More Comments on Our Laboratory Informatics Market, Change, and Project Size/Failure

Yesterday, I happened to bring up the topic of the bloated “cast of thousands” projects that bring on every warm body they can find and have each of them do some small amount of work, spending quite a lot of money for a slow and slight outcome. Also, several days ago, there was a discussion about our laboratory informatics market and the issue of “change.” Today, I’d like to make a few more comments on this.

As it happens, I do end up talking to a number of software vendors and services vendors, which gives me an opportunity to keep-up with what’s going on in our market regarding project size. It dawned on me that, in the past six months, I’ve had two entirely different conversations regarding the trends in project sizes. One software vendor was proudly telling me about his company’s strategy to keep costs down on services for customers by finding ways to reduce the amount of services used on projects and that the services for their implementations was decreasing. Yet another software vendor was telling me just the opposite -- that their company’s projects were getting larger all the time, and I got the impression that he sounded quite proud of that.

Going back to the conversation of several days ago, where the topic came up of change in our industry and how the market drives that, my statement would be this: our market must not be driven to save costs if projects continue to grow in size. With that, I’ll add that we continue to see money wasted on failed, bloated projects. On top of that, I keep hearing the that a number of projects accept the idea that the first round of the project is meant to be a learning experience where it’s all planned to be wasted.

Project Size/Failure Factors
Here are the factors I see as instrumental to project size and sometimes failure in our industry (large projects don’t have to fail but projects that start to bloat are on their way to failure):

1. The Software: When a piece of software needs more services or fewer services, the implementations that are done with regard to that software will reflect that.
2. The Services: Whoever is providing the services does have some control over the amount of services provided. For those companies that are looking to make as much as they can from each implementation and to place as many warm bodies as they have available, that will drive up the implementation costs, and that’s true whether the services provider is the software vendor or an independent provider. When services companies take the “let’s make as much money as we can approach,” they’ll succeed in doing that.
3. The Customer: Customers who are concerned with costs will go with the implementation strategy that saves them money and those that aren’t, won’t. Customers work to drive what’s available in our market. Those companies that don’t provide what customers will buy go out of business – plain and simple. So, whatever the trends are is what customers are actually willing to pay for

At a recent conference, I ran into the Gartner group who was doing a survey on whether customers are trending toward using more strategic service providers versus those service providers that provide a single service. Considering that providing a “strategic” package is an opportunity to bundle in multiple services. I have a feeling that “strategic” will become the next meaningless buzzword regarding services sales as an excuse to sell more. I hope you’ve all stopped using the buzzphrase “best practices” by now, but I guess the time is ripe for the next buzzword/buzzphrase.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/