But North American companies are more likely to apply the "Colin Powell" philosophy to IT buys. The former secretary of state, according to Karrenbauer, "used to say that as long as he had 70% of the data, that's good enough to make a decision and just move forward." The difference reflects a U.S. business culture of moving very quickly, but both paths work well for their respective regions, he says.

Karrenbauer says he can select vendors and products quickly because of the homework he does beforehand. He starts with an internal system architecture for the corporation that factors in business requirements and forecasted needs. The resulting framework of business needs against architectural standards makes the actual product selection pretty straightforward, he says. Certain vendor "footprints" will be readily seen as good fits, while others obviously are not, he says.

Dennis L'Hereux, CIO at Rockford Health System in Rockford, Ill., says his company has gone from a philosophy adopted more than 10 years ago of buying best-of-breed products for each function to one in which preference is given to buying suites of integrated products from just a few vendors. Best-of-breed products are likely to better address the needs in question, but they often require the use of integration tools, "and that requires a lot of effort," he says.

For example, when L'Hereux recently looked for a medication safety software package, he considered just the four offerings from preferred vendors, not the 15 to 20 that were available. But those four contenders each received a detailed evaluation.

Managing expectations