How do you cost justify a tool like G-TEA Data Programme Delivery

The hardest enterprise tools to cost justify are ones that delivery a longer term benefit...

We all want to work more efficiently, and in most enterprises, having the right tooling in place is key to this goal. You wouldn't attempt to dig a road with a spoon...so why do so many enterprises have a problem with cost justifying and adopting enterprise tooling?

It's never worked for us before!

This can be for many reasons, but most likely it is because the use cases for the tools are not understood, weak or misguided. All tools must fit a purpose and have a mandate that is large enough to make the cost of adoption irrelevant at some future point.

The choice of the tool should be the last step in that process of evaluation.

When the wrong tool is implemented [or the right tool for the wrong reasons!], it provides very little ROI and quickly becomes redundant.

The right tools for the right reasons very quickly embed and start providing returns.

The tool doesn't work for us because we're different.

All enterprises are different, this is not a problem for the buyer, more a problem for the tool designers and vendors themselves.

Most of the issues here are not about features, but more about the lack of support for the people, roles, structures and activities of an enterprise. Many tools are great in a single user context, but loose the plot when applied to an enterprise.

Keeping it up to date is not possible for us.

Well, this can be a valid criticism of the tools currently in the market place. The same scrutiny that we apply to business applications should be applied to enterprise tooling also. Tooling should seamlessly integrate with the enterprise and other tooling and processes.

Tooling that facilitates entry of information only once and provides accessibility in the right format to all people who need to view it and can share with other tooling....saves time and cost in the long run. This is the same for business systems.

Tools that operate as silos are generally only of benefit to the few and keeping them up to date becomes less useful to the enterprise as a whole.

The tool costs too much.

This is a key objection to all enterprise tooling because it's not generally directly funded by a profit generating business function, but lets break this down.

Good tooling leads to more coordinated processes. The benefits of improved processes are easy to describe. Less resources doing the same work for less cost with increased quality and consistency. This applies to business systems in the same way as to enterprise tooling.

You can justify all enterprise tooling against an equivalent FTE that would have been performing the activities that the tool replaces, makes simpler or more effective...year on year.

For example, project managers and their delivery teams spend a specific amount of time on planning, task management, status updates, reporting time bookings and progress on activities...compiling, reporting, waiting for feedback etc. Any tool that provides instant answers to those questions across the whole delivery function is clawing back project resources, costs and time from administration activities...every day. Less meetings, quicker deliveries and more consistent quality.

We get all our tooling from our framework supplier.

Agreed, this has clear economies of scale and nobody ever got sacked for choosing a global vendor!...but all large global vendors have weaknesses and strengths in their tooling portfolio. Adopting a weak product is counter-productive, it becomes a weak link in your overall processes.

There are other options out there that provide a better fit, smaller niche companies and competition will improve the quality of enterprise tooling in the long run and reduce prices!

This also promotes innovation and evolution, the things that smaller companies are much quicker at than global ones.

How does G-TEA Data Programme Delivery compare?

G-TEA Data Architect is a SaaS cloud based application, therefore it is licensed by an enterprise wide monthly subscription. The monthly cost of this single subscription is roughly equivalent to the cost of an external IT Contractor...therefore 1 externally sourced FTE. So, if the tool provides coordination benefits equal to the cost of one FTE across all your data architecture delivery activities...it pays for itself.