioners represent an important source of inside knowledge. I highlighted developers earlier, but you can often gain insight from other colleagues as well, including your IT support staff, QA staff, and community managers.
Second, many SaaS and PaaS technologies allow you to do nimble procurement without requiring you to start from scratch. While a startup’s IT advantage might rest on the fact that it gets to grow on top of a spare foundation, the large enterprise’s advantage often rests on the fact that it already has robust IT systems in place. Fortunately, the best cloud solutions don’t force you to upend and rip out your existing systems wholesale. Their built-in modularity and extensibility enable you to select the applications, platforms, and infrastructures that make the most sense for your business.
3) Do a Procurement Self-Assessment
One last reminder: There’s no one-size-fits-all procurement solution here, but no matter where you are, the important thing is to apply a healthy measure of self-scrutiny.
In the face of a constantly evolving enterprise software industry, the first step is to ask yourself an important question: How are you engaging your own employees and colleagues in your software evaluation and acquisition practices today?
Roland Smart is the Vice President of Social and Community Marketing at Oracle.
Source: iStockphoto
