This is one of a series of posts on the high cost of buying enterprise applications and the high cost of selling the products. This high cost, I’ve been arguing, is just plain bad for both sides and almost certainly unsustainable. So the question for the analyst is, “What can be done about it?”
In the background, I’ve had a lot of discussion with industry pundits and the Twitterati: Vinnie Mirchandani, of course, and Jason Busch and @dahowlett and Brian Sommer and Dennis Moore and many others who don’t regularly comment over the airwaves. What accounts for the high cost, I’ve been asking? Two answers seem to emerge.
1. Too many cooks.
2. Too little trust.
If you’ve ever been involved in buying applications, you’ve seen the first one happen over and over again. Too many people get involved with the decision, each with their own agendas, each more or less connected to one of the contenders, and getting all these parties to agree requires too much head-banging. It’s Congress trying to pass health care, writ small, and it’s just as pathetic.
The lack of trust. Well, I get why people don’t trust, and I get why they erect structures that are supposed to control the vendor. But in my experience, it’s always been a losing game. Buyers are nowhere near as devious, oops, I mean sophisticated, as sellers–how could they be, the sellers do it for a living? So if you go into a deal, it’s natural to feel skittish, but giving in to the feeling doesn’t really protect you and does slow you down.
So what’s to be done? In the long run, you can’t do much about either problem without cooperation from the other side. If you’re going to have lots of cooks, the cost of sales for the vendor is just plain going to be astronomical, and the cost of buying will rise accordingly. If the vendor behaves in what has become the normal fashion, alas, defensive (and expensive) buying will be only too appropriate.
Granting that, you have to start somewhere, and here are some suggestions for the buyer, suggestions that should save money. All of these will really help, even though the second sounds completely ridiculous.
1. Limit the scope of what you’re buying as much as possible. Look only at what you clearly need; prefer things that you’ll use immediately; go for immediate results; and don’t buy anything else. You can always buy the rest later. (This reduces the number of cooks.)
2. Use a tape recorder and a camcorder. Keep track of what the vendor says, in full, precisely. Look the transcripts over. If you have questions or don’t understand, follow up. In the long run, it saves a lot of time. (This can help you to get more trust–kind of trust, but verify.)
3. Prototype, prototype, prototype. Get a small team to set it up and try it out, rather than assembling a large team to review demos that were set up by the vendor. If you have to pay the vendor to help you with the prototype, do it. You’ll save in the long run. (This, too, reduces the number of cooks.)
Enough from me. Suggestions from the readership are welcome.
