Some Thoughts on Developing Purchase Requirements (for IT Purchases)

You have a business problem that requires some sort of software to solve. There are a number of potential products on the market, but which of them best matches your current and future needs? To successfully solve this problem you first need to define your purchase requirements, and then find the product that best matches those requirements.


Thus your immediate problem is how to develop your purchase requirements. To help describe this requirements development process, I'm going to frame this article around a cloud service purchase. Specifically I'm thinking of software that will be used internally, as opposed to software that will be used by your organization's customers. Examples of this type of internal software are systems for accounting, ERP, a help desk, project management, etc. Note that this requirements development process could just as easily apply to purchasing in-house software, hardware, other services, or any combination of those. A phone system is a good example of a purchase that combines hardware, software, and services.


There are potentially many products on the market that could work, but the question on your mind is this: Which product most closely matches my requirements? How do I find that product? Bear in mind the first order needs for users of these products are often very similar; it is the second order needs that vary significantly between organizations, and they can make or break the purchase.


To answer that question of which product most closely matches your requirements, you need to effectively develop or gather your purchase requirements. But before we get into gathering the requirements themselves, we need a "requirements framework". A list of requirements by itself is of limited use. You also need to know information behind each requirement, basically why it exists, and who it matters to.


Typically you can manage this information on a spreadsheet, and I have found the following columns to be useful:

• Requirement Name - a short, descriptive name for the requirement. Used to refer to the requirement in other documentation.
• Requirement Description - This expands on the requirement name, and is a detailed description of what the requirement is. Write it in such a manner that a potential product vendor would understand exactly what you wanted when reading the description.
• Who wants the requirement - This is a list of those people who want the requirement. It should also include their title or job function.
• Requirement Reason - This is an extremely important field, and explains why the people above want the requirement.
• Requirement Importance - See below for more details on the Requirements Importance column.

Requirements Importance
This is a measure of how important the requirement is to the people who want that requirement. Usually it is best to have words that describe requirement importance, along with an explanation of what those words mean. You can also attach a numerical rating to each importance, e.g. the numbers 0 - 6 in the example below (more on using these numbers in a future post).

Requirement Groups

It is useful to group related requirements in your list, e.g. all security requirements can go in a group called “Security”, reporting requirements can be collected under “Reporting and Analysis” etc. See below for an example of requirement groups from a help desk evaluation.

This sums up a useful framework for managing the purchase requirements you are about to collect before making a significant IT purchase decision. In my next blog article I will discuss a technique for creating a list of requirements that includes finding those requirements you don’t even know you need.

User help in MS Office

A few weeks ago I upgraded to MS Office 2010. In general Microsoft has done a pretty good job with the 2010 release of office. But one thing remains a problem, namely the help engine. In fact, it turns out that if you ask your search question on Google, you get MUCH better results than going through the Office help system.

Online help is a problem with many products; but it is a little unexpected that Google serves up significantly better results that the native tool. It just shows the power of the community. I have long though that all application help systems should be collaborative (and moderated to remove the inevitable trash that collects). You might call it a "crowd sourced" model for  help. But by collecting and harnessing input from real users, the quality of the application help will rapidly improve for the benefit of all users.

Backup software for the home: A review of Mozy

I consider myself to be an IT professional after spending most of my career in IT. A while ago I realized that my backup strategy on my own home PC was not very professional. Much like security, backup is a layered approach, designed to reduce risk. This means you should not just stop at one backup solution. I have a Seagate USB backup drive, but the problem is that if there is something like a house fire, you can lose your backups. Since we keep all our family videos and photos on the PC, the thought of losing all of that in a house fire was just too painful to bear. After some research, I signed up with Mozy in June 08. One of the appeals of Mozy was the unlimited personal backups for just $5 per month because I have over 800 GB of data.

Fast forward about 2 years. A few months ago my XP home computer required rebuilding because it was the easiest way to resolve problems that had developed. It was also an opportunity to increase the size of the hard disk. Also, although I had two backups, the most prudent approach was to buy a new hard drive, and not reformat the old one. Then the unexpected happened – first the Seagate drive demanded that I create new partitions. It has lost all my data! No idea why this happened, but nothing I could do would get my data back. Then when I set up Mozy on the new hard drive, about 75% of my files seemed to have vanished. Although Mozy’s documentation makes moving your Mozy account to a new PC look simple, it really isn’t. In my case, the old hard drive was installed as a 3^rd drive on the PC, and I was able to copy all the files across to the new drive, and no files were lost. And when Mozy was doing the initial backup of the new hard drive, it found most of these files on the Mozy system. Perhaps they were not lost after all, but they certainly weren’t visible in the recovery pane. My suggestion is that if you are moving Mozy from one system to another; do not delete the old system in Mozy. Rather create a new system on Mozy, and only once you have all your files on the new system, delete the old one from Mozy. It will cost you $5 per month extra, but at least you won’t lose any data. While prudence had paid off (i.e not reformatting the old drive), it was a bit sobering to think that both backups had failed.

Web site legal and usability problems

My eldest is in college, and today she asked me to purchase an online textbook from cengagebrain.com. There were several interesting things about this site...

1. At the bottom of the purchasing page there was a link to their terms and conditions - all 8188 words of it! That works out to 260 words per dollar spent. Can you believe it - having to study an 8188 word purchase contract before you buy a digital textbook? Something is not quite right here, especially when the first assignment was due at midnight tomorrow.
2. The last term on the contract stated that they had the right to deny you access to your account at their sole discretion for any reason what so ever. Wow - so I am paying for this access, and if they are in a bad mood tomorrow, they can just turn off my access. I have no recourse at all.
3. Paying for the text book required my credit cards. When entering the credit card number I had to take care to strip out all spaces and dashes - enter numbers only. This is a pet usability peeve of mine - it doesn't take much JavaScript to strip those things out, but no, you the user, must do the work. But if you type one of those 16 digits incorrectly and there are no spaces in the 16 numbers, it can be difficult to find the error. I am never sure if this is just poor UI design, or lazy programmers, but you so often see it on web sites. My rule of thumb is that if the system can do the work, the then user should not have to do it.
4. The credit card expiry date month defaulted to August, but my expiry month for this card is earlier in the year. So when I changed the month I got an error, because the expiry date was now earlier than today (I had not yet set the year field). But the year field is to the right of the month field; naturally you enter the month first. This is an example of poor web site design, but something that can so easily slip past the people developing the web site, and their quality department. These sort of things really take away for the "quality" of the user experience.

It was quite interesting to come up with so many problems with so little interaction on a web site. This is a good example of why work flow, web site & software development really are so hard to get right.

A little on Evernote indexing from images

I have been using Evernote since about March '09, and have found it to work well (4499 notes as of today). I have always known they analyze images and extract the text in the background to index it, but never had occasion to make use of that until yesterday.

While searching for a particular person's name, I saw that Evernote found it on a screen shot that had been pasted into a note. Now that was impressive, because it was an image of the name; there was no actual text there. Evernote recognized the text and indexed it; in fact the text was even highlighted in the image when I searched for the name.

I also use Evernote to store images of all the business cards I get, rather than leaving the cards in a pile in a drawer. Along with the image of the card I usually a few words about the person and why I have their business card. Now I know that Evernote can find all those names in the business cards. Taking the idea a bit further, if you take a photo of a meeting room whiteboard, Evenote will analyze and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the text, and then index it.

All of this takes Evernote's usefulness up a notch!

Blog move

For some months technical problems have prevented me from posting on my blog; and a lack of time prevented me from fixing them. I have been thinking of using a SaaS (Software as a Service) approach for hosting this blog for quite a while, and these problems pushed me over the edge. After looking at the possibilities available, Google seemed an excellent choice.

I must say I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well Google's Blogger just works.  One example is "After the jump summaries". This is a feature which allows you to create expandable post summaries in your blog posts, so longer posts appear as an intro with a link to "Read More".

There are a few formatting issues that I need to resolve, but that will come later.Once all the articles are moved, I will point the blog's URL over here. The articles will keep their original dates, and if possible I will try to keep the original URLs. Unfortunately the comments probably won't make it across. Once the blog is in its new home it should be significantly easier to maintain, which means I should add articles more regularly again.

Managing information in your personal and professional life

While all of us suffer from an information overload, how we deal with that information is often what separates us on a professional level. This blog entry is a review of my experiences managing this information, leading up to Evernote, a product that works well in practice.

Here at work we are slowly implementing a records management policy, and a probable outcome is that we will be unable to keep email older than one year. As an IT professional this has implications, because my email is full of useful information that I want to keep. After discussing this at length with our records manager, I came to the conclusion that I really need some sort of "personal information manager". In about March 2009 I discovered Evernote, an online service.