Enterprise IT
Education And Replication: No Free Ride
Both corporate IS and users are under the mistaken impression that they need not pay for the cow if they can get the milk for free. This month's RFP feature illustrates two distinct examples. First, many decision-makers are outsourcing the education and architecture process by ineffectively commingling it with the RFP process. Second, many users--with the encouragement of middleware vendors--are assuming connected and disconnected mean the same thing. We discovered this because our RFP was targeted for sales and marketing users, many of whom are laptop users on the go. The solutions suggested by most of our bidders went to incredible lengths to propagate data down to each laptop. Example One: Unrealistic Expectations for the RFP Process When I spoke with management about their procurement process, I encountered a lot of chest-beating and unrealistic expectations. I recently overheard the following: "I can get any vendor to do anything for nothing." There's your first mistake. Next I overheard: "I use vendors for education. Let's use this RFP process as a way to get up to speed." There's your second mistake. Just because you agonized for five months about whether or not to upgrade to Office 97, doesn't mean you can make an informed decision about the intranet.
ReadTelecom Deregulation: One Year Later
When I wrote about the telecommunications deregulation act last year, I was looking forward to cost savings, better customer service and improved technologies to come--sooner than later (see
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