Whatever your involvement with data, you will have found yourself in situations where the current technology your workplace employs, does not address your needs, or the needs of your stakeholders. If you find yourself in a position to change that for the better, please allow me to share my experiences on this long and weary road.
Find your friends
Buying a tool is a team sport, and the name of the game is Influencing. If you are going to be successful, you will need to find some allies. Some will share the load, some will help to remove barriers, some will cheer you on, and some will just be along for the ride; and they all add value in their own way.
Executive Sponsor – They don’t have to be the first person you win over, and you may even end up with more than one, but at some point, you will need political muscle and DOA (delegation of authority) fat enough to sign on the dotted line.
Enterprise Architecture – What capability gap are you trying to close? How does this technology decision impact the rest of the technology estate? Will your technology selection pass your organisation’s technology governance processes? Involving your EA function early will ensure you are headed in the right direction.
Finance, Procurement, PMO, Legal – You are not buying anything without finance and legal. Learn your organisation’s approach to procurement, projects, funding cycles, and be sure to identify and involve legal and procurement early on.
Security, Privacy, Risk, (Data & AI) Governance – Any new technology represents a change in risk. Involve Security, Privacy, and Data & AI Governance early, to ensure their requirements are addressed in the technology selection process. Involve 1st line risk to ensure your project is risk assessed and leverage your organisation’s risk management processes to collect risk acceptances where prudent, to ensure you don’t get bogged down in endless bureaucracy.
The Customer, Change Management – Who are you doing this for? What are their requirements? What behaviours will they need to change to get value out of what you are hoping to implement? If you put your customers at the centre of what you are doing, you will reduce your chance of failure immensely. If your organisation has a Change function, or your project can afford to hire a Change Manager, leverage their expertise as much as you can, to further increase your chances of success.
Be professional and disciplined
Technology purchasing is serious business. Be unimpeachable in your conduct and create an environment that will deliver the best outcome for your organisation.
Take your ego out of the equation – Doing this might have been your idea, or you may have been chosen to lead it, but this is not about you, it’s about your organisation’s needs and the needs of your internal customers. This activity should not be a dictatorship, it should be a coalition. Wherever you can, play the role of facilitator, and try to ensure decisions are made by consensus, not simply by the loudest voice in the room.
Be capability driven, not technology driven – This is not about what tool you like or used at your last workplace (nor should it be what your boss or exec liked in their last workplace either). Anchor your rhetoric and your process to what capabilities your organisation has (current state), and needs (target state). Counterintuitively, your technology selection should be technology agnostic; with decisions emanating from what best addresses your capability needs and requirements.
No gifts, no favours, and no favourites – Your workplace no doubt will have policies around this, but vendors would not keep offering if there were not people who still said yes, every now and then. Fancy lunches, tickets to the Tennis or the F1; you might think it will not influence your decision, but the appearance of a conflict of interest can be as damaging as an actual conflict of interest. Don’t allow yourself to be anything other than beyond reproach. You will also be tempted, as time progresses, to pick your favourite and start to root for them. Don’t. Your job is to play the field and build competitive tension. For the monogamous among us it can be uncomfortable dating multiple people at once; like you’re the main prize on The Bachelor; but if you try to skip to “happily ever after” too quickly you’ll undercut your negotiating position and may even end up with the wrong tool.
Be considerate and do not burn bridges – You will be asking vendors for a lot of time and consideration, and you will ultimately be disappointing almost all of them. Yes, it’s their job, but amongst the chaos try to make their jobs easier where you can, and remember you’ll almost certainly need to work with some of them again in the future.
Be organised
You cannot rush into things, or you are guaranteed to fail. Put in the work up front, be methodical and meticulous, and it will pay you back in dividends in the second half of this marathon.
Start with why. What capability are you looking to purchase technology to enable? How does that map to your requirements for this technology? What should it integrate with and what should it do? What do you need now, and what might you need later? Keep your lists structured and organised, easy to filter and navigate; this will help you, but it will also help your prospective vendors who will be burning the midnight oil to try to win your business. Prioritise your requirements, but do not share this information with your prospective vendors, you are only asking to be lied to. Keep things numbered and coded. This will become your single most referred to document and if written well, will continue to be useful long after you have implemented your chosen technology.
Track your vendors, and their progress through a structured and auditable process. Create clear entrance and exit criteria for each stage to give your stakeholders confidence and your potential vendors clarity.
Even in the nascent stages, treat your activities like a project. Track Actions and Decisions. Keep a RAID register. Write a roadmap to show estimated timelines. Know that your roadmap will be wrong, and things will take much longer than you would like, and remember to be kind to yourself about this, and realistic with your stakeholders.
Be process and data driven
Decide up-front, how things will run, and how decisions will be made. If your decisions lack provable objectivity, then your recommendations will lack credibility, and you will be unlikely to make it through the gauntlet unscathed.
Establish Principles – Anchor your decision-making to a set of guiding principles. These show your stakeholders you are running a thoughtful and deliberate process and will help you and your compatriots work through difficult decisions objectively.
Plan your sourcing process – Will vendors need to sign an NDA; will you? What information will you share with them to enable a tailored response? Will you have the vendors conduct a formal demo and score them on it, or have you already seen them demo during your original market scan? Will you ask for a reference site? At what point in the process; how many references; and how similar should the reference site be to your organisation (industry, geography, private/public/government, size)? What will your RFP contain? Will you run an RFI first? Do you want to run a POC before you commit to a full purchase? How will you score the outcome of each stage and when will you provide outcomes to the vendors?
You must define a process that is clear, methodical, and will deliver a transparent outcome. If your requirements are well defined, and you follow the above advice, you will land on the right choice for your organisation.
And remember
The implementation of new technology is the ultimate nexus of people, process, and technology. It is at this nexus you will learn that people & process eat technology for breakfast. As hard as it is to successfully navigate your way to selecting and purchasing new technology; it is only then that the hard work truly begins.
With apologies to Mike Fleiss, and Peter Drucker
Andrew brings nearly 20 years experience in Data & Technology in large corporate settings across the industries of Health Services, Insurance, Financial Services, and Utilities. He is a strategic thinker, and is passionate about delivering value through improved data management practices with an emphasis on automation and artificial intelligence. He enjoys mentoring, and building strong teams.
With over 10 years experience in Data Management & Data Governance, Andrew is a Master CDMP (Certified Data Management Professional) working across Data Strategy, Data Quality, Data Analytics, Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, Risk Management, Reference & Master Data Management, Data Ethics, and Content & Records Management.
Andrew lives in Tasmania with his family and regularly travels to Melbourne & Sydney for work.
