In the past few days, I have identified five reasons why you should consider not buying new software to improve business performance.
The first five were:
3. Less Impact on your business.
4. Fewer surprises due to new hardware/software.
6. You get faster results.
Today’s entry will be:
7. When you are Ready to buy, you know exactly what you need from the software.
Have you ever bought software for your business? How did you know what to buy? If you are like many business owners, you heard about the software from a friend, one of your staff had worked with it or you scoured the Internet looking for software that could do the job.
At best the marketplace for software is confusing. There are many products that seem to do the same thing. Some specialize in certain industries. All of them tell you why they are the best choice for you. I’ve spent many years working with software, time as a developer, in jobs that required me to evaluate software purchases. It was never easy, always confusing and often in discussions where two parties insisted that their choice was the only one that could do the job.
What I found, is that most of the evaluations were a waste of time. Most products today are flexible enough to be used in many ways, and if you really want to, you can get the software to do what you need.
Most software products are evaluated on features and benefits and all of the bells and whistles that are available. While all of these bells and whistles are neat, they don’t matter.
So what is important? There are two things:
a) Knowing exactly what functions that you need from your software.
b) A supplier that is willing to work with you to develop a win-win solution.
Nothing else matters.
If you have already gotten your software to do what you need it to do, you have a much better understanding of how your business works and how the software helps you. You also know what more you need it to do, and you know that your existing software can’t do it. You are now in a good position to evaluate software. You know what you need and how it has to work. So you can ignore featsures and benefits, bells and whistles. You simply evaluate whether and how the software does the job that you need. You also can evaluate how willing the software supplier is willing to help you.
Your chances of making a mistake have been lowered.
Results:
3. Less Impact on your business
4. Fewer surprises due to new hardware/software.
6. You get faster results.
7. When you are Ready to buy, you know exactly what you need from the software.
If you have gone through the reasons why you shouldn’t buy new software, you also know what you have to do to make your new software a success. I’ll talk about that in my next post.
