As further reports from the mainstream IT sector continue to paint a gloomy picture, budget cuts and canned projects seem the order of the day – especially where those project’s budgets are in the millions.
It is therefore refreshing to read yet another article from Martin Butler (www.computing.co.uk) on the subject of IT decision makers following the herd and investing in technologies that ‘seem to be the best idea’ – just because other people are doing so. Martin’s full article. can be read at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/comment/2234814/leaders-resist-herd-mentality-4430810.
As more and more articles questioning the buying and decision making process find their way into the press, maybe business leaders will begin to think twice about jumping with the herd. As someone that offers a fully integrated application development toolset that enables flexible applications to be built that also supports existing business processes - I can only hope.
Those of you in the MultiValue community that are faced with a prospect that is intent on following the herd, might find the following useful as well. www.denverpost.com ran an article on the 14th January this year regarding the demise of Shane Co. Part of the article reads “The final blow to the company was a point-of-sale and inventory management system purchased from business-software giant SAP for $8 million to $10 million, which ended up costing $36 million and took three times as long to implement. In the meantime, because it did not work entirely, the system did not provide accurate inventory numbers. . . .”
A little bird tells me that the abbreviated back story is that the Shane Co. ran software in the early 1980's on Prime Information and this was later ported to Universe in 1988. The Shane Co. spent many years developing and extending the applications in BASIC to meet the changing business needs and as a result, the software ran their business successfully over many, many years. Management made the decision to go the SAP route from Universe and the result, as they say, was catastrophic – the full story can be read at http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_11446814/.
For those of you not in the know, Prime and Universe MultiValue technologies which are very similar to Revelation’s ARev and OpenInsight. Needless to say, Revelation also have anecdotes of clients following the herd and spending millions in so called mainstream technologies to replace ARev and OpenInsight systems, only to find those projects fail and OpenInsight continues to help the business trade profitably.
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