Off-The-Shelf IT Solutions

A practitioner's guide to selection and procurement

By (author) Martin Tate

Publication date:

17 March 2015

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

Dimensions:

244x170mm
7x10"

ISBN-13: 9781780172583

This practical book presents a proven decision-making process to help IT and business managers select the off-the-shelf software product that best fits the needs of their organisation, whether in the commercial or public sector. Offering a structured approach to managing stakeholders, requirements and candidate IT vendors, this practical 'how-to' guide will help deliver a rigorous, defensible decision within an aggressive timescale.

Introduction - purpose and principles

1 Introduction to off-the-shelf solutions

2 Talent management - supplier psychology

3 Initiation - shaping and authorising the project

4 Requirements analysis - capturing the organisationalneeds

5 Requirements document - documenting and agreeingrequirements

6 Trawling the marketplace - establishing the longlist

7 Assessing longlist candidates - selecting the shortlistusing the RFI

8 Detailed evaluation - assessing the shortlistedcandidates

9 Scoring - establishing degree of fit and ranking

10 Demonstrations - proving the best fit

11 Reference sites - real customer feedback

12 Contracts - negotiation and agreements

13 Implementation - preparing the ground

14 Viewpoints by theme

15 Concluding - recommendations and resources

Appendices

*OTSIS extras - available at http://www.decisionevaluation.co.uk/otsis-extras/

Martin is the guru of robust decision making. The process he describes in this book combines intuition with rigorous, transparent logic. Good choices are easy to explain, sell and defend whilst spurious bias is left with nowhere to hide.