One Vendor vs Multiple Vendors when designing the future business IT Platform

Introduction

In this article I will share some of my observations related to topics that have to be addressed in relation to your future IT Platform before making a decision about the preferred vendor solution.

I have chosen in this article only to handle the application scenario as the applications are integrated in the Business Processes, where the primary purpose of the hardware is to run the chosen applications.

I will when using the term; One Vendor be referring to the IT design, where one primary vendor sources more than 80% of the business applications used – either as a service hosted by the vendor or installed on-site.

When using the term; Multiple Vendors I will be referring to the IT design, where the business applications used are delivered from best-of-breed vendors – each either as a service hosted by the vendor or installed on-site.

It is my intention with this article to highlight some of the topics I have seen causing issues at a later stage during the implementation of the selected application(s).

There are more issues at stake

In one of my other articles I described some of the scenarios you will have to deal with whether you choose an On-site or a hosted solution.

One major activity that oƠen are given less priority are the evaluation of the organizational roles and number of end-users handling the business process versus the role and number of end-users required to handle the process built in the application.

During the decision phase many businesses define the expectations to the end-user role based on the country where the business resides. However, when the business operates cross borders and cross continents, this has to be given a priority during the design phase. 

The consequences happens most of the times to be non-measurable in the monthly financial report, but – next to a sometimes frustrated staff – they do have a long term impact to the total operational cost.

A tool here could be an Activity Based Cost Management exercise. Giving the right attention, it will provide the business with many details, like what the real cost price is for your services/ products.

When it comes to the detailed knowledge of the application, you will have to consider where the competence should be, i.e. decide either to have a pair of internal resources or to rely on the support from the vendor or professionals.

Even the best-of-breed vendors can have bugs in the solution or the next update, so would you like to be conservative with implementing updates/ new versions or do you want to be one of the first to implement?

General reflections to functionality

I have over the years experienced a tendency of decisions being taken due to external “marketing” pressure rather than an actual business need. A thorough evaluation of the existing design with respect to the real functional need would sometimes reveal that the existing solution can be upgraded to include the functionality the business team requires.

My experience through the years is that 80% of the end-users only uses 20% of the functions within the implemented applications. As some vendors have managed to set the standards for which applications a business must have, many business owners have invested in (updating) applications that they really do not need in order to service their customers.

My reference here is the development of Microsoft Word in the Microsoft Office versions from Office 95 to Office 2016 – many companies would still today be fully supported by the functions available in the ʻ97 version – or maybe even in Word Perfect 5.2.

Unless the end-users are aware of these details and their impact and are capable to compensate for them, you have a risk for the situation, where focus unnecessary are transferred from the content to the formatting challenges. Investing some time in training the end-users will prepare them for rutines to avoid such issues.

I will be looking forward to the day, where an exchange of an editable text document will be fully independent to the source application used for creating or editing the document.

Data standards – interfaces – migration

Businesses are exchanging data electronically with other businesses and/ or authorities. In theory this should be easy to manage as there are several defined standards for this purpose.

As the design for data stored and used internally within the sending or receiving part often varies from these defined standards, exchange of data are often handled by a gateway.

Should this be a problem? Well not in the event the available documentation shows the gateway and how it has been configured. I have experienced an issue caused by an undocumented gateway within the customer data flow design. The result was data sent were not shown correctly in one of the receiving systems, which happened to be the one handling invoicing.

When migrating data you have a risk for errors caused by the same issue.

In general I recommend a trial executed using an extract from the present sources to show how these data are migrated into the potential new application. Another advantage here is seeing which fields that remain empty in the new application, i.e. to consider whether the business team shall start using these fields or you just continue as usual.

Been working with both automatic migration of data and manual input of historic data, I strongly recommend to use the automatic solution whenever possible. The automatic migration will only succeed when executing a quality assurance of the source data.

The end-user experience

Some business applications are designed with a screen resolution of 1280*1024px or even worse 1920*1200 px – a detail that often are missed when buying new laptops or monitors to the end-users.

Have you noticed that laptops – despite the physical 15” screen – are sold with a 1360*768 px resolution?

Have you noticed that monitors – despite the physical 22” screen – are sold with a 1600*900 px resolution?

The outcome is a frustrated end-user needing to scroll down in order to read/ fill in information in each view.

 Another issue you will have to be aware of is the number of mandatory fields to be filled in/ worked through in each step of the process within the application. Some vendors allow you to hide the fields your business have chosen not to use, where other vendors do not allow you to skip any fields. I have experienced that mandatory fields without any relation to the daily operation can cause a negative effect to the general data quality.

An OS limitation to have in mind

In a business setup most end-users are comfortable with the Windows desktop. Hereto many business applications are build on top of Windows.

As it is possible to run a virtual Windows Desktop on a Linux based computer or a MAC, some companies have chosen to shift from Windows based computers to MACʼs claiming that this solution reduces the cost related to end-user support.

I see no reason for using the virtual desktop scenario unless your business has chosen a solution like Citrix to access the company desktop. The argument here is the security scenarios in relation to the device, the virtual desktop and the access to
the business data.

Despite the improvements within the Microsoft Server OS and the Microsoft Platform solutions, I see a critical need for highly qualified technical resources in order to secure, that only the parts required for operating your business is installed/ activated.

I have experienced installations, where an uncritical approach, i.e. “we want everything nice-to-have” have caused a slow performing platform. In order to improve the performance the company started upgrading the hardware and infrastructure without executing the critical review of “Nice-to-have” vs “Need-tohave” features.

A critical review might have identified a need for upgrading some hardware or parts in the infrastructure. The review might also have identified some issues related to data security.

The IT platform design is complicated

As I have mentioned the companies need to catch up on having the full overview of the match between the Business Strategy, Business Processes, Data Processes and Legal requirements documented.

I recommend to use the models mentioned in my third article with an open mind – I do believe in it is better to use a reference model with identified holes than no reference model at all.

Do not underestimate the importance of having everything documented and not just relay on the knowledge within the employees. Having the approach of replacing staff members to fit the required skills rather than giving them the required training increases the risk for loosing knowledge about the real configuration of the IT platform.

Securing the match between the Business Strategy, Business Processes, Data Processes and Legal requirements are critical.

Talking about the option to either use one primary vendor or a group of preferred vendors (Best-of-Breed) your list of topics to consider will have to include end-user GUI (Design/ open for customizing), number of mandatory steps in the Use Case scenarios, stability, version control, security, patch support, open standards, interfaces, migrations, reference to defined standards, how changes to GUI flow are configured, etc

This article was published initially on LinkedIn on March 2, 2020. I have made some adjustments to the content in this version.

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