Over the past decade, industry research has consistently shown that a majority of enterprise technology deployments run over budget and/or beyond schedule, and that failing to achieve expected business results is quite common. Additionally, a recent Ardent Partners survey of more than 300 business leaders highlighted the inability of enterprises to drive business value out of their technology investments. There are many reasons why IT projects fail, but one obvious place to start looking is at the beginning, during the solution selection process. Simply put, businesses today need to learn from the recent past and rethink and overhaul the traditional approaches to technology selection or else they will be doomed to repeat those IT failures.

As the executives in charge of the two groups tasked with leading these technology projects, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) must join together to lead a new, more collaborative approach to evaluating enterprise technology. The roles of the CIO and the CPO were each designed as executive leaders of strategic, value-added organizations that are focused on leveraging their expertise across the entire enterprise. Yet, despite the recent individual successes of their departments, most CIOs and CPOs (and their organizations) remain less collaborative on technology selection projects than they might otherwise be. Instead, these groups evaluate enterprise technology differently and in ways that reflect their unique perspectives and individual departmental goals and objectives. This has to change – these leaders must take the opportunity to become more collaborative with each other and with the business process owners who fund these projects. They must also begin to take a more results-focused approach to their evaluations.

Evaluating New Tech? Here’s How We’d Do It

The good news for CIOs and CPOs, as well as line-of-business end-user groups, is that major industry shifts in how enterprise solutions are packaged (solution suites) and delivered (cloud-based Software-as-a-Service) have opened up opportunities for more effective collaboration between the groups in the selection and deployment of technology. To aid CIOs and CPOs in their solution-selection process, Ardent Partners has prepared an evaluation framework below that incorporates the most common outcomes and the factors most likely to enable them.

• Adoption: The value created by solutions is directly tied to how frequently and how well they are used. Solutions that highlight usability and speed of deployment drive greater activity and impact.
• Growth (Customers, Sales, Community, etc.): Solutions that can attract and engage their target audience with a better experience and/or improve the delivery of business’ products and services can yield faster growth.
• Process Efficiencies: Solutions that can link, streamline, and automate processes to make them highly repeatable and scalable drive great value for business process owners. In particular, solution suites can create a process ecosystem where one outcome “feeds” the next, accelerating efficiencies across the value chain.
• Business Effectiveness: As enterprises compete on all fronts, how each business function or team executes can have a cascading effect on the larger enterprise. Business leaders use technology to scale and streamline operations, but they also want to use technology to improve them.
• Visibility/Intelligence: In today’s data-driven world, the ability to mine data and convert it into intelligence and value is table stakes. Systems that capture, aggregate, cleanse, categorize, enrich, analyze, and present data that can provide users with visibility and actionable intelligence are foundational to Best-in-Cass performance.
• Compliance: Whether it is adherence to contract SLAs and T&Cs, internal processes, or regulatory requirements, compliance can be a significant value driver and/or cost and risk mitigation tool. Flexible solution design and smart reporting can aid compliance efforts significantly.
• Savings: However it is defined, savings can be a powerful dividend to a successful technology deployment. Solutions that model and improve upon offline, legacy processes can play an important role in saving money.

Final Thoughts

With a results-based approach, it matters less what capabilities or features the solution offers, and more what can be done and enabled to generate value for the enterprise. CIOs, CPOs, and the other business leaders involved in the technology evaluation process need to define the desired business outcomes and then work aggressively to identify the solution(s) most likely to generate them. Additionally, the provider’s experience delivering innovations and general enhancements to its solutions in a well-executed manner and customer references can provide valuable insights into service quality, a general ability to execute, and future performance.

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