Getting indistinguishable

In the past, every vendor seemed to have a different approach to the same business problems.

The challenge was deciding which approach to invest in. Although choosing which technological horse to back was reasonably difficult at the time, it now seems relatively easy in the light of new challenges.

As enterprise solutions become increasingly similar, it has become even more difficult to choose between them. Instead of being able to choose a particular technology or approach, CIOs now have to choose between solutions that are almost indistinguishable.

Towards the end of a series of vendor presentations this week, it became clear that the only real difference between the PowerPoint slides in each presentation was the logo at the bottom of each slide and not much else.

Each presenter was essentially saying the same thing, identifying the same trends and advocating the same kind of solutions. They were all talking about a consolidated, unified, simplified, customer-centric, integrated, business-driven, modular, service-oriented, risk-mitigating and centralising approach to reducing risk, minimising cost and maximising revenue.

Sound familiar?

As it became clear in the last presentation that I was not going to hear anything I had not heard before, I began to wonder how any CIO could be expected to make a choice between all the solutions on the market that seem to differ little beyond their names and suppliers.

What are the real differentiators?

According to CA`s UK-based regional director for strategy, Colin Bannister, service delivery will be the key differentiator of the future. He says the battle for market share will no longer be about technology, but the ability to deliver consistent and effective service to the business.

Compatriot, Peter Armstrong - a corporate strategist for rival BMC Software - agrees that in an industry full of false promises, a company`s ability to deliver is the only meaningful metric.

OK, this makes good sense. But how would a business know if a solution vendor`s service delivery is good or bad before it is way too late?

Talk to other CIOs who`ve implemented the solution under consideration, says Bannister. Most companies would not employ a new member of staff to a key position without checking his or her references, so why not do the same when choosing key business tools?

Service delivery will be the key differentiator of the future.

Warwick Ashford, portals managing editor, ITWeb

Again, this makes good sense. But are companies willing to talk to others about what enterprise management solutions they have chosen and why?

Yes, says Armstrong, but only up to a point. He says the trend, in the UK at least, is towards talking to others in the same industry sector to establish whether a particular solution works or not and then discussing the details with others who are in different industry sectors and therefore not competitors.

But what caused the swing from a multitude of different approaches to the common approach just about every enterprise solution vendor is talking about?

The switch in recent years away from technology to business requirements as the main driver of IT solutions probably has a lot to do with it, but Armstrong identifies something even more specific than that.

He says the dramatic change in the past three to four years that has seen a shift from a desire to customise to a requirement for standardisation has been brought about by the growing need for business to prove compliance to more than 50 regulations across the world`s industry sectors.

CIOs and other business decision-makers have had to get real about the severe consequences of not being able to prove compliance.

Compliance has driven demand for standardisation on auditable processes using a variety of best practice frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the allied international ISO 20 000 standard. Control, and therefore standardisation, is the order of the day.

It is little wonder then, that enterprise solution vendors are all talking about the need to manage and control every business process as well as manage and control change within those processes. Key to this approach, of course, is the configuration management database (CMDB).

Although calling it by several different names, just about everyone is claiming to have invented and/or perfected the CMDB to manage change and ensure a single version of the truth across an enterprise, while disputing all such claims from their competitors.

Once again, we return to the CIO`s challenge of making the right choice from among a host of solutions that all purport to do the same thing in more or less the same way.

On this question, Armstrong and Bannister are in complete accord. Vendors must be called upon to demonstrate that their solutions work in practice as well as theory.

Organisations should not be investing in anything before establishing that a solution works for others in their industry sector, that the vendor can deliver consistently on promises of meeting business needs, and that the solution will work for them through conducting proof of concept exercises and pilot implementations before signing on the dotted line.

With customer testimony rapidly becoming the only real differentiator in the foreseeable future, vendors will also have to get real about the fact that customers are partners in a much more meaningful sense than ever before. In a very real sense, customers are essential to generating new business.

Now that most enterprise solution vendors seem to be on the same page, or at least in agreement over how to solve the most common business challenges, there is just one burning question: What took them all so long?