Building Strategic Business Partnerships With Software Vendors: A Best Practice Model For Behavioral Health & Social Service Organizations

Abstract

Deployment of emerging technology holds great promise to improve the operation of organizations in the behavioral health and social service field.  New technology can reduce operating costs, improve service quality, and enable new service offerings, providing strategic advantage in an increasingly competitive market.  With increasingly strategic implications of technology in the field, it is important that managers understand the importance of choosing technology vendors that will be not just a supplier, but a strategic business partner.  Among the many technology vendors, strategic relationships with software vendors are key.  Software selection is an important and often underestimated process that holds the key to developing these strategic business partnerships.  In the current market, it is not unusual to find many software vendors offering a wealth of functionality in their applications at a wide range of price points. Traditionally, managers in the field have selected a software vendor with a simplistic value equation of the amount of functionality per dollar spent, with an assumption of  fixed useful life of the software product.   However, as the health and human service field has become more competitive and more dynamic, the ability to work with the software platform and the software vendor to collaboratively and quickly meet those needs is a key to maintaining strategic advantage.   This article outlines a ‘best practice’ in software selection process that builds the framework for creation of such a strategic partnership with a software vendor – a selection process that weighs software functionality and price, but adds the dimension of vendor responsiveness to the equation.