Here we go again. Another year and another crop of IT trend predictions along with plenteous new or improved technology solutions cheerfully rolling out to meet the anticipated demand.

Another year of headaches for CIOs

For many of us working in information technology, keeping up with the trends is all part of the fun—and it can be critical for our jobs. But while reading Gartner’s prophetic top 10 technology trends for 2015, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for CIOs.
While CIOs are expected to keep the lights on and technology humming, their roles have become much more strategic to their company’s success—a fact that is often underappreciated by the “old school executives” who don’t fully grasp how much the world of business IT has changed.

The CIO is now looked upon as a catalyst for innovation, helping the company reach its strategic and financial goals. To do so, the CIO must fully understand critical business operations and objectives, and identify how IT can help put the company in a better position to succeed.

Technology is confusing, even for experts

Gartner’s list, of course, references a proliferation of new computing processes and contraptions promising to affect almost every aspect of our businesses and our lives—pumping out ever growing mounds of data—ostensibly supported and harvested by business intelligence, or analytics solutions.

All of this data generation is wonderful as long as your business can leverage it—you know—to make life and death decisions. For that, companies need to understand their requirements and select the right solutions—a formidable task with a miserable success rate for most (7 out of 10 tech investments under-perform per Standish Group).

Aside from widespread IT selection and implementation failures, organizations are not able to properly leverage the systems they already own. Gartner’s CIO Agenda Report reveals that enterprises are realizing only 43% of their technology’s business potential.

To see a common example of market data overload and category confusion, you don’t have far to go – just look at the landscape below for BI / Big Data / Analytics (provided by Perella Weinberg Partners.)

This game cannot be won with spreadsheets

With over $2 trillion worth of technology to be purchased this year (per Forrester), CIOs are struggling to understand the vendor landscapes for wide portfolio of categories such as ERP, cloud management, big data and analytics, marketing automation, networking, and security, all while also making sure your PC has the latest version of Microsoft Word.

But how do you win at this endless shell game–matching business goals and technology solutions —when the complexity is far beyond what human minds or selection methodologies can capture?

In the face of complex, decentralized technology purchases and high failure rates, the typical procurement teams, processes & tools are helpless. They are often too slow, non-inclusive and lack relevant subject matter expertise.

The solution is an intelligent platform for IT selection (a.k.a., let me introduce “RequirementsHub”)

If this sounds like a plug, it is. But in my defense, this solution can play a life-saving role in technology investments for your company. “Business-as-usual” IT selection methods just don’t work. How can they?

Even with top research sources and a competent team—the multifarious selection process is still managed through a mixed-bag of painful manual processes and generic tools, such as Word docs, emails, and untraceable spreadsheets. Tasks are further burdened with endless meetings, approval cycles, and error prone communications. All of this conspires to complicate and prolong selections, making stakeholder consensus and properly supported technology decisions an elusive and excruciating affair.

RequirementsHub, a new offering from SelectHub, solves these problems by centralizing the requirements gathering and evaluation processes on an accessible, intelligent platform–with analyst sourced requirements templates, vendor scorecards, and stakeholder collaboration tools—all built-in.

RequirementsHub eliminates the messy, error prone business of requirements gathering and prioritization by centralizing the entire process on an intelligent, collaborative platform. 

A key part of the SelectHub technology selection management platform, RequirementsHub provides collaborative requirements management, a critical function in a guided best practice workflow for the entire selection process going from requirements compilation to vendor shortlists, and finally to RFx processes—greatly reducing time and errors—and allowing all participants to contribute efficiently.

For CIOs, RequirementsHub provides a quantum leap forward in terms of quality and speed for the management of requirements within technology selections. With built-in best practices and activity tracking for line-of-business management, IT and Finance, CIOs can realize more successful IT initiatives, faster. Allowing them to focus more attention on value producing innovation—while leaving many of their headaches behind.