Category Archives: Technology

Software Acquisition Insider Tips, Part I

Don’t Get Blind-Sided by IT
How many times has this happened to you. You identify a new software program that will make your life easier and deliver ROI to your department, but just before you sign the deal, IT steps in, in a very public way, and says “we already have a product that can do that and we have lots of extra licenses“, even though the product doesn’t do what you need it to, doesn’t deliver ROI, and, to top it off, makes your life harder than it would be if you had no solution at all!

This doesn’t have to happen. Especially since you’re all on the same team and the only reason you want to buy the product is because it solves a problem that no other product in your arsenal does. To avoid this scenario, be sure to make your ROI case with the IT department first and get them on board. That way you can make sure that none of the solutions available solves your problem and present an even stronger case to management.

This will also address the slightly less common but still problematic “we can develop that for you and it will cost less and take less time than implementing yet another solution” when you know, based on past performance, that they damn well can’t because their skills are implementation, integration, maintenance, and support — not customized new supply chain management product development, which is an area they don’t have the requisite expertise in, to start. As any good software architect knows, many applications looks easy from the outside, but turn out to be much tougher to implement once you fully understand everything they must do in order to be useful. Then there’s all the effort it takes to “optimize” the code-base so that it’s as quick, efficient, and robust as possible. And let’s not forget QA, Beta Testing, and “tweaking” time. It all adds up. There’s a reason why the majority of internal development efforts fail, having wasted months of effort, accomplishing nothing, and wasting budget that should have been applied directly to an existing solution in the first place. (And if you can’t convince them, then you have time to bring in an outside consultant [like the doctor] who can evaluate the situation objectively and determine what the best solution is for your particular situation.)

Watch Out for the Big Lie
Some software vendors will lie and say “yes, we have that capability” even if they don’t have it at all and there are no plans to incorporate it in a future release, and many software vendors will give you a resounding “yes, we do” if they only have part of the capability, or have a similar capability that they believe is “close enough” to land the sale. And then, as per the urban legend, if you insist on it, they’ll price the missing feature really high in hopes that you will decide that you can’t afford it and / or don’t need it anyway. And they’re usually right (although I have heard of a few cases where the customer actually “bought it”; needless to say, those relationships didn’t go very well).

That’s not to say that you should not trust a vendor who claims they can produce a new feature they currently don’t have. Some can, and you have to give credit to any vendor who owns up to missing functionality and treats you honestly and fairly. But you should check them out before signing on the dotted line, as there is an easy way to assess the credibility of the claim. Ask them for a history of all new features added to the product over time, by release number and release date. If releases occur regularly, with significant new features being added every three to twelve months, they probably deserve the benefit of the doubt. However, if the change history looks suspiciously void of new functionality, especially over the past year or so, or if there haven’t been many changes or bug fixes, then the product is probably “walking dead”, and being phased out, and you should be skeptical of any claims of significant enhancement.

To understand why, you have to understand software developers and the nature of software. Software developers live to develop software. In fact, given the choice between a high paying, legacy support job and a low paying, exciting new development effort, the vast majority would choose the latter. As a result, when software isn’t under active development, key developers quickly move on to other projects, and often to other companies.

Furthermore, the nature of software is that the IP exists not in the code, but in the head of the developers who wrote it. Even though C++ (C, or C#) is a standardized language, and many programmers know it, the nature of a programming language is that there are many ways, often dozens, of accomplishing the same task and many acceptable programming styles. As a result, code is nowhere as easy to read as it is to write. And since your average enterprise software product will have hundreds of thousands, or millions, of lines of code, you can imagine how difficult it is for a new developer to lean an established code-base. It’s almost impossible for your average developer to learn the software well enough to add a significant new feature without breaking some key piece of functionality.

As a result, once software developers move on, so does most of the IP, and changes inevitably slow to a crawl. “New features” are reduced to minor bug fixes, eye candy, and cosmetic “enhancements” that add no new capability and mean nothing from an ROI perspective. A slick new user interface is just another form of “big lie”, and reviewers that avoid the hard-work of understanding the true value proposition of the product simply propagate the lie. (Unfortunately, some companies will get taken in by these cosmetic changes. I know of more than one situation where the vendor simply re-did all the application pages with a new color scheme and layout, and convinced the customer that the “new” application was “much better”, even though no new functionality was added. This happens in B2C software too. Take the Microsoft Ribbon, for example. There’s no value — all it does is eat your limited screen real estate and irritate those of us who know how to use a word processor. [There’s a reason the doctor moved to Mac and decided to stick with Office 2004.])

The Strategic Sourceror’s (Supply Chain) Anti-Trends

The Strategic Sourceror was first to the plate with a trio of home-run anti-trends for 2009.

  • Strategic Sourcing Outsourcing Finally Gets a Good Rap
    The Sourceror notes that even though the list of anti-outsourced strategic sourcing excuses (just like the list of excuses for why we don’t need no consultants) goes on and on and on, this is the year that people who just made a big investment in (e-)sourcing software realize that software alone is not enough and you need to balance the tools with the human expert techniques.
  • Networking Costs You That Job
    Every time the economy takes a bath in the crapper, every person and his dog comes out of the woodwork with a list of techniques for landing that next job, and networking is always at the top of the list. And this time, the media has outdone themselves and convinced people that “networking” means getting in touch with every single person you have ever heard of in your life and bombarding them with your resume and story … every single day. Now, while you should contact everyone who you honestly think could, and would try to, help you, and while you should be persistent in your job hunt … there’s persistence, and then there’s good old fashioned harassment. Go overboard, and you might just find that you’re the first person blackballed next time something opens up.
  • Hasta la Vista to the Fat Cats
    This post is just too good to every try to summarize.

NBR’s Top 30 Innovations From The Last 30 Years

To celebrate their three decades on the air, PBS’ Nightly Business Report teamed up with Knowledge@Wharton to select the 30 most important innovations from the last 30 years, which can be found on the PBS Site. Without giving everything away, the top 10 were:

10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery
  9. Office Software
  8. Fiber Optics
  7. Microprocessors
  6. Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  5. DNA Testing
  4. e-Mail
  3. Mobile Phones
  2. PCs
  1. The Internet

And while #20, social networking via the internet, to borrow a phrase, really grinds my gears, I have to say that the top 10 are dead on.

Cross Blog Challenge: (Supply Chain) Anti-Trends for 2009

A week and a half ago I alerted you to Vince Kellen’s Technology Duds for 2009 which highlighted five “anti-trends” for 2009 that stand out as a brilliant counterpoint to the rose-colored predictions of the laissez-fair wannabe analysts that tend to dominate the technology landscape.

After writing the post I started thinking about how great it would be if there were more voices like Vince’s that spoke the truth and opened our eyes to reality and not marketing fantasy. Thus, I have decided to make anti-trends the focus of the next Sourcing Innovation Cross-Blog series, which I will kick-off with this post.

My first two and a half trends echo Vince Kellen’s. My last two and a half diverge into the space.

1. Social Networking Will Unravel
As Kellen says, “at the risk of offending Web 2.0 enthusiasts, most firms, especially those hardest hit in this recession, consider social networking speculative and in some cases frivolous. And as I said in my last post, there’s a reason why “facebooked” has become an urban slang slam, “myspaced” has become a synonym for a late-night booty call, and why the blogger elite (including the doctor and Loren Feldman of 1938 Media) slam Twitter on a regular basis (as the only thing you can do with it is say nothing in only 140 characters). There’s no real value in these technologies, and no commercial value to a productive business. Businesses will drop these efforts to focus on projects with value.

2. Web 2.0 will soon be Web 2.Done
Similarly, mash-ups, fancy portals, and other web 2.0 projects are going to be axed because speculative ROIs or projects not directly assisting with significant savings are going to be difficult for IT leaders to advance. While mashups can be a useful component of B2B 3.0 platforms if they focus on enhancing content, community, and connectivity, on their own they are just useless eye-candy.

3. Traditional “Spend Analysis” will Lose Luster
Although a sound spend analytics package (you know the one) in the hands of a true expert (you know who they are) will find you limitless savings opportunities, the reality is that most of the offerings on the market are just static data warehouses with static reports in the hands of recent grads with little real-world experience and almost no training. As a result, as early adopters come to the end of their maintenance agreements, which came with six figure (plus) maintenance fees, you’ll see a lot of movement towards modern low-cost B2B 3.0 data analysis packages or spend analysis as-a service offerings.

4. Home Country Sourcing finally comes back in vogue
Regular readers will know that I’ve been pushing not just for best-cost, but home-cost country sourcing for a while now. Giving the skyrocketing transportation costs from mid 2007 to mid 2008, the repeated product safety scandals with imported products, the current recessionary environment, the low dollar, and fears of protectionism with the new US administration, more companies will finally start looking for strategic sourcing opportunities close to home — which will also come with more predictable costs, and savings, over the long term.

5. Sustainable green catches on, despite the recessionary environment
Although green initiatives that cost more than they return will be scrapped faster than unburied copper cable, as my fellow bloggers on Supply Excellence and 2 Sustain are pointing out, more and more companies will be looking at sustainable initiatives to save them money, and those green initiatives that save money as well as improve the corporate social responsibility image will catch on.

Now it’s time for my fellow bloggers to join in with their anti-trends in and help you understand where supply and spend management is headed.

Tools To Help You Tame the Wild Web

Google’s good, but when you search for terms like sourcing and purchasing, chances are that in addition to a few relevant hits, you’ll also get a few million, mostly irrelevant hits, in response to your query. There’s got to be a better way to find what you’re looking for, right? Most likely, and a number of companies are endeavoring to build the next Web 2.0 tool that will help you in your quest. In addition to PurchSearch, the following Web 2.0 tools are vying for your attention and hoping they will make your quest to tame the wild web just a little bit easier.

FiltrBox

A new market intelligence offering, Filtrbox is an advanced search tool that constantly monitors online media and delivers to you the most relevant, credible mentions of the critical things you need to track.
It allows you to track multiple searches at once through a single interface, embeds constant monitoring technology that is like a real-time version of Google alerts, and maintains a history that allows you to see what the most relevant result was at any instant in time. Finally, you can create custom RSS fees that combine only the most relevant posts from all the feeds that you monitor.

FeedScrub

Feedscrub is an intelligent RSS aggregation and content filtering tool that dynamically learns your preferences as you “save” posts you like and “scrub” posts that you don’t. It supports NetVibes, import and export via OPML, and Google Reader.

Krawler[x]

Krawler[x] is a desktop application that lets you manage your online and offline content with tags that can be used for quick search and retrieval. It also lets you share content, create communities, manage your RSS feeds, and interact with a peer-to-peer social network. It also supports version management, desktop-based collaboration, and supports multiple protocols that combine to create a seamless tool that serves as content creator, content publisher, content sharer and distributed content search engine.

In short, if you’re suffering from a content shortage despite the information overload clogging your RSS feeds and Google Searches, there are tools to help. And while they’re not perfect, despite their relative lack of value to the enterprise, Web 2.0 technologies are showing promise in the consumer world and just might make your on-line travels a little easier.