The process of providing our customers with solutions that will solve their business problems also means that we have to select the most appropriate building blocks to create these solutions. Over the years we have identified best breed of products that we use as building blocks for our solutions.

The following key criteria guides us in our selection process:

Open Standards Support

The product or component must support open standards. If a product or solution cannot pass this test, it is approached with caution. In many cases we may opt to rather develop our own software that will adhere to open standards if we are unable to source a product component that support open standards. By supporting open standards the software will have a very high level of interoperability with other software components.

Cross-platform Support

It is a complete myth that a single vendor platform makes any business sense whatsoever. The only outcome of a single vendor platform is vendor lock-in and that will always result in a higher cost of ownership as you limit your freedom of choice. Any CIO that limits an organisation's ability to choose the best solution for the organisation by narrowing it down to only a specific vendor platform risks the performance of the entire organisation by placing these technological boundaries on the business.

Business will and must dictate the requirements and the IT department must deliver the best and most appropriate solution irrespective of the technology. If the IT department does not have the skills available to support the new requirement, it is no excuse to hold the business hostage because the IT department cannot support new technology. An IT department must be dynamic and flexible - and keep up to date with new trends and technologies to ensure that they have the same agility that is expected from the rest of the organisation.

Return on Investment (ROI)

This term is probably the most overused and abused phrase in the Information Technology industry. What does it actually mean? Is there really an ROI on so many of the products that so many companies invest in? We believe that there are some solutions and products that can deliver a real and measurable return on investment

Implementation of a document management solution is a typical example - it very simply saves days and weeks that staff normally take to search for documents, that is an immediate return on investment. Implementation of a Business Process Management solution delivers immediately by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of an organisation, most return on investment is measurable within three months.

However, do not be fooled about this. If you for example migrate from one messaging platform to another, you will have 0% return on investment. Migrating from GroupWise to Exchange will provide 0% return on investment as you still have the same functionality and even less after such a migration. The benefit to the business does not exist. Most of the time when organisations consolidate all their platforms to a single vendor platform the migration costs will be huge and will be disruptive to the users, affecting productivity. The post-migration syndrome then develops where the IT department very often realises that in fact very little has improved, resulting in an absolute denial of the existence of other and more mature technologies.

Vendor Selection

Apart from being a software vendor ourselves, NetCB has partnered with a few selected software vendors to provide these additional building blocks that we use to provide our customers with solutions that will address their business issues. These vendors that we have partnered with have the same philosophy with regards to building business solutions using software components that will prevent customers from becoming vendor locked-in. The moment you loose that freedom of choice you may end up costing your organisation millions without providing a real and measurable return on investment.

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