My firm has some new clients who are software providers. A lot of their needs deal with issues related to their products. Their software products deal with this concept of “Best in Class.” We haven’t met with them yet (or at least, I haven’t). From what I’ve been briefed, they use term with e-business models and data management. I can grasp those ideas conceptually, but I have a little trouble putting it together in real-life scenarios. If it helps, the partners throw out the terms “best practices” a lot, which again, doesn’t seem to be really strictly defined. So what do these terms mean? I’m not in the business world and have been spending a majority of my time in the library, in front of a fax machine, and my favorite, the copier. Thanks in advance!
“Best in Class” just means that in the group of products that handles whatever they’re handling, they’re the best.
So if it were accounting software & they claimed to be best in class, they’d mean that for comparable products, ie other accounting software, they’d come out ahead for things like value for money, usability, tech support, flexibility, customisability, lots of factors.
Of course, just about everyone claims their products are best in class, so unless they have indendent reviews of their software saying it, take it with a pinch of salt. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, which has branched out into e-business, but may not include that company’s flavour of e-business used to be Clarify, Remedy (which I hated) & Siebel for best in class/highly recommended/market leading off the shelf packages. I’m not sure what it is today. Likewise, e-business is a huge wooly term - it can mean simple things like selling online from a website, to tracking prospects through to huge contracts to enormous complex deliveries, or just having web interfaces for people to report faults to.
Data management is a huge field too - it could mean data warehousing/data mining & associated report writing/graphing, or just databases to hold data, and being flexible enough to have them set up by the customer using metadata to get the structure. Big field, lots of possibilities. So best in class for those would be the ones that you can write the reports on most easily, customise how the data is held most easily, & so on. I recall we used Business Objects, but can’t recall any of the competitors we chose from, but they would have been described as “best in class” or “among the three best in class” for them to have been short listed.
“Best in class” originated in livestock shows, where all the dogs/goats/cattle/whatever would vie for “best in show” (the best critter judged at that event), but each class (based on breed, sex, age, and other criteria) received their own top awards. Thus the poodle/Nubian/Charlois/whatever could go home with a first place ribbon even if the obviously prejudiced judges handed out the “best of show” to a collie/La Mancha/Holstein/whatever based on their personal prejudices.
Carry this over to software, where Crystal Reports and Cognos Impromptu might vie for the honor of “best” software to display data in a coherent fashion (“best of class”) while someone rating all software might dismiss them as “mere” report writers when compared to something like Powerbuilder or C++ or Java whatever current favorite programming environment was popular.
“Best practices” is a bit different. There has always been a bit of a cottage industry among technical and financial fields of university professors dictating how the “real” world should work. Among the currently popular buzz words for that oversight is the concept of best practices, which implies a somewhat eclectic approach to any given industry, where someone examines the leaders of any industry and tries to determine which practice (policy, methodology, protocol, philosophy, etc.) has boosted that organization to the top.
I am being a bit snide, here, having gone through several earlier incarnations of the same efforts under different names. The reality is that a genuine attempt to understand how people make effective use of their resources is quite valuable, but management rarely has sense in abundance and any attempt to get them to understand how they might improve always has only the odd chance of succeeding.
(For example, a currently popular “concept” is Customer Relationship Management with the astoundingly radical notion that a company will do better if it attempts to tailor its business practices to actually meet customer expectations. A lot of companies have put in a lot of money building cosmetic interfaces to make it appear that they are trying to meet their customers on their customers’ terms, without actually changing their business practices to really make life easier for their customers. A “best practices” analysis will seek out companies who have succeeded in boosting sales (or minimizing loss of customer base in the recent downturn) and try to figure out what internal policies and methodologies were implemented to make that happen. Of course, since no corporate bosses ever want to acknowledge that they are not, themselves, brilliant and cutting edge, most “best practices” analyses result in ways to identify cosmetic changes that do not force the management to actually change their ways of doing business, but they still need to use the buzz words to show that they “mean business.”)