Business & IT Professionals Guide

How do I choose the best software for my business?

Whether you’re a small, medium or large business, choosing and deploying new business software to manage and improve your company's efficiency is bound to feature on any company executive’s agenda.

Looking for the right solution often requires a great deal of time and resources, becoming more expensive than anticipated and creating headaches.

It’s essential to have a solid game plan before considering different applications, as the options can appear to be never-ending: each industry and set of business needs are covered by multiple vendors, offering solutions based on a variety of configurations and technologies.

Here are five key steps to guide you in your selection process:

1. Define your needs
2. Identify all potential solutions
3. Determine the best deployment method
4. Create a short list
5. Make your final choice

Define your needs

The ideal starting point is to define your specific needs, ensuring that they’re aligned with your company's overall business goals. This means gathering all available information and including all stakeholders in the discussion: end users, executives and appropriate finance and IT personnel.

We recommend discussion and brainstorming sessions, during which you create a list of all the functional requirements you would like to address with the application and separate them into two categories: "Must haves" and "Nice to haves".

The "Must have" list should be as concise as possible and reflect only the core functions that the application must perform in order to fulfill the company business goals. The "Nice to have" list can of course be much broader, although we recommend listing the features in order of importance, encompassing all the capabilities that would make life easier for users and eventually drive incremental business benefits.

Don't forget additional considerations, such as:

• Usability - particularly if you will use the software on a daily basis
• Growth potential - how well the software matches your future needs
• Budget - how much you can afford to spend, including implementation and ongoing support. The cost of the software is crucial, but it is equally important to know what your recurring costs will be.

During this phase, it’s also a good idea to evaluate your existing processes and consider how to make them streamlined and more efficient by leveraging industry standards and best practices.

By improving your business processes beforehand, you’ll significantly improve the likelihood of a successful implementation. This process also helps ensure that problems that simply cannot be fixed with new software are not overlooked.

You should also take into account integration with existing Applications. Enterprise applications are increasingly being developed around particular technologies, standards and platforms that allow for easier integration and provide additional benefits, such as seamless data synchronization.

Last, but not least, check with your legal adviser as to whether there are any regulatory obligations that need to be considered prior to choosing a specific application.

Identify all potential solutions

Once you’ve built your list of needs and a preliminary budget, you can search GetApp.com to identify your initial selection of relevant business applications that best suit your requirements. You can adjust the various filters on the search results page in order to visualize the corresponding applications and adjust the results as you go along. You’ll also find user reviews and comments for each application that provide genuine feedback and go beyond the application's sales pitch.

GetApp.com also features a convenient Appfinder function, which will provide you with detailed information about all the available applications that match your requirements in a single click. The system will select the most appropriate application providers for your specific needs and contact them individually. This can potentially save you a great deal of time (and energy!).

At this stage, we recommend refining your selection to 3-5 solutions that look to be a good fit, based on the following criteria: specialization in supporting the size and type of your business, peer reviews, depth of product line, breadth/range of support for the product and first-level Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We recommend you prioritize companies that have a clear roadmap associated with an "open" technology strategy. This essentially means that their solutions are designed to work with other complementary solutions, now and in the future. The size of an application provider's user community is also a good barometer: a large community means you’ll have less trouble finding the resources to keep things running later down the road.

Determine the best deployment method

The deployment method is a key factor for determining which of the potential solutions make it on to your short list. Today's new technologies, like Software as a Service (SaaS or On Demand), Virtualization and Cloud Computing, can provide significant benefits in terms of efficiency, business agility and so forth, but there is no magic solution that can be apply to every situation. As such, a more traditional on-premises deployment method can prove more suitable in many cases.

You’ll need to carefully analyze the following three key issues before making a decision: Characteristics of the application you are looking to purchase, business context and your current IT environment.

Create a short list

The next step is to create a shortlist of 2-3 application providers with whom you are ready to discuss proposals in greater detail. You should aim to rank your various alternatives against each other and base this classification on the following factors:

• Which solutions offer the most features from your "Must have list in addition to some "Nice to haves"?
• Which solutions are available via the most appropriate deployment method for you?
• Which solutions integrate best with your current environment?
• Which solutions offer the most complete and comprehensive service level agreements?
• Which solutions have the widest market adoption (references)?
• Which solutions best fit your budget range?

Most application providers will allow you to download demos or watch online seminars that road test their solutions. This will enable you to familiarize yourself with their interfaces and see their functionalities in action. During this phase, it’s a good idea to include as much input as possible from your internal users. The people who will use the application are often the best resource when making decisions: gaining their approval will facilitate internal buy-in when you begin implementing the new solution. Keep talking to all relevant stakeholders during the entire selection process.

Make your final choice

This is the last stage of the process. It’s where you’ll need to spend some time with the short-listed application providers in order to gain a complete understanding of what they’re offering and their approach/response to addressing your specific needs. Setting up one or two Proofs of Concept (PoC) with a pilot group of users is often the best way to see whether the solution you are about to purchase is likely to meet your expectations.

This phase will also enable you to determine the application provider's depth of commitment to you, which is a good indicator of the level of support you’re likely to receive for the application. Ensure that you make direct contact with the application provider's existing customers, in order to benefit from their experiences. Most applications providers will allow a PoC to take place as part of a free trial. This is a valuable opportunity to validate your choice before making a financial commitment.

Once you have selected the ideal solution, it’s time for final discussions on pricing and support levels. Pricing schemes (pay-as-you-go, subscriptions, perpetual licenses, etc) are usually closely linked/tailored? to the deployment method you choose. It’s important to check what product enhancements the provider has in the pipeline. Are there planned features that would be useful to you and how quickly will they become available? You can often negotiate a discount on additional modules prior to their official release.

By now, you will certainly have made an informed choice, with a view to making your business more competitive. Don’t hesitate to return to GetApp.com when planning your next application purchase, and please feel free to send us a testimonial if we’ve succeeded in helping you make your decision.