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            Services for Organizations

            Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection

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              We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

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              Ventana On Demand

                Services for Technology Vendors

                We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

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                  Buyers Guide

                  Assessing and Evaluating Vendors and Products

                  Organizations are challenged to find authoritative information about technology vendors to help assess and evaluate vendors' products in how they manage and use enterprise software. Our Buyers Guide evaluates vendors in an RFI-based approach and on the customer experience they could provide across their buyer's journey, to the management of their technology. It also evaluates the vendors' products across the experience they provide in a customer relationship and that of the products, management, and usage of the products in essential categories like usability, manageability, reliability, adaptability, and capability. Organizations looking for guidance and those needing to augment their existing resources and skills will find our services and research to be essential ingredient to their success.

                  About the Methodology

                  We offer our Buyers Guide as a research-based resource for technology buyers on vendors and their products. Our Buyer's Guide is designed to help decision-makers through our RFI / RFP-based approach to ensure an effective evaluation of vendors. Our carefully crafted and best practices-based methodology called the Value Index draws on our benchmark research that reflects organizations’ priorities.  The research guides organizations on how to assess vendors and how to avoid making a decision that will negatively impact their total cost of ownership and return on investment. The most important outcome will be the improvement seen in the productivity of their organization.

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                  Using the Buyers Guide

                  In our view, business improvement efforts should be based on best practices that research indicates deliver value quickly. Our Buyers Guide evaluates business systems and tools in accordance with that belief.

                  We advocate using the Buyers Guide as part of a structured approach that begins by incorporating these steps into an assessment program that will summarize and detail your initiative or project. Then using the Value Index methodology can ensure the choices you make are most effective. 

                  Technology-Driven Business Improvement Based Methodology

                  1. Assess the business case and goals

                  Assess the business case for investment. Define the mission of the business project: What does it do, why is it important, what outcome do you want to achieve and how will you measure the project’s success? The goals should be grounded in your organization’s strategy and plans and should make clear the expected outcomes.

                  2. Specify the project’s business requirements

                  What must be done to achieve these goals? Define the business requirements to help identify the specific capabilities that are required with respect to people, processes, information, and technology.

                  3. Identify the required roles and responsibilities

                  Assess and specify the individuals required for the project at every level of the organization, from executives to frontline workers, and describe how each will contribute.

                  4. Outline the project’s critical path

                  What needs to be done, in what order, and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan.

                  5. Develop the technology approach

                  Determine the technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Then develop the long list of potential vendors and products that best fit your needs.

                  6. Establish technology evaluation criteria

                  Define the business and technology criteria that you will use to evaluate vendors. We recommend using the criteria we have developed based on our benchmark research and used to build the Buyers Guide: usability, manageability, reliability, functionality, adaptability, validation, and TCO and ROI. This step will provide the tool you need to move a long list of vendors and products to a short list to evaluate for final selection.

                  7. Assess and evaluate the technology properly

                  Weight the seven categories of technology evaluation criteria to reflect your business’s priorities. Then evaluate the short list of vendors based on your business case and requirements and the technology evaluation criteria for your project. 

                  8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project

                  Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team who will plan and execute it. Have them begin by establishing a timeline and allocating resources.

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