Your next system


25 September 2009 Harold Hambrose


In an extract from Wrench in the System: What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software and How You Can Release the Power to Innovate, author Harold Hambrose explains what to look for when considering new software.


Sooner or later, you’ll be thinking about a new system. Whether you buy or build, this is a great opportunity. Products in the marketplace may bring to light methods you haven’t considered, and they also may offer more comprehensive data storage and retrieval capabilities than you ever could have imagined for your business.

Once you’ve narrowed the field of candidates to products represented by reputable manufacturers and confirmed that the systems have solid technical architecture and sound code, it makes sense to evaluate the systems just as you would any other prospective purchase. Business software has a cost of ownership that may bear little relation to its value, and the answers to a few good questions are worth a thousand promises.

In this chapter you’ll find the most valuable questions you can ask to obtain the greatest return on your investment.

What is this thing?

" By spending a small amount of time up front with a designer, you may be able to prototype the ideal dashboard, account display, or reporting interface, and in doing so, set a bar that any candidate system must clear."

If the product is a time-reporting solution, a data warehouse, or any of the multitudes of packaged "solutions" on the market, make sure that every facet reflects an understanding of your business and your professionals, from the executive suite to the loading dock.

Will terminology on-screen and the metadata that will store descriptions and keys to the data repositories resonate across your organisation? Will this system help to clarify the complexity of tasks? Is this really a tool, or is it possibly a technological barrier that will prevent members of your team from realising their full potential?

Just because a system is already installed in other companies in your line of business doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s working in those companies. Make sure you are looking at a proven solution, one proven on every level - technological performance, business efficiency, and acceptance by end users.

If the tool you’re considering has been retrofitted from a related business, ask about what changes were made. If it was initially developed for a business different from your own, think carefully about your end users. The transactions that the system supports and the structures of its database may translate to your business, but the display tier may speak another language. I have watched many clients, in seeking innovative new solutions for their companies, look to systems designed and developed for businesses outside their own industries. Most of the time the display tier is the area that is least carefully considered, when in truth it’s one of the most sensitive aspects of a potential deployment.

Is this what we really need?

The sales pitch is as old as time - salespeople hawking a 100 varieties of snake oil that "you can’t do without." But your accounting office or order fulfillment team may not work precisely like any other, and that brand-name manufacturer of enterprise systems may not have the right answer for your business.

If you fully understand your business, its processes, and your employees, your requirements for a business system are clear. With a well-defined set of requirements in hand, the noisy marketplace of candidate systems is far safer to negotiate, and there is less risk that product manufacturers will use their lists of product capabilities to dictate your definition of needs.

Assess how closely a product and its manufacturer’s promises measure up to the future as you see it. Any gap between what you need and what a vendor has to sell must be completely understood in order for you to accurately predict whether your organisation and its professionals will benefit from a tool and whether the vendor’s promises will be fulfilled. You can make your own yardstick to measure various facets of candidate systems by drafting a prototype of an ideal or best-case solution. By spending a small amount of time up front with a designer, you may be able to prototype the ideal dashboard, account display, or reporting interface, and in doing so, set a bar that any candidate system must clear.

The problem with many systems can be traced all the way back to the beginning, when a company heads into the marketplace with a seriously flawed set of requirements in hand. For decades, businesses have relied upon requirements documents to evaluate new software systems and to develop custom products. Everything about these documents - from the process used to create them to their physical form - will influence the success of the final product, and unless they are properly prepared, you may find that you have staked a large and critical investment in the future of your business on very shaky ground.

A requirements document is commonly based on information from polls of target users, conjecture on the part of various business experts and user proxies, and exhaustive mapping of the business operations by business analysts. At best, a requirements document may be a request to subtly improve the status quo for the end user by installing some latest and greatest back-end technology. At its worst it may be a wholly inaccurate description of an essential system that should be bought or built. Very likely it won’t describe the level of innovation the business needs or the innovation that this opportunity affords.

To be sure that you have an accurate description of what you need, make sure that professionals with the right skills have applied appropriate investigative techniques. Ask the wrong question, and the answer is irrelevant. Trained observers such as designers and design researchers can help business experts look beyond what has been accepted within the organisation as common knowledge - assumptions and beliefs that may be misleading—to develop a set of requirements that are grounded in a true understanding of the business, its people, and their combined potential.

An excerpt taken from Wrench in the System: What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software and How You Can Release the Power to Innovate, by Harold Hambrose. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2009.