Technology is rapidly evolving. As companies adapt to the evolving landscape, they look to third-party vendors to carry out various processes and procedures. When evaluating software vendors in risk management, what should organizations take into consideration? Often, companies look to industry analysts and reports, such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant, for answers. This report uses just two dimensions to represent a vendor’s position in the market: 1) Ability to Execute and 2) Completeness of Vision. The question is, how are these dimensions interpreted?
To answer this question for myself, I did a Google search and came across this answer. “Ability to Execute” includes more measurable and objective aspects like Product/Service Offering, Company Overall Viability, Pricing, Responsiveness, and Track Record, Customer Experience and Operations. The second dimension, “Completeness of Vision,” defines factors that are not directly correlated to a customer’s success, but rather future strategy, including things like: Market Understanding, Marketing Strategy, Sales Strategy, Offering (Product) Strategy, Business Model, Vertical/Industry Strategy, Innovation, and Geographic Strategy.
Gartner’s “Ability to Execute” is objective, quantitative, verifiable and less subject to opinions, particularly those of non-customers. The objectivity of Gartner’s “Ability to Execute” allows you to compare and contrast vendors based on an unbiased third party definition. The information used to measure this dimension is based on actual customers’ success with the solution, their customer satisfaction, and usability of the product day to day. Customer success can be objectively determined across all vendors by tools and metrics like “Net Promoter Score (NPS)” and Gartner Peer Insights. Both of these measures come directly from customers of the vendor who are using the product to solve their real-world problems.
Although the Gartner “Completeness of Vision” dimension is more subjective than Gartner’s “Ability to Execute,” this dimension can be used as a valuable tool. For example, if you have niche location requirements, understanding a vendor’s geographic strategy may be useful.
One of the challenges with the “Completeness of Vision” factor is that what is considered “important” changes over time as the industry and market evolves. Industry analysts’ jobs are to see where the industry is headed and how it will address the needs of their client bases, which makes the criteria subjective and fluid over time. For example, until a few years ago, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) was preferred by many customers but considered less favorable to on-premise solutions by industry pundits, and as such resulted in a lower ranking on “Completeness of Vision.” Today however, Software-as-a-Service is considered vastly superior to on-premise and cloud hosted solutions and is favored by both customers and industry analysts for the time-to-value, flexibility, and total cost of ownership. Vendors with true vision and commitment to that vision pushed forward with huge infrastructure and business model investments years ago that are only now being recognized. Over the last three years the perception of “Completeness of Vision” has changed. It is important to identify which vendors truly align with your own company’s values and goals and ensure they are, in fact, relevant.
The “Ability to Execute” dimension empowers you to focus on your organization’s goals and is a measure of how effective the vendor is at helping their customers achieve their goals. Many companies have different approaches when it comes to satisfying their customers. At the end of the day, we believe that giving our customers the resources they need to be successful is what matters. We’re pretty biased, but this is why we’ve developed an innovative business model that prioritizes customers’ success. Often times, companies charge for professional services making the implementation process impossible without the use of these. At LogicManager, there are no professional service fees to slow down progress towards your goals. As a result, our organization is incentivized to create a product that is as easy to implement and use as possible. While this is our approach, it is important to find a process that works for your organization. The largest takeaway is that you find a vendor that helps to achieve your organization’s goals.
With a better idea of “Ability to Execute” in mind, you can take a closer look at reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant for risk management. With your company’s goals at the forefront of your own evaluation, you can better determine which vendor will do the same for you. You can examine, through an objective lens, which of the vendors has helped customers like you achieve success while maintaining a positive customer experience. Start evaluating your potential vendors today and download a complimentary copy of the2019 Gartner Integrated Risk Management Magic Quadrant and Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Risk Management.
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