That seems to be a pattern!

13Oct11

I recently was asked by a consultant to assess a game plan to roll out a an alternate web based data collection system, one of those 3 letter acronym systems. The existing system was in use by only 15% of the staff for the past 2 years. Management has determined that they should move away from this system as they are tired of paying a couple grand per month for the per user SAAS rental fees. The proposed system has roughly 25% of the features of the existing provider, although it does have 1 key feature the original provider lacks. The new system cost half as much as the current system per month. The customer is willing to do anything to get away from their existing vendor, including exporting and importing the data twice, once to get on to the new semi-lame system and secondly to a system they can grow with over time.

The problem is the new system is doomed to fail, just as the implementation of the previous system did. Why? Because of lack of management commitment to the system, management falsely believed that merely signing up for the system was enough for them to do, and that their staff would simply use it because it was available.