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What your customer wants
What are your IT investment priorities right now?
SS: We will be implementing and replacing several risk management systems, a data warehouse and comprehensive system for our financial market division. We are also replacing our internet banking platform and upgrading our trade finance system.
AH: Our priority is bringing internal processes to a higher and more stable level. Also, we are adopting a virtualised environment approach that will provide the business with the agility, sustainability, continuity and capacity required.
AM: Today, my priority is mainly business intelligence. This is a natural progression for us because we installed SAP two years ago. We are staying with SAP and looking at Business Objects. We have not really selected a product, but we are looking at the options that we have and at partners.
AB: Right now, we are investing in CRM. We should be able to finish by the end of this year and then wireless activities will be a priority. We are also doing lots of other things like increasing the storage area network capacity because we want to give services to tenants. We are also doing document management for the entire company and to resell to the tenants.
PO: The biggest thing we are driving through right now is a total upgrade and redeployment of our ERP solutions and financial systems. Irrespective of what the economic climate is doing, I have to get that done, it is important to the business. There are also a lot of other ancillary upgrades that need to be done this year as well.
Are attractive payment terms a factor when selecting a partner?
SS: Not particularly. We select SIs based on a number of factors and payment terms are taken into account in the evaluation process.
AM: To be honest, payment terms are not usually a big deal for us as payment is usually made after the work is done. When it comes to IT, because you are really buying a service and it is complex, the quality of the work is more important than the payment terms.
PO: It is quite important that the vendor or systems integrator is realistic about payment plans. They may come up with a price tag like US$1m and they will want 50% up front. When a proposal comes in I like to see that the payment plan is somewhat milestone-based in terms of delivering a certain item on a project list and a payment associated with that. I’m fortunate in the way that my current systems integrator works. We sit down, discuss it and say, “This is what we can realistically do”, and then they work out what they can do for that.
AB: Right now, we have our own standard and we go that way, we haven’t changed because of the economic crisis. That standard is that as soon as the provider has delivered the equipment they get so much, and so forth. It depends on the contract and the project. If the project is a majority hardware delivery, the payment is going to be a lot faster.
AH: Payment plans carry less weight to my organisation than the sustainability of the provider and their ability to match the required level of service and service agility.
On another note, the vendor’s ability to match the new imposed business rules that have come as a result of the current climate would foster a reliability alliance that would carry the relationship beyond the financial crisis.
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