Optimizing the business benefits from technology acquisitions: making intelligent technology purchases requires a vision, a long-term strategy and the knowledge that desired objectives are attainable. Smart companies--moving toward single data repositories across their enterprises--are doing things smarter, faster and better.

• Author: Murray, Dave

Businesses make significant investments in technology--purchasing software, computers, networking tools and other components necessary to stay current, drive business and sustain their competitive stance. Making budget trade-offs, measuring relative values of competing products and trying to get the most value for the investment is a daunting challenge for CIOs and CFOs alike.

Decision-makers must deal with a number of challenges in pursuit of their goal of effectively investing in technology. Some of these considerations include speed of adoption, system performance, technology support, training and the return on investment (ROI). Important cost factors can be overlooked or inadequately budgeted, which limits the effectiveness of these crucial purchases. Making effective and efficient technology purchases requires a vision, a long-term strategy and the knowledge that the purchase makes a company's objectives attainable. That translates to doing things smarter, faster and better.

Taking a seemingly structured approach to technology acquisition, a senior management team is established to develop new business practices and rules required to implement the technology. A transition team works to inform staff of new business practices and rules to ensure the seamless integration of an application or new hardware implementation. An information technology (IT) team assesses hardware, database, security and training required to roll out, secure, manage and support the implementation.

In short, a great deal of time and money is spent to ensure an effective implementation and transition to maximize the company's ROI on its technology investment.

Rollout complete, the switch is turned on.

Then what? Often, employees who were trained months before the implementation don't remember how to use the technology. The help desk is swamped. Pockets of users, comfortable with old business practices, resist change. Dial-up users connect to applications at a snail's pace. Productivity declines.

In a phrase, the technology has hit the fan!

Needed: Thinking Both Global and Local End-User

In hindsight, the structured approach to acquisition does not look so ordered. Overall implementation effectiveness and ROI on technology investments depend on end-user buy-in and the extent to which the application performs as promised across the enterprise and within new or expanding departments or divisions.

A large company must think like a global enterprise yet also think locally, like an end-user, when acquiring enterprise-wide technology.

End-user resistance increases if, for example, the technology forces staff to change functional business processes and does not provide optimum performance and high-speed access during business hours. Unexpected hardware, application, training, support, management, administration and security costs can also derail an implementation project.

That's why, to maximize technology effectiveness and ROI, companies must think like end-users while at the same time anticipating global scalability issues when rolling out critical financial technology that spans an expanding global enterprise.

For instance, to make effective business decisions, companies must be empowered to analyze accurate information in a timely manner. Critical decisions are often made on the fly, and based on a constant analysis of data. However, gathering accurate data in real time can be difficult for global corporations with divisions in several countries, running different resource planning and customer relationship applications on a variety of technology platforms.

That's why enterprise technology must be chosen with vision, strategy and a financial plan in place. Imagine what would happen to the ROI on a technology expenditure if:

* End-users resisted implementing the new technology because it required a complex and unnecessary business/culture shift.

* Users in several countries could not access the technology during business hours due to application maintenance.

* Dial-up connectivity resulted in onerous delays.

* The company expanded operations, but the technology could not accommodate new users without additional application servers and decentralized databases.

* The corporation acquired a competitor and discovered the technology applications do not run on the acquisition's platform standards.

To maximize ROI and minimize surprises that knock the wind out of anticipated productivity gains, a structured approach to application acquisition should take into consideration the needs of the end-user, scalability and performance goals. Without end-users on board or a cost-effective scalable process in place, the company will not achieve its objectives.

Thinking both like a global enterprise and like a local end-user, if the company's defined goals are to streamline and centralize business practices through optimum performance and scalability across a growing enterprise, potential vendors should be asked a series...