More on Choosing Software

However you choose a data platform, the most important thing is to have a process. Even if you run your own business and you’re making the choice on your own, you need a plan. This is even more important if there are several decision makers. The only way you can know if you made the right choice is to plan the criteria before you start looking at candidates. This applies to recruitment too, but you likely give more thought to recruitment than you do to procuring software. Why is that?

Once everyone has pooled their criteria and you’ve made a consolidated list, you still need a process that will help you fill in that matrix. The best way to buy software, as for cars, is to take it for a test drive. Find a simpler problem, or a small part of a big problem, that you could solve in a few weeks using the tools in your shortlist. You don’t have a shortlist yet, but you could work back from that. Find a business challenge you could solve using a data tool.

When you know what challenge you want to solve, you can do market research to create a list of candidate solutions. Gartner can help, if you’re really stuck, and you work in a large corporation. There are more options for smaller businesses. You can ask colleagues or friends: what did they choose and why?

I haven’t mentioned budgets yet, and that’s for a reason. You don’t want to start talking about money until much further on in the procurement process. Believe it or not, most software that does something specific will be the same price as the competition. This is just like everything else in life: companies endlessly research each other. If your solution is SaaS then the pricing is normally publicly available anyway. Have you noticed that SME products are always £10 per user per month? And that software for larger companies is £40–50 per user per month? It’s not a coincidence.

The truth is that if you have a genuine business problem to solve, and if software can help, then it will always be worth the money. Whatever money you spend will have an ROI of at least double, and possibly even ten times. That’s right, the more you spend, the more you save, or the more profit you make. If you don’t feel like you can afford a solution then your pain isn’t high enough and you shouldn’t buy anything. Or not now. Find a bigger pain. Find your biggest pain of all and focus on that first.