Digital Earth Weblog

Today is the end of the financial year in Australia. This time of year is interesting for organisations that provide services to government clients. There is always work that must be done before the immovable deadline of 30 June. It is also a time when product vendors are looking for clients who still have money in their budget, and when clients don’t have time to evaluate those products properly.

Digital Earth Pty Ltd was one of those vendors. We benefited from end of financial year deals, several times. Some of the software was purchased with the best of intentions, but still sits on the shelf. No vendor likes to see their software go unused. It means no ongoing business relationship, and no happy customers to use as a reference. It just doesn’t sound good to say “Agency X bought our stuff but they haven’t used it”.

A few weeks ago I visited a client to help them evaluate some enterprise geospatial software. It was great to see a government agency taking the time to give competing solutions a thorough evaluation.

Government organisations often make major technology purchases near the end of the financial year, if they have money left in their budget. However, this is possibly the worst time to make such decisions. There is pressure to spend the money before the books close (“use it ot lose it”). Staff are often busy finishing off other projects, their real work. Nobody has time to do a thorough evaluation.

Doing a thorough evaluation takes a lot of effort. Due to the complexity of today’s enterprise environments the best way to do it is to run a pilot project:

• Install the software in your environment;
• Load it with realistic volumes of data;
• Do at least proof-of-concept integration with other systems;
• Train people how to use it and manage it;
• Use it for real world tasks;
• Load test all server applications;
• See what works, see what breaks;

You’ll be glad you did.