Nine Questions Your Potential Technology Partner Should Ask You - (Part 2)

This is Part Two of a two-part post.

In our previous post, we talked about the initial questions a potential service provider should be asking you to find out more about your company and business. These questions cover your business plan, customers, products and services, competitors, and partners. This next set of questions helps evaluate the best tools that you will find useful while allowing you to focus on solving your business problems.

6. What software or online programs are you using regularly in the business and how closely should the existing and new tools work together? Typically, as business owners add new tools to address growing business needs, they overlook how the new tools will work with the old tools. After several years, owners may have a collection of powerful tools that work great by themselves, but may cause massive headaches when trying to use them together to run the business. The most common problem is that data from one program is not easily accessible or does not transfer well from one program to another. Getting programs to either work off the same set of data or communicate automatically with each other is called program integration. While this work can prove the most expensive, you should compare the short-term cost of integration work against the long-term, ongoing cost of constantly moving data manually between programs, or worse, manually re-entering the information into multiple products. Even a simple data transfer solution that helps prevent data-re-entry errors can save against potential lost sales from bad data.

7. What is working and not working about your current solution(s)? Before jumping into a new solution, the potential technology provider should understand, not only what is not working, in order to address those issues, but also what is working in order to preserve or even enhance those aspects. A worse case scenario is for the new technology to work well, but to break what was previously working fine in other areas. Investments should leap your business forward, and remove any drags on productivity.

8. What are your goals for this new work? Ideally, the answer to this question can also provide some insight into measuring success. If necessary, your potential technology provider can work with you to articulate your goals as measureable in order to determine, not only success of the project to your satisfaction, but also the ongoing value of the new tools. Measurable goals will help you evaluate success and make changes if necessary. Don’t forget to include these new goals in your next business plan review.

9. What is the technology skill level and time availability of the primary operator of the new technology solutions? Dig deep and be realistic when answering this question. There are many tools that provide relatively easy-to-use interfaces, similar to familiar tools like your word processor or spreadsheet program. Some solutions, however, may require additional technical and business understanding beyond the simple point-and-click of navigating a website. Time availability poses the biggest challenge. For example, if you want a website that allows you to post new press releases for your new products, simple tools are available. If you don’t have the time to enter the new press releases to the website, then it’s a nice feature without a return on investment. A good technology provider will help you match the correct solution to the skill level and time availability of the staff person assigned to use it.

Any good service partner should provide you with an estimate that outlines in some detail the work they expect to complete. If you don’t understand the terminology used in the estimate, make sure they explain the work thoroughly.

Be clear about your business priorities so that you can help the potential partner focus on the most important parts of the solution first. And don’t be afraid to ask for a step-wise approach to completing the work, especially if you need to distribute the cost over a period of time.
As a final step, you should determine if the potential technology partner takes the time to explain everything in terms that make sense to you and your business. If the company or its representatives try to construct a wall between what you do and what they do, then you may wonder how well the new solution will reflect the image you want to project, and your ability to effectively leverage the new tools. If you want to ensure a better partnership, listen for questions like these before you agree to sign any agreement.