Profiling Your Project: Technology
In the 6th chapter of our Healthy Digital Procurement series, Vesa Palmu and Steve Parks discuss how to begin selecting a technology…
(You can view the Introduction, or the previous chapter, Chapter 5: Profiling Your Project: Vendors. Follow us on Twitter, or signup for our newsletter to be notified of future posts in the series.)
In some cases your technology may already be chosen for you because your organisation is standardising on something. For cases where it’s not you should start by selecting one. If you don’t you’ll often end up in a situation where you would like to pick vendor A offering technology B but use technology A offered by vendor B.
Changing a vendor can be relatively straight forward in a well run project, but changing the technology is always expensive. You want to make sure the technology you choose has multiple viable vendors. This is why we recommend starting with the technology selection or at least limiting the allowed technologies.
There are four primary families of web technologies:
1. Software as a service (SaaS). This is a product you simply use and don’t have to worry about the technology, but on the other had you have fairly limited access to modify it. For digital projects SaaS mostly works for simple marketing sites or standard applications like stand alone eCommerce. At the moment SaaS is usually used pretty much exclusively for small and medium web projects.
Examples: Squarespace, The Grid, Wordpress.com, Drupal Gardens
2. Products. Content management systems (CMS) or for example eCommerce or eLearning products. They are the Microsoft Word of the web, very good for basic needs, not all that great for advanced workflows and difficult to customise. A good quality CMS product can be a great match for a small to medium marketing site.
Examples: Sitecore, Wordpress, Joomla, Typo3
3. Platforms. These are typically used to quickly create a custom CMS. They offer plenty of functionality out-of-the-box and always require some customisation to get the full benefits. Platforms are especially good as a standard for all web activities of a large organisations because of their high productivity and versality. Typical projects for platforms are medium to large.
Examples: Drupal, Sharepoint, Adobe Experience Manager
4. Frameworks. Everything is created in an efficient coding environment with frameworks. Frameworks are great for large projects requiring highly custom functionality or for projects where a new revision of the project is launched live every day. Typical use cases for frameworks are online products with rapidly evolving business concept, this makes them especially popular with startups.
Examples: Django, Ruby on Rails, Symfony
It’s a good idea to start by choosing the right category for your projects. This will drastically limit the number of technologies you have to chose from.
Getting to understand each technology
* What kind of customers typically end up with this technology?
* Can you see any similar concepts online?
* Try contacting some of the references of a technology, ask them what’s their experience on it
Other things to consider
* What’s the expected cost of the technology: Licenses, typical project costs, annual maintenance
* How widely used the technology is globally, more adoption typically translates to better future proofness
* Are there local vendors available that know the technology?
How to get to know the technology
* Read sites, blogs and case studies about the technology
* Visit events for this technology
* Talk to multiple vendors offering this technology
After all of this you should be ready to decide.
Articles in this series will be published twice a week in June and July 2015.
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