solution review
Today's strategic and most successful suppliers have certainly evolved from product to solution focussed sales activities.  Arguably with a reasonable network of colleagues and peers it was easier to review a product and therefore a potentially commoditized sales proposal, when compared with today's more encompassing enterprise wide strategic solution proposals.  Therefore this has generated an increased reliance upon market research form Industry Analysts, but as a supplier has a bias toward their products, Industry Analysts don't necessarily have up-to-date implementation and delivery skills...

At Value-4IT we "walk the walk" as well as "talk the talk" and we find this is the only way we can have visibility for end-to-end solution delivery competence, from the embryonic stages of project initiation via business requirements definition to project fulfilment via implementation and management activities.  Therefore it's not unusual for our client base to first engage us for reviewing solution designs, both from a business and technical resource viewpoint.  Typically the costs associated with such activities are minimal, as Value-4IT offer guidance, mentoring and quality assurance reviews, therefore providing cost efficient, unbiased and timely input, as and when required.

Ultimately most business models have been in operation for many years if not decades; so which came first, the business model or the IT solution?  Clearly this is not a rhetorical question and so the business requirements are the primary driver for all IT initiatives.  Therefore it follows that any IT solution implemented should always meet business requirements, which from an IT supplier viewpoint, might sometimes be difficult, but if their prospective client doesn't highlight or reinforce such requirements; well, the rest as they say is history!  Clearly initiatives and methodologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provide functionality to maintain legacy applications while deploying the latest platforms and programming techniques, but let's safeguard that we never lose sight of the fundamental underlying business model!

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Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

There's an assumption by many partners that no matter what happens to their business, they'll be partners forever.

David Gibbs