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Suckered by a software vendor - how I did not follow my own advice and paid the price for it

I should have known better than to just buy software to address my own internal challenges in CS Interactive Training, says Louw Labuschagne, partner at CS Interactive Training.


Johannesburg, 22 Jul 2016

As a small training and consulting firm specialising in establishing and adapting best-practice methodologies for organisations, I should have known better than to just buy software to address my own internal challenges in CS Interactive Training, says Louw Labuschagne, partner at CS Interactive Training.

My nightmare started as we decided to broaden our training focus and not only address the enablement needs of corporates, but also to start focusing on individual professionals who might be working on a small team in large organisations, or heading up the ICT function in a smaller organisation, or who is an independent consultant or contractor that needs to have better insight in applying a toolbox of methodologies.

Although we have the processes, tools and people in place to provide the services to corporates, our shift in focus to provide services and training to individuals forced us to rethink our engagement model and especially the interaction with the student during the sign-up and service delivery phases, and we also had a challenge in accepting small payments.

In essence, we shifted our strategy, which impacted our capability model, business and ICT architectures, but I, like most managers (in small and large organisations), believed I understood the problem, and that it was not going to be a large or difficult project, so there was no need to complicate the environment by bringing in formal methodology. I reckoned that there must be thousands of other companies who had the exact same problem and the solution was out there, so I should just go and "Google" it.

The key requirement for us is the ability to transact with individuals who want to pay cash or by credit card or by bank deposit. So it was critical to find a payment engine with the ability described above. My search quickly revealed that Vendor X's payment engine was a great option, with integration into Vendor X's accounting system for invoicing and stock management, and Vendor X's online Web site builder and e-commerce cart that provide an integrated e-commerce engine.

Although we only really needed the payment gateway, it made sense to buy an "integrated" solution for small businesses. I was especially excited about the Vendor X CRM module that allowed for scheduling and management of training events, which is also linked to the accounting side. Although we had an established accounting and payroll system from a competitor, having an integrated solution from a single vendor made sense, because we would be dealing with a single contact person, single invoice and all the services are cloud-based, which makes it available from anywhere and also saves on infrastructure costs and maintenance.

So, I contacted the Vendor X team by e-mail and asked for a quote on accounting + payroll + payment engine + e-commerce web site + CRM. When I received the first response from the Vendor X accounting module marketing team that they could only assist me with the accounting side, and I would have to contact payroll directly, because they are actually another company, I should have known I was in trouble!

Just a short note here; I must admit I received friendly and timeous responses from the support and marketing team(s) from most of the Vendor X companies, and people were very sympathetic to my challenges, although they could not resolve them for me. The only exception is the CRM team, which, after several online requests, probably decided our company was too small to bother responding to our requests.

My "simple" solution to just find an integrated software package to solve my problem turned into a frustrating process, until I decided to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to salvage the situation. I surprised myself (I should probably not have said this out loud) by how easy it was to get back on track by just applying a bit of business architecture thinking. After struggling for two months to get traction on a project that I believed would not need to take more than a week or two, I started following the business/enterprise architecture approach we use in corporate environments, but adapted it for an SME organisation.

Using a business model canvas (done in a morning) linked with an open source modelling tool (Archi), we created models for the appropriate level of detail to guide us through the implementation and alignment of the software with our new way of doing business. We had a working solution two weeks later, and we can now track any changes to the environment. It is now also providing us with information we require for our SETA accreditation process. Saving us time on the new project.

Based on our experience, we created a 'business architecture for small teams' course, which runs as four morning workshops, one per month, from August to November. The idea is to share with other small to medium-size companies how easy it is to use business architecture to engage ICT companies and vendors, and how it can save you time and money when dealing with information-intensive projects.

The course is based on the flipped-classroom approach, where delegates are required to prepare for the workshops by reading the theory, and where we problem-solve and build actual content during the workshops.

For more information, visit the CS Interactive Training Web site: http://www.csinteractivetraining.com.

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Editorial contacts

Louw Labuschagne
CS Interactive Training
louw@csinteractivetraining.com