From this list, you should prepare and distribute a Request for Proposal (RFP).  The RFP will be far more inclusive and delineate your detailed requirements, process models, and use cases.  You'll be asking the vendor to rate themselves on the requirements, provide an initial solution proposal, and initial costs.  You'll want to allow a question and answer session with all vendors present to clarify any vagueness.  It is important to keep the selection process unbiased and hence we stress the "all vendors present" aspect.  Upon receiving the proposals, it is necessary to bring the Selection Team together again to review the proposals.  If at all possible, an attempt to eliminate more vendors is timely.  Upon determination of the final "short list" you'll want to schedule these vendors to complete detailed demonstrations including walking through the use cases with their systems.  We recommend providing each vendor up to 8 hours for this session.  While recognizing this is a tremendous time commitment, we discourage short-changing this step given the selected solution may be with your company for up to 10 years...

For the detailed demonstrations, it is essential to have all Selection Team members present and ensure they are quantifiably assessing the solutions.  The Selection Team members should be provided a copy of the requirements document so that they might adequately rate their satisfaction with the system functionality.  They should also be provided a rating document for the use case scenarios.  The vendor should be expected to demonstrate ALL use cases.  If they are unable to satisfy a requirement, you would be best to know it upfront.  We also clarify our expectation with the vendor that they NOT show us anything that is not generally available.  As the outcome of the detailed demonstrations, you should aggregate the scores for each vendor and determine a total score.  The total scores can then be ranked and prioritized against each other.

In the best case scenario, you'll have no more than three vendors that match your requirements relatively closely.  With these final vendors, you should now perform an even more detailed review and validate the out-of-box and detailed presentations.  The first step is to send the IT team to the vendor's development facilities to review the technology, development methodology, and  development environment.  Your goal is to ensure that the technology has a stable infrastructure.  The second step is to observe the solution working for other similar customers.  Be very clear as to the type of customer you want to visit and exactly what you want to see while there.  Although you want to be respectful of your host by not flooding them with people, it is essential to make sure that you have an appropriate blend of functional representatives on the site visit.

At this point you are armed with all the relevant data.  By utilizing the technical architecture deep dive and the site visits, you should be able to validate that the priority order is correct.  You will also be prepared to define any gaps that might exist in the original proposals.  

You should work with the vendors to true these gaps up, update prices, and further validate your priority order.  Functionally and technically, you now have your selection supported by quantifiable data.  Your solution selection process is complete and you're ready to lawyer up and start negotiating with your finalists to determine the winner of your business.  

We'll cover this process in next month's article.