You are hungry. It is lunch time and you are losing steam, but you are swamped and you’ve been eyeing the fresh plate of brownies someone brought to the office this morning. Oh, sweet sugar rush! So you indulge. However, twenty minutes later you have a headache, and now you really can’t concentrate. Let’s face it: we don’t always do a good job connecting our needs with the best solution to them.
Assuming your brownie indulgence is a one-time occurrence, it’s not a big deal. However, when it comes to important business decisions, we often make this same mistake repeatedly. This is particularly true with regard to business software purchases.
For instance, say you are a doctor whose practice does not keep electronic medical records. You really don’t want to deal with paper records anymore, so you buy an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution. While your office’s medical records are now electronic, your office is still buried in insurance, billing, and scheduling paper work. By saying that you wanted electronic medical records you really meant that you envisioned a paperless office, but somehow this was lost in translation. Now you are left with all the problems of a paper-swamped office, but still have to adjust to and work through your new software. A Medical Practice Management software solution probably would have been a better fit.
Why does this happen? In situations where we are experiencing pain or annoyance, we tend to immediately think of a fix instead of a strategy. We lose sight of the big picture.
Every enterprise software search should start by bringing together several people from different areas within your company to brainstorm about your software needs. The doctor in our example could have started the group brainstorm by posing the question: “If we have electronic medical records, what else would this affect?” Your goal should be to think of everything that you need in a software solution, how it fits into your business goals, and if any of your “needs” are really just “nice to haves”. If your brainstorm group decides that you need functions A, B, and C, then let those functions determine your short list. After you get to that point you can allow your “nice to have” functions to narrow the list even further.
Comments (1)
Absolutely correct. Buying software starts with discussion about the business needs and the outcome or impact that it can bring to the business in terms of readiness for growth or addressing the pain areas.