Why you must factor in time when selecting software.

• Author: Currier, Richard
• Position: Includes related article on acceleration of application implementations

What happens when you're five months behind on an important system implementation and you realize you never questioned the timetables for installing and upgrading the software?

Selecting the right enterprise software application is one of the most important decisions a financial executive can make. For years, conventional wisdom held that the proper way to evaluate such applications is to make a list of the most important functional requirements and then select the package with the most features and functions addressing your needs. This isn't true anymore.

Today, most client/server applications you'll evaluate contain the full set of functions to run your business. This is especially true of cross-industry systems, such as financial and human-resources applications, where much of the functionality must conform to generally accepted practices, rules and regulations. Those companies that continue to use the feature checklist as their primary criteria typically find only minor differences in the products they evaluate. Increasingly, the difference between vendor offerings is less in what packages can do and more in how they let you do it and - most important - how long it takes to do it.

STUDY FINDINGS

Time is the most important factor for CFOs to consider when evaluating client/server financial packages - the time it takes to implement, change and upgrade applications. This may sound simple, but based on studying almost 500 enterprise computing sites over the last 15 years, I stand by that conclusion.

Recently, I conducted additional in-depth research through focus groups of select enterprise computing customers and got the same results. When I asked one focus group (that had already implemented software) to rank the importance of time, risk and money in the selection of financial software, the answer came back "time, time and time."

Any company can expedite its return on investment by implementing time-saving technologies. But organizations are just beginning to apply this rule to software selection. For every scenario that involves expensive and time-consuming programmer support, another allows user empowerment to cut time.

Not surprisingly, a recent Forrester Research study confirms that the pace of technology and business change has continually accelerated for the past 25 years. With the coming of Internet technologies in the 1990s, the change rate has accelerated even more. Every new technology has had a direct impact on the rate of...