The Right Way to Select Technology

Get the Real Story on Finding the Best Fit

Tony Byrne, Jarrod Gingras

• Publisher: Digital Reality Checks
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781933820545
• eBook ISBN: 9781933820934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

Why do half of all technology projects fail? A major reason is that organizations often pick the wrong tools, leaving them digitally hamstrung from the start. This book offers a modern alternative to traditional waterfall approaches to selecting technology. You'll learn a practical, adaptive process that relies on realistic storytelling and hands-on testing to get the best fit for your enterprise.

PART I

Business Foundations

It’s an old adage in the tech world: if you don’t have a solid business rationale for what you’re doing, you will never achieve business value. Everyone knows this, yet many enterprises still chase technology for its own sake, selecting tools and then only later figuring out what to do with them.

The inevitable result is “shelfware”—technology awaiting deployment as real users figure out how to exploit what their employer purchased hastily. Selecting technology that explicitly addresses business priorities leads to faster time-to-value.

Digital technology initiatives frequently span across multiple departments in an organization, each holding different stakes and interests. To work toward a common purpose, you need a broadly representative governance structure that boasts both strong internal leadership as well as executive support. The time to establish this foundation is before you select the technology.

Finally, you need to make sure that you are ready to fully realize the benefits of any new technologies you procure. In many cases, customers are not ready, and their new systems fall prey to the same dysfunctions as their old environments. Benchmarking can help you baseline your true capacity, so you can figure out where you need to improve and perhaps reconsider the complexity of any new tooling you pursue.

This section will lead you through an approach to ensuring that solid business foundations and processes underpin your technology selection and deployment.

• Chapter 1, “Craft a No-Bullshit Business Case,” will show you different approaches to articulating a realistic business case and offer a primer on how to approach the long-term, total cost of ownership.

• Chapter 2, “Build a Selection Team That Works,” instructs you in building the all-important, cross-functional selection team.

• Chapter 3, “Get the Basic Foundations Right,” identifies the key governance and capacity-benchmarking steps required to obtain an optimal selection result.

CHAPTER 1

Craft a No-Bullshit Business Case

Foundation for Any New Technology

Types of Formal Business Cases

Understanding True Costs

Tips

Many enterprise project teams sense intuitively that they need a new solution and then figure out how to justify it. This is backward thinking. Instead, you should start with the business case and then proceed directly from there. A solid business case will not only challenge your assumptions around the type and complexity of the tools you need, but also give you a clearer sense of direction and purpose.

Foundation for Any New Technology

Let’s be clear: you do need a real business case. All major technology efforts beget tough decisions and difficult trade-offs, so it is best to have a business plan in place as a touchstone to keep the team focused—especially if your CFO will be writing big checks to outside vendors.

CAUTION EXCEL CONTORTIONS

Many quantitative business cases represent artificial exercises with mythical person-hour cost savings or exaggerated revenue bumps, all via extreme contortions in Excel. That may suffice for obtaining funding approval, but it is not actually a business case and will offer few hints about how to structure and run your technology selection process.

If you can project truly realistic, quantifiable gains, then do so. But in many cases, your business case will rely on nonquantifiable objectives, including improved customer loyalty, better employee morale, or reduced risk of future litigation. To any visionary leadership, these should matter, too. Above all, don’t warp the data to show some mythical outcome in a spreadsheet. That’s demeaning for you and your colleagues—and leaves you exposed when financial benefits don’t fully materialize.

All technology projects can be justified in terms of some combination of the following:

• Reduced risk: You will mitigate against compliance and legal troubles or outright disasters. Many records management and security technology solutions apply this rationale.

• Value creation: You will generate more revenue or customer loyalty. Ecommerce, salesforce automation, and most digital marketing solutions will use this approach.

• Greater efficiency: You will be able to produce more work with the same or fewer people. HR management and ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions often sell against this justification.

• Qualitative transformation: Your enterprise can pursue radically different business models. Social ideation and Q&A technology often rely on this rationale.

Most enterprises seek a combination of these goals, but you should understand that a single technology is unlikely to bring all four. The key is to figure out your top two to three business objectives and keep them front and center throughout a selection process whose tactical complexities tend to distract project leaders from original business goals. Consider this example for a dealer portal at a financial services firm:

1. Lower costs via self-service delivery of digitized marketing collateral.

2. Increase revenue by expanding share of dealer book of business by injecting promotional information into transactional environments.

3. Reduce risk by distributing compliance updates more rapidly and comprehensively.

A time will come when the selection team will disagree on a particular approach. In the previous example, perhaps one of the portal technology offerings excels at dealer-to-dealer collaboration. Being able to go back to your list of top business objectives can help clarify the right decision. In this case, collaboration (however laudable) was not a prime objective, so the team should downplay that capability in their assessment.

Types of Formal Business Cases

Technology projects are seldom cheap. To be sure, the new system can increase value and productivity; however, the initial investment may well require justification in its own right, usually in the form of a written business case.

There are different ways to build a business case for implementing any technology solution. One approach looks at return on investment (ROI) or its cousin, internal rate of return (IRR). This approach entails demonstrating the financial return on your investment, and it is a very powerful justification—if you can credibly predict attractive financial returns.

REAL STORY

The After-the-Implementation Business Case

We get calls all of the time from potential clients asking for help in writing a business case for new technology. A recent call from a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• How to use this Book
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Contents
• How to Use This Book
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I: BUSINESS FOUNDATIONS
• PART II: NEEDS AND OPPORTUNITIES
• PART III: CONDUCT MARKET ANALYSIS
• PART IV: ENGAGE WITH SUPPLIERS
• PART V: TRY BEFORE YOU BUY
• PART VI: MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE
• APPENDIX Resources and Examples
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors