Best Practices Software Selection Executive Brief

In today's rapidly evolving business climate a paradigm shift is beginning to unfold. The lowering of deployment obstacles for organizations to purchase enterprise software is on the way to becoming the "new normal". The proliferation of smarter customers, end user bill of rights, newer technologies, the maturing of service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing and client engagement by vendors all contribute to the shift now taking place. Organizations and vendors must adapt to the new way of doing business especially in the acquisition of enterprise software selection.

Issues such as non-realized return on investment, failed or partially successful implementations, incomplete data on solutions, political and operational biases; both internal and external, lack of an evaluation process, lack of needs prioritization and misunderstood vendor communications are common problems that have occurred and can be mitigated by employing a best practices approach for enterprise software evaluation. This brief will examine the need for a structured evaluation methodology for software selection, needs prioritization and vendor engagement best practices. These topics will be discussed within the context of software evaluation and the significance in which they hold for the selection portion of an evaluation process.