Successful Application Package Evaluation and Selection

 

CIOs know that the best practice for adding applications to a company's portfolio is through buying a package rather than by custom development. Thirty years of software evolution has taken us from building to buying and the rationale is obvious.

There are five main reasons to buy:

• Licensing costs are a mere fraction of in-house development costs
• Time to benefit is minimized
• Project risks are minimized
• Support contracts manage timely and ongoing enhancement
• Vendor functionality includes industry best practices

Make vs. Buy, projects still fail

Given these obvious advantages, it is surprising that the failure rate of package implementation projects is only slightly lower than that for custom development projects. That means that almost equally, these projects are not on-time, on-budget, or don't deliver the business benefit originally committed. Why is this so?

Before we answer that, another interesting trend that goes with the migration to packaged software is the upward trend in application package litigation. Our work on quite a few of those cases over the past 10 years--including ERP, CRM, financial, human resources, healthcare and liability insurance solutions--has revealed one of the major causes for project failure. In virtually every case, the outcome of the project was decided before the …

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