It does not matter how far in my career I look back, the corporate search for a silver bullet , and the executive’s own push to “keep up with the cool kids” has always been a challenge to doing the best thing for the business.
Long, long ago, when I used to write educational and training modules as a consultant for companies, I would get work because they always needed the newest “gimmick” in computer training added into the process. It did not matter if their training was effective or not, they just wanted to add in “cool” new features.
When I worked in enterprise IT, changing the software or hardware vendor/technology was too often the go to change made when outputs were broken. Instead of taking time to dig in and see if perhaps interfaces, data or people processes were causing issues with the (ERP/MES/EDI/BI/CRM) software, managers would look to rip out a solution and replace it with something new.
ITFM is honestly just another enterprise software solution. Now that we are well into a decade of the market being flush with off the shelf solutions, we are starting to see waves of customers jumping from vendor to vendor.
Don’t be mistaken, every once in a while, one of the vendors really does cut through the competition and make a marked improvement. There are times when making a switch brings game changing value to the business.
But if your reason for looking at new vendors is because you have had a tool in place for a year or two and it just isn’t meeting expectations, pause and understand the cause of the problem before you make a switch.
If the real reason you are not getting the value you want is because you are missing data linkages in your CMDB, you are going to have the same problem in another tool. You will just spend a a quarter of million dollars changing vendors to end up in the same place.
If the real reason you are not getting the value you want is because no one is looking at your system outputs and using them to make decisions, changing vendors might not solve that. You will just spend 2–8 months of implementation time to end up in the same place.
If the real reason you are not getting the value you want is because your services are badly defined and have no actionable levers, putting those same services into another SaaS solution will only end up irritating the CFO.
So, if you are one of the 40% of the companies we talk to who are unhappy with their current solution, be sure you have a clearly defined strategy and understand how you are planning on getting value out of your shiny software. Then spend a little time and understand if the cause of your pain is truly a limit of your software or if it is merely the configuration of the software.
Maybe it is not actually the software at all, but problems with the data you are feeding into the solution (or the systems that underlie that source data).
Perhaps your real problem lies in the processes of how the outputs of your system need to be used, versus how you designed it..
You get the picture.
There is a laundry list of things that can make an enterprise solution feel like a bad fit.
Before you spend lots of time and money following the sales siren song, pause and assess what you really need to fix. Not sure where to start for an assessment? Contact us and we can do a free maturity assessment for you. Ready to build out a roadmap and align your solution better with business solutions? Check out our resources page for videos and whitepapers around road mapping, or talk to us about our road mapping service.
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