Blog: Craig Schiff

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How NOT to Select a Performance Solution

Ever been to an IT chat room or forum? They are great places to get solid answers to pressing technical challenges. Leveraging the combined experience of all participants in the room or on the distribution list is probably one of the best ways to get a quick, authoritative answer to a detailed syntax or command question that the vendor failed to adequately document. However, I have recently seen these forums used for a purpose that I don't believe they are well-suited for: BI and/or business performance management vendor selection. The typical query runs something like this: 'we are a large, complex bank and we are looking at Microstrategy or Cognos to analyze our data, which would you recommend?' Just in case the problems with this approach aren't already obvious to you, let me spell them out.

First of all, most people in these groups use screen names so you don't know who you are really talking to. When getting technical help that doesn't really matter. When making a sizeable purchasing decision it matters a lot. Is 'BIGuru' a salesman for Cognos who will promote his product or a disgruntled ex-employee who will have nothing nice to say? The next issue is that to properly select a solution that you are going to live with for some time to come you really need to delve into your specific detailed requirements and match them up against the product choices and their capabilities. While product A may have worked quite well for someone else at a bank, it may not work well at all for you. Your requirements, at the detailed level, are most likely going to be different in some important ways from the people responding to your question. Lastly, let's take a look at what we are attempting to do here. We are looking to buy a BI or performance solution that will be strategically important to the company, probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when all is said and done (software+services+staff time), and live on for 5-7 years. Is this the way to make a decision of that magnitude? Of course not. You need to go through a comprehensive, structured process to determine your detailed requirements and evaluate all the viable vendors for this solution. An IT chat room can be one small step in a thorough due diligence process, but it certainly should not be the only step. I wonder how the senior executives in these companies would feel if they found out their BI/BPM experts used this as a primary means of selecting vendors?

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