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by basseq
3267 days ago
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Worth noting that you can hire consultants—often SIs—to help you with software selection: to answer the question of what software is best for you. Most companies don't want to pay that cost, so ask SIs to make recommendations in their RFPs for implementation services. Not only are you going to get bias from pitching the software they're best positioned to implement, but the requirements gathering process is never as good because a) companies won't share as much during a competitive procurement and b) SIs won't invest the time to do all that work for free. Standalone vendor analyses are another ball of wax, as SIs with true experience with all the leading products will give you great advice. You have to make sure you get the right people. And then you have to walk to the line of "objectivity": either you exclude the evaluation vendor from implementation (so SIs won't bid because they want the more lucrative SI work), or you give the evaluating SI a leg up over competition in the competitive implementation process. You also have to come to terms with some duplication of requirements gathering if you have different evaluation and implementation vendors. The other consideration is that the "best" software is completely subjective. Software X may have more features out of the box, but has 2x support costs. Software Y may lag on a particular feature you want, but is the market leader with better integrations. This is part of proper software evaluation. |
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I mean I'm sure there is solid economy theoretic reasoning in favour of RFPs in general but I've never understood why anyone would want to do things that way.
The way I hear it, you're basically saying, "Hey, from a group of people who are willing to work for free – I'll pick the one willing to cut the most corners!" Quality just cannot arise from that kind of process.