Choosing wisely a suppliers perspective

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Choosing wisely a suppliers perspective

• EAOLUG
• Cambridge
• 23rd May 2006
• Malcolm Howitt, DS Limited

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Presentation content

• Words of wisdom
• Common sense steps
• Supplier view of
• Customer business requirement
• Customer selection process
• Supplier offerings
• System features
• Standards
• Supplier add-on value

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Words of wisdom

• Ive seen the demo, now show me the real system
  (Consultants comment, SoA conference 2002)
• The way to sell your companys stuff at
  conferences, outside the exhibit hall, is not to
  sell your companys stuff (Caveat Lector
  http//cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2006/03/25/h
  ow-to-sell-your-companys-stuff-at-conferences/)

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Some might say

• Cynical view
• Sale at all costs
• All just sales/marketing speak
• Reality
• Vested interest in ensuring best match between
  software functionality and customer requirement

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Reasons for buying?

• Increase in compliance legislation, risk
  management
• Secure environment for maintaining records
• Exploit information more effectively
• Effective workflow of information through
  organisation
• Knowledge management needs
• EDMS, EDRMS, etc. are important elements of
  organisation planning
• Therefore
• Employ a consultant to advise?
• Tap into expertise of supplier as well as that of
  your users

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Common sense steps

• Youve probably seen these cited in some shape or
  form before
• User requirements/business analysis
• Identify supplier shortlist
• Request for proposal
• Preparation
• Distribution
• Evaluation of responses

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User requirements/business analysis

• Identify business problems/needs
• Define system boundary
• Cost benefit review
• Project planning and management
• Business case

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Identify supplier shortlist

• May need to filter suppliers
• Request For Information (RFI)
• Use established software surveys
• Trade press
• Professional bodies

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Request For Proposal

• Tells the supplier what you want/need
• Gives all potential suppliers the opportunity to
  respond, and express interest in the project
• Minimal time, effort and money
• Produce and distribute

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Evaluation of responses

• Analyse and compare
• Extract salient points
• Check against mandatory requirements e.g.
• Core functionality
• Company stability
• Appropriate reference sites

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What does the system do?

• Integration
• Not just supplier software but integration with
  other third party products
• No integration, no use?
• Hardware and technical environment
• Scaleable
• Security, authentication, authorisation
• Minimum industry standards

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What does the system do? 2

• All in one solution
• Easy, speedy data capture
• Database flexibility
• Workflow processes
• Document retrieval
• Version control
• Internet/Intranet
• Interface to other applications
• Adherence to standards

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Standards

• Standards for best practice
• ISO 15489
• Various BSI PD (0008 and 5000) standards on
  document management legal admissibility
• e-GIF
• Browser interface, xml for data integration, WWW
  standards, metadata for content management,
  SMTP/MIME for email, POP3 for mailbox, etc.
• Government data standards (GDS)
• Standards for data storage, search and retrieval
• Metadata standard based on e-GMS
• Dublin Core
• Web services/SOAP
• Data harvesting/data exchange
• Standards for internally handling the data
• XML, XSLT, web services
• Most sector standards are/have represented data
  in XML
• Standards to display to the browser
• HTML, XHTML, style sheets

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Whats in the box?

• Are you getting
• Out-of-the-box and/or
• Enhancements and/or
• New features
• Technically, the supplier can do anything, but do
  you/they want this?

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Supplier add-on value

• What is the supplier offering?
• Ease of installation
• Flexibility of setup
• Responsiveness to users
• Good help-desk
• Mail forum
• User community
• Implementation
• Training, customisation, support
• Confidence not complacency

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Choosing wisely a suppliers perspective

• EAOLUG
• Cambridge
• 23rd May 2006
• Malcolm Howitt, DS Limited