Different strokes

When MIT recently looked to buy business intelligence software, CIO Jerry Grochow resisted advice to do a very detailed analysis of the many potential vendors and their BI offerings. Instead, he just picked Hyperion Solutions Corp. "We had some people around MIT who had used Hyperion elsewhere, and they were very satisfied with it. And it was clearly one of the market leaders," he says.

MIT limited its risk by bringing in the BI product for a "quick prototype," Grochow says. "Rather than spending $20,000 on analysis of the feature sets of alternatives, I said, 'Let's bring one in and spend $20,000 to do something with it.' We learned more by doing that."

Still, Grochow acknowledges that such a rapid-fire "try it then buy it" approach is not always possible or appropriate. MIT will soon spend up to nine months and $500,000 evaluating student information systems -- about as mission-critical as IT gets on campus. "Other schools have spent $30 million to $40 million on them, so we are going to go through a significant study, lots of review of alternatives, detailed visits to other places that are using them and so on," Grochow says.

ING Group NV has offices and CIOs all over the world, and the CIOs sometimes come to Raymond Karrenbauer, group chief architect, for help with their IT purchases. He says doing in-depth analyses of alternatives is common practice in the European and Asian business units. "They spend time very diligently looking at accuracy, predictability, all the features and requirements, until they have a near-perfect set of details," he says. Then the buying decision must be approved at multiple levels in the company.