P roviding our customers with solutions that provide answers to their business requirements means that we have to select the most appropriate Technology Partners to create these solutions. Over the years we have identified and continue to discover best breed of technologies that we use as building blocks when architecting our solutions.
When choosing a Technology Partner, NETCB uses the following criteria before a Technology is used as part of our solutions offering:
Open Standards Support
The Technology must closely follow and support open standards. Preference is also given to technologies that are Open Source. If a technology 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 at ransom 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.
Real 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 use specific 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.
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 a corporate messaging and scheduling system after such a migration. Rather spend the effort in enhancing and uprading your existing environment to the latest versions and have more funding available for better training and alignment to support the business requirements.
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 often realises that in fact very little has improved, resulting in an absolute denial of the existence of other and more advanced technologies that would have delivered real return on investment..
Partner Selection
Apart from being a software vendor ourselves, NETCB has partnered with selected software vendors to provide these additional building blocks that we use to architect solutions for our customers to solve their business requirements. 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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