Navigating Vendor Selection
 
Tips from the coal face, delivering vendor selection.
 
If it’s time for a change, the platforms that support your marketing are burning, too costly to maintain or upgrade, your business process is out of sync with your tooling, or the purpose and presentation of your web presences no longer match what your business currently does, read on. 
Marketing tooling on average is replaced every 3-5 years, this may simply be down to a lack of maintenance sometimes a  project over a product mentality will have left a behemoth that is presenting a business risk of patched and loosely coupled technologies. It’s time to press ahead and realise the benefits of a replatforming. With all the upheaval that will entail
 
For a number of years, we have been working with organisations large and small to identify platform architectures that deliver against need but also provide the business uplift required to make our customers the hero. Increasingly we are seeing the acquisition of platforms decoupled from the implementation partner relationship. With so much at stake you need to assess the market and land on a path that will suit your organisation for several years. It is not enough to know that your support partner has access to lots of engineers, there is a lot at stake if you make the wrong choice. 
Research shows that the average SAAS or PAAS platform remains in use for 3-5 years. But if you are looking for a complex platform or will be looking to invest in a platform that will support a number of different processes, supported by a product development plan you may be looking for a lifespan of up to a decade. 
 
We are seeing RFP’s where platform selection is being carried out in parallel with an implementation partner selection or, in a lot of cases a package of work to unpack the business need and define not only a platform but a larger architecture and implementation roadmap alongside phased investment thresholds. 
 
I have drafted this article to pass on some of the key tips for organisations embarking on a vendor selection.  It is not exhaustive if you want more detail. Do shout. 
The challenge is that a business platform decision will impact multiple teams within your business. The implementation could cost 3-5 times the software costs in the first 12 months so confidence in your underlying platforms is imperative. 
 
In order to create confidence. Not only for you but also for your colleagues and stakeholders we recommend the following steps
 

• Get your priorities right – Unpack exactly what your business need are. It is probably not just be a replacement of new for old. Tec changes and you can guarantee that if your last change was five years ago. The landscape will be different. Analyst reports can help you get a top line on trends in the market. 

 

• Unpack the interdependencies – Understand who and what impacts your platform. And where these interactions could be improved. Make sure you understand what goes on under the hood and who is feeding in. 

 

• Dig out the details – Make sure you are clear on any processes or integrations that will need to be implemented or migrated. Are you pulling a value from a legacy system or serving an international market with specific data considerations.

 

• Understand your full technology lifecycle – you can only understand the total cost of ownership when you understand what your platform will be doing and for how long. Implementation cost is only part of the picture, what are your total costs annualised and are you benefitting from other technology in a way that could not be replicated in a new platform. 

 
Let’s unpack this a little more. 
 
 
Understand the priorities. What gap are you seeking to fill
 
Make sure you have an adequate mechanism for logging and prioritising your business requirements. The primary driver of the initiative may be a single imperative such as your current platform is approaching end of life. However, replacing like for like is potentially not the right thing to do. 
 
Timelines may be deceptive a key requirement in one part of the business may not be compatible with the quantity or quality of change needed in another. The way to navigate this is to understand and document the priorities. What is needed now and what is needed in the future. I have additionally seen platform decisions upended and revisited when a small but prescient point that has not been surfaced, becomes apparent.  Having clarity on the priorities ensuring they are tracked, shared and commonly understood will ensure you are going in with your eyes open. 
 
Modern composable technologies can help as you are often not compelled to use one platform for all. A competent implementor will certainly be able to help you stage a delivery plan. 
 
Lets also look at the Interdependencies.
 
Do you have teams or business units with key skills that need to be considered (coding preferences)? 
Do you have data that needs to be shared managed or handled at different parts of the process? Equally, timelines do you need one technology in place before you can implement others. Having a high-level picture of this will help you create your architecture over time. 
 
Staffing, Business processes 
 
Ensure you have looked at your staffing requirements. Content or ecommerce technology has huge impacts on business teams. Your content supply chain. Your merchandising capability, stock and facilitation.  Changes in technologies at one point in the digital diaspora can have knock on effects up or down stream. Make sure you have these implications logged. 
 
Thiswill give you a strong sense of the shape your platforms will need to fill within your organisation. 
 
With the context in mind, it is time to focus on the solutions. 
 
Getting a sense of what is out there 
 
Draw up a clear requirement and take that to the market. 
Starting with market landscape view, it is worth understanding quickly which vendors can bring something to your requirement. As vendors grow through acquisition and consolidation. It is worth having an up-to-date understanding of your vendors perspectives. Don’t just look for historic leaders. Look at who is investing and who has strong roadmap plans that align with your requirements. 
 
I like to have initial conversations with vendors without divulging the name of my client. You can clearly align your needs against the functionality you need and look at company size and industry experience so you can assess a match with the vendors available. I also like to look at vendor stability. Look for a measure of stability that suits your need but ownership, backing, client mix and pending mergers can give you a clear understanding of potential partnership contenders. 
 
Once you are clear that there is a solution fit across a shortlist of vendors It is time to start talking cost. 
 
Ensure you have a clear understanding of the total cost of ownership (TCO). 
Are there any subsidiary costs, is this PAAS or SAAS, and what are the implications fo hosting, maintenance and upgrade paths. 
Ease of access to resources. Quite often responsibility for development will be split between vendors and implementation partners. Make sure you gave a strong ecosystem of partners in case a change may be needed at some point. 
 
 Also do what you can to project costs over a full-term. Software implementations often have a 5-10 year lifespan. Understand cost impacts across that timeframe.  Initial implementation of course is important, but your business will change. What will be the long term costs to adapt your platform.  What is the mix of Ongoing (fixed licences) short term costs (implementation and decommissioning, and any third party, plugins’ s updates or additional licences. A platform that looks cost effective on paper can look different when you assess support, hosting and any functional add-ons’ or connectors you will need to pay for on an annual basis. 
 
Having looked at this a number of times the first-year cost is rarely reflective of ongoing costs. So make sure you have a view over a period relevant to your business. Certainly, more than one budget cycle.  Also factor in the cost and cadence of upgrades and deployments. What weight will this place on your business. Long slow deployment processes can be crippling for efficiency. 
 
If your platform requires the development of add-ons, tools or widgets.  Are these native to your platform or can you develop them in a way where they can move forward into any new platform, using for instance headless or UI technologies that can exist beyond the current use case without costly reengineering. It can be worth thinking in this way a few years prior to any potential replatform to retain as much of the investment you have made in specific user tools, as you can. 
 
Test before you commit.
Firstly, don’t take the standard demo. You can guarantee that is not real and has been rehearsed many times. Look by all means but once you have a small group of potential vendors left ask for a detailed demo. One that closely matches your business requirements or needs. Remember vendors are commercial entities and sales guys time is precious so save this detailed step for the final few. It will help you understand the user experience your staff will be going through. You can unpack how well suited the technology will be for your teams. 
 
Many vendors will let you spike an API to be sure that its delivering, but if you are doing spikes save this as a final step and only put vendors you are very interested in through it. Hopefully your vendors require an NDA in place for this but if you have been sharing business information throughout your negotiation it’s a wise precaution. 
 
As an overriding principle a vendor selection process is a funnel. Your initial interactions need to cover easy to ascertain information. Business size, reputation, status, broad technical fit etc are easy to acquire.
 
Detailed functional details are harder and will require some interaction between you and the vendor that you will both have to invest in. 
 
Detailed demo’s or Technical spikes take time to create and resource, both for you and the vendor. Save these interactions for Vendors that you are really interested in. Keep demos to an hour or so and don’t pack too many into a day. You will not remember anything clearly. However  Do invite you team into Demo’s. Give them a series of critera and ask them to mark vendors. It will help you massively in removing subjectivity and focussing any follow up conversation to achieve a result. 
 
We have worked a range of collaborative Vendor selection engagements working with a variety of tech platforms across a range of industries. If you feel that JumpRock can add value to a vendor assessment within your organisation. Feel free to reach out.

It was great to be part of the Opticon gathering again with Mando. 
Both Daniel from Satalia, on AI's and impacts on business and humanity, and Nazanin from the Product team at Optimizely, gave stand out talks. 
 
My key take on the conversation was that the direction of travel is realising efficiencies in the content supply chain. With content testing and personalisation making increasing demands on content teams for volumes of nuanced and varied content. Efficiencies through effective tooling can create some of the required bandwidth.
 
AI tooling is great for automating the leg work in content production but the intellectual property is currently still human. If I understood Daniel correctly not for long. 
 
Here is a piece I worked on with Rob and the team at Mando Group. Still largely human in origin, but it may have been given a shine by a LLM.

Stephen Gillespie
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