Products and services trend positive and negative. A person can make reasonable predictions as to when items will cycle from positive to negative, negative to positive, or disappear altogether (e.g., Blockbuster Video).
Positive and negative trends effect your business’ operational units. These operations must be as efficient and effective as possible. Most likely, you will want to implement new products and services that have a positive trend. Here are some current trends:
Positive:
- Apple’s computing ecosystem
- On-Demand entertainment (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc.)
- Texting
- Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
Negative:
- Stand-alone software applications that do not require Internet access for some purpose
- Cable TV schedules
- Telephone calls
- Face-to-face communications
READING AND RESPONDING TO TRENDS
The trend of a product or service, however, is not an indicator of what type of results it will have when used at your company. You will need to deploy human capital to perform the critical analysis necessary to decide if a specific product or service is a fit for the operational unit. You must remove emotion from this analysis.
If you want to use a product or service categorized as “common sense,” “conventional wisdom,” or “settled science,” it will still need to pass the empirical testing. You should not use shortcuts when purchasing and using positive trending products and services; research might show that a negative trending item is the best fit.
A current positive trending item in the software application space is the “All-In-One” (AIO) application. This is not a real software category name; companies that produce these products probably do not use this term or acronym. AIO can be confused with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, which are multi-million dollar systems maintained by “teams.” Think of an AIO application as an ERP-lite; its system architecture is similar to an ERP (it tries to do everything), but does not cost near as much and should not require “teams” to maintain it. Regardless of the difference, the AIO is positive trending primarily due to a management directive to get one system that does “everything.”
CAUSES OF AIO TRENDING
- Desire for single vendor for training, support, debugging, enhancements, system updates, and customization
- Desire for single contact at the vendor to coordinate all work
- Desire for single database type (MS-SQL, Oracle, etc.)
- Desire for fewer integration software applications
IT’S AIO OR NOTHING
Wanting an all-in-one type system is a laudable goal. The downside to this is that your option for software applications becomes AIO or nothing. If your company has more than one operational unit running on an AIO, it has created a single point of delivery and a potential single point of failure.
AIOs are created in a specific manner. There is usually a core application for which the system was created (e.g. Finance) and non-core application modules may not fulfill all of the needs of your other operations. This means you will either need to create a custom application (which will cost you), pay more for the missing features by asking the vendor to change the AIO’s application without creating a custom application (which will cost you), or suffer without the features (which, in the end, will cost you).
Those are only a few concerns to take note of before going ahead with the trending AIO. Consider this before moving forward:
- In a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, the vendor’s data center going down means the penalization of your company.
- The AIO software vendor selling, going out of business, or dropping non-core modules from the AIO system will heavily affect your business.
- Although it is nice to have one point of contact at a vendor, the management of projects and work for which the customer (you) is paying should be done by you.
- You have no control over the vendor’s personnel. If you outsource project and job management to the vendor, you are abdicating control over deliverables and costs. Hence, you will pay more money.
- Much like software application selection, you should base the type of database used on how it fits into your current IT infrastructure and how it meets your company’s long-term goals.
- You should purchase the software products and services based on the needs of each operational unit within your company. Use the applicable integration software throughout the company to communicate and enter in data into these systems.
TYRANNY OF THE STATUS QUO
You shouldn’t compromise on selection of software products and services. Compromising is for marriage (less the TV remote) and Congress.
The different operations within your company have in-common needs (e.g., payroll) and unique needs (e.g., should we replace the 20-year-old wheel loader?). They would not recommend that you purchase tools and equipment that cannot meet their demands. Each operation should select the software products that can deliver on its wants, needs, and goals.
Once an AIO application is in place, you have an expensive, entrenched system that limits your options and cannot fulfill your company’s needs. Your employees will take hours assembling reports and information that they could create in seconds with an application that meets their needs.
Because of how expensive the AIO was, it will take at least 5 years before anyone will consider changing to something else. By that time your employees will succumb to the AIO’s shortcomings and you will have to battle a form of what the economist Milton Friedman called the “Tyranny of the Status Quo;” i.e., no one will want to change systems even if the AIO does not deliver all that they need. ■
About The Author: James Magee is a partner and product manager with CFA Software, Inc. He has been a software developer and systems analyst since 1984. He has also worked as a network administrator and IT manager. He has worked with fleet and equipment maintenance service operations for more than 25 years. He can be reached at mageej@cfasoftware.com.
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Modern Contractor Solutions, July 2015
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