Kicking Your Technology Investment
Into High Gear

InfoTech Update
An AICPA Publication
Vol. 16. No. 3
May / June, 2007
By Stephen Barrett, CPA.CITP, MCP
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Navigating New Terrain

Most organizations take one of two approaches in deciding which applications to use in their practice or business: “suite of products” or “best-of-breed.” A “suite of products” approach means that the company purchases as many products as possible from one vendor, expecting to minimize the amount of training necessary. With “best-of-breed,” products are purchased that are best suited for a business’s own needs and processes, regardless of the vendor. The business, in turn, will train its staff on the systems as necessary.

Most firms assume that a suite of products will yield a greater level of integration than best-of-breed products; ironically, this is not always the case. While a suite of products will typically offer “out-of-the-box” integration, the degree of integration is limited to whatever the vendor decides to integrate and is usually limited to products offered within the suite. Vendors who do not offer a suite of products will typically encourage others to integrate with their systems and will often offer toolkits detailing how to go about this. This process enables organizations to integrate the various systems and make them work together in ways that will benefit them the most. Most suites tend to be less flexible and typically only offer minimal integration within their product suite.

At HKMP, we have taken the “best-of-breed” approach because we prefer to have optimal flexibility in making our systems work together. As illustrated by Figure 1, our firm has a content management system that interacts with other key systems so that information is shared from
the time we engage a new client until the job is complete and rolled over for the next year. The final product offers tremendous functionality.

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