[141] in magellan
First draft of the "Buy" alternative
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert V. Ferrara)
Wed Apr 21 18:04:05 1999
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 18:05:27 -0500
To: magellan@mit.edu, delivery@mit.edu, integration-ptl@mit.edu
From: "Robert V. Ferrara" <rferrara@MIT.EDU>
Hello,
Here's the initial draft of a project to better document the "buy"
alternative. This will be discussed at the Team's Leader's meeting this
Friday at 10:30 in N42-286. Your comments at the meeting will be
appreciated. Thanks to Tim McGovern and Jag Patel for helping me prepare
this.
Cheers, Bob
-------First draft of the "Buy" alternative project announcement-------
1. Brief Background:
Sometime this summer, Greg Anderson and I would like to sponsor a process
improvement project to ensure the "buy" alternative is better reflected in
IS process maps and other relevant documentation. Currently, our process
maps and much of our thinking recognize only the "build" model for
deploying systems, yet our active projects (e.g. Infoseek) show a large
fraction involve the acquisition of commercial as well as open source
software products.
2. The Deliverables:
The minimum deliverables would be 1) updated process maps on the
appropriate web pages 2) a new resource page for help in the "buy" process,
and 3) sponsorship of events (e.g. forums, interview, whatever) to promote
organization wide discussion and consensus building on this topic, and 4) a
project notebook using the evolving IS standards. It is expected this
material would apply primarily to the small and medium scale purchases. For
an enterprise scale decision like SAP some of what is uncovered might also
be useful. Finally, it is expected that the material would be accessible
and useful to IT groups across MIT.
3. The Roles:
We believe a small, focused team of no more than four people would be most
effective. The commitment is estimated to be 20 per cent over two months.
The key competencies that have have been identified to date are:
* A decision maker with some project management experience
* Someone very familiar with the software licensing process
* Someone experienced in service/support issues
* Someone with web publishing skills
* Expertise in acquistion and integration of commercial software
4. Other Stuff to Consider:
Because of the small size, there will be no attempt to ensure that this is
a "representative team". However, it will be important that key Service and
Support teams are interviewed and their input incorporated into the
product.
It is not critical that this project start at a particular time. We would
rather wait until the selected team is ready and then proceed in a focused,
straightforward manner.
5. Synopsis of Comments Received to date.
Helen Samuels notes that there should be provision for the incorporation of
policy considerations into this process. For example, as part of the work
that she did on the revision of the student information policy, she felt it
was realized too late that it would be impossible or very costly for the
purchased system to meet MIT's policy requirements around issues such as
privacy, access controls, warning messages, and tracking of data. Some of
these issues may be addressed in an indirect way when security issues are
considered. But addressing this more directly would require both an
examination of MIT's current policies that would impact a specific system,
and/or a consideration of policy issues that might need to be resolved or
clarified before "buy" decisions could be made.
Tim McGovern wants to be sure we do basic best practices research. He notes
that there's been a bunch of work down at Carnegie Mellon on the buy
option. It can found at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cbs/index.html.
Jag Patel thinks of this project as process "care and feeding" and noted
the importance of licensing considerations in her recent Infoseek
experience.
Jim Bruce wants to ensure all the Processes have a hand in formulating the
result.
Brian MacDonald felt the result should be tempered by a strategic
assessment of what we are best at and what skill sets we don't want
to develop. In these areas, we would naturally pursue the "buy" alternative.
6. How to Respond:
Anyone interested should contact either rferrara@mit.edu or
ganderso@mit.edu. We would like to first select a Team Leader, who would
then be involved in filling out the rest of the team.
