A bluffer’s guide to incisive IT supplier evaluations

How to cut through geek-speak to unmask a supplier’s viability.

Ask the right question and a prospective technology supplier will reveal wonderfully useful information to help you in your evaluation. While merchant’s can feel intimidated by acronyms and jargon, you *can* talk tech about the product you’re thinking about buying. The secret is to ask qualitative questions, then follow the scent of evasion and pride. That’s because it’s often not just about the technology.

Most importantly, reflect on the fact that the more critical the supplier’s role in your operations, the greater the scrutiny you need to apply to the supplier itself -  the actual company. Products matter, software features matter, technology “stacks” sort of matter — but they evolve at a pace few of us are likely to totally understand. Trust your supplier to *really* understand. Through evaluating its technology, you can lead your supplier to demonstrate whether the company itself deserves your trust and investment.

Here’s an example:
A multi-channel merchant in search of a new ecommerce platform asked our evaluation of the search engine friendliness of a supplier’s URL’s or links. “They end in .asp. Is that OK?” Our question in reply, having nothing to do with SEO, sought to reveal the product’s technology foundations: “Why not end URL’s with .aspx?”  The intent of asking this is not to make a value judgement on the technology per se, but to give us an opening to explore the product’s evolution and infer the company’s health.

(We also answered the SEO question, too: Yes, .asp URL’s can assist your SEO efforts providing they resemble an English sentence, containing relevant keywords separated by hyphens, and in a “readable” style.

Let’s explore this example further: If a supplier’s product still relies on Microsoft’s old-style Active Server Pages, which a .asp file extension implies, then its notable that the product isn’t yet upgraded to the .NET framework. That matters because .NET is integral to Microsoft’s technology strategy — released circa 2002.

Seven years ago? Ah, so there’s a legacy flavor to this supplier’s product! There may be a perfectly good explanation for the supplier holding back. Ask for it. Maybe they’re not profitable enough to make the necessary investment. Or don’t think they have to bother given past success and present busyness. Or they won’t explain either way, being evasive. And maybe that’s because the founding partners split, and the remaining partner lacks expertise in managing technical operations and so he outsources its “maintenance” to India, and the software hardly evolves anymore.

All very interesting. But what, if you don’t know the difference between .asp and .aspx! How would you ever spot a vulnerability like that?

Even if tech acronyms are like Greek to you; still you can learn from this exchange. Ask leading questions, appealing to the supplier’s aspirations for its own product. People love to talk about their ‘babies’. Ask for qualitative descriptions. Prompt the supplier to describe what they’re proud of; they do have something to be proud of, yes? Pride’s important.

Suppliers also know what’s old and crusty about their product; give them a chance to describe all the great improvements they have planned. Ask why it matters to them. Sniff for evasion. Then read between the lines. Listen. Sometimes say nothing. Grunt and nod a bit.

Regardless of your comfort level with technology, remember that any question you ask will be more useful if it can’t be answered with a yes or a no. Your most effective questions will be those that can’t be answered with a definitive, factual response. Factual questions are less useful because we’re assuming you don’t know enough to evaluate the technical decision-making that drives a product’s evolution. “What’s the technology behind your product?” might serve to open the conversation, but does it mean anything to you if the answer is .php or .asp or .jsp?

Probably not. But you can learn to follow a scent. What sounds evasive? When do you hear pride? Explore this with multiple points of contact within the supplier’s company. Trust where it leads you, and keep asking why. In the end, you’ll be better informed when it comes to the biggest decision:  can you trust the company?

Cheat Sheet

Qualitative, leading questions you can ask a prospective supplier about its technology product without speaking geek:

1. Why is that important?
2. How does that help you serve me better?
3. What’s exciting about that to you?
4. Which part of it are you proud of?
5. How would you improve / upgrade that if you could?
6. Why haven’t you done it already?
9. When did you last do something like that?
7. What part draws the most support questions?
8. Why do you think that is?
10. What else?

About the authors:

Patrick Pitman, CEO of E-business Coach,
implemented his first ecommerce site in 1996.

Murray Kenneth has been a multi-channel merchant since 1998 and currently offers advice and
investment to growing merchants.

Article licensed for publication with Creative Commons “Attribution” terms.

First published in Catalogue & e-Business, June 2009

Image by mcsandstrom

Tags: IT Systems