Harshavardhan Jegadeesan's

Extracting Maximum value from Enterprise Software

Written by Harsh Jegadeesan on 12:00 PM

Every season has its flavor, 'extracting value from enterprise software' by achieving the right ROI is the most important business imperative for every CTO, even the CEO this season. Especially when there is a global credit crunch, banks going down every other day and liquidity hard to find. Every serious enterprise software vendor has to be in this, as much as its customers, if not more.

Presently, for an enterprise software vendor, its all about 'making a sale', deploying its software (i.e. if the customers choose them to, and not their partners or other third-party implementers) , and interfacing with the customer for upgrades and add-ons and dutifully receive maintenance cheques every year. Though value engineering and iron-clad business cases play their part during pre-sales, thats where they end.

As is the norm, after a 'successful' implementation and the 'Go-Live', the deployment team transfers the running systems to the internal IT and move on to other projects. After all a happy ending?, well no. All the insights that a deployment team developed during the course of the project is lost forever.

In order to continue to optimize operations (after all bottom lines rule!) and extract value from an enterprise software deployment, customers and enterprise software vendors must work hand-in-glove to evaluate the roadmap on an ongoing basis, Value Engineering must be an ongoing activity than a one-off presentation during pre-sales. Account executives must actually be Value Engineers who work with customers to enhance and extract as much value from their enterprise software deployments. The insight built must be retained on-site - the value engineers at customers place - is where you store these insights.