If we would ask this question to both sides, customer and implementation companies, I am sure, both sides would go for the later. At least this would be a politically correct answer. If that is true, why are both side acting like it is a date.
Nobody is buying a new business application to show it “as a status signal”. There is always a business need that is not satisfactory covered by existing solution. Usually, the reason why that is so lies in ‘time’ component. The existing solution is ‘no longer’ satisfactory for our evolving business needs. It was ‘once’, but it is not ‘now’ and will become even bigger issue for in ‘the future’.
Some of the reasons why that ‘time runs out’ on the existing solution are:
- We can’t change it fast enough, when we want to introduce new business practice.
- We can’t integrate it with a new solution we are introducing in our environment, because we need them to react to market trends.
- We can’t find people with knowledge of existing solution due to ‘lack of resources’ and ‘archaic character of the existing solution’.
- It does not allow automation of activities based on usage of new technology, since existing solution functions development roadmap is too slow.
- We are depended on a knowledge of people that develop existing solution since it was heavily customized.
If this are the main reasons, why does 70 % of RFP, still set decision criteria based on ‘a date’ and not on ‘relationship’?
Why do companies still ask for the cheapest implementation and not for the best partner match? Why they look for functional matching of today’s business and don’t check the capacity of future development of solution? Why they only check the current team capacity and do not look for a track record of people development? Why are their decision criteria based on a single solution capacity and not on integration potential to outside application ecosystem? Why they estimate only implementation approach and not cooperation model during application lifetime?
LTV (life-time-value) is a sales metric, but introducing LTC (life-time-cost) metric for estimation of business app, would be advisable to estimate the value of the new solution. But cost is not only what you pay for it, is also what you can or can not do, because you don’t have the right solution. It is also how much time and energy your people spend or don’t spend on usage and adoption of the solution in order to meet the business needs of the company. One of the factors how employees estimate the power of the company they work for is the usage of applications that support their everyday work. Driving a Porsche or a Renault is not the same experience, even if they both drive you from point A to point B.
If the decision for a business application is not made jointly by users and management that are responsible for living with a solution for a long time, but is left to a ‘formal’ buying process, it will always be ‘a date’. If this will lead to a partner playing ‘a date’ game instead of ‘relationship’ game, then we are left with what Sinek would call ‘a finite’ solution to ‘an infinite’ challenge.
