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I came across this essay, Commentary: Proof of Concept, by Barney Finucane in Nigel Pendse’s OLAP Report. While I fully agree with Finucane, it’s no easy matter to get vendors to agree to a Proof of Concept test, as I described in this space a few months ago. I referred to this as a matter of due diligence, which is a little more broad in scope than proof of concept. The thing is, SMB customers don’t have the resources to buy one of every BI product the way some of the big boys do on a regular basis, so demonstrating the fitness of a product for its intended use with the customer’s own data seems like a no-brainer.
If you are reading this, you are either a customer, a vendor, or a facilitating consultant.
Customers see the logic of “try before you buy”. No further discussion necessary.
Vendors have a different viewpoint. A POC exercise costs money, and that cost won’t be recovered if the customer doesn’t buy. Besides, the vendor may be able to point to a review by the Gartner Group and a list of big name customers and say “Doesn’t that prove the concept?” My answer is one size doesn’t fit all, and the vendor should take advantage of the opportunity to evaluate the customer the same way the customer is evaluating his product. View it as a cost of doing business.
Consultants, too, should be evaluating both the product and the customer. A consultant who is very familiar with an established product can be like a kid with a new hammer, seeing everything as a nail. You want to give the best service to the customer. You’ve had good results with this product. This is the product for this customer. That’s not good service. You need to look at each product in relation to competing products for this customer, because you may be in for a surprise. In the course of a POC, the customer may well ask for something unexpected. How does your favorite product deliver it? Does a competing product do it better?
And how well does the customer (the actual users) take to the product? Does it compare favorably with their experience of other products? Does it fire up their imagination? Are they excited to implement a full installation? If not, the project is not likely to be a total success.
As I have stated before, proof of concept (or custom demos) used to be commonplace. They are not any more. I think we need to bring them back. It just seems like intelligent business.
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