Performance
You need to specify some minimum performance requirements here. You are procuring a corporate EDRM solution which means that once it is fully implemented all administrative staff and many academic staff will be using the system every day to create and retrieve and use content and vital documents and records. If the performance of the system is poor then you will not achieve the business benefits that you require from the solution and ultimately the project will fail. Hence high performance is an important requirement.
However, it is a difficult requirement and contractually it is hard to put all the risk onto a supplier as they will be implementing their solution on your networks and your desktops. Hence if the system does not meet its performance targets it can be difficult to attribute blame or, more importantly, identify the solution.
In you SOR you should therefore be very clear about your requirements and how you expect the supplier to mitigate as many of the risks relating to performance as possible.
Firstly you should define a set of performance requirements which the system should meet for searching the metadata and then retrieving and displaying a document. You will need a number of variations of this requirement to cater for users on the same Local Area Network as the EDRM server; users accessing the system across a WAN and users accessing the solution remotely across a phone line.
Then you should specify that the supplier must firstly test the core solution on their own development or testing environment. This will be an ideal environment as there will be no other applications operating and no other traffic across the network. If the solution cannot meet the performance requirements in this environment then it will not meet them on your network. Then you should specify that the supplier must also carry out the performance tests on the model office solution which is also on a dedicated network. This will highlight whether or not the supplier as using any acceleration facilities on their test environment which will not b available to you.
Then you should specify that the supplier should also carry out the performance tests on the pilot solution which will be on your network. As part of the specification stage you should have asked the supplier to survey the network used by the pilot users and to request any upgrades to the network needed to meet the performance requirements. The supplier will also want to list any assumptions they have made in terms of other applications running on the desktops etc.
For the roll out phases you should specify in the SOR that you will require performance tests to be operated and if the system does not meet the performance requirements the supplier will be required to research the causes and once they are agreed you and the supplier will be required to address any system failings or IT infrastructure failings that are causing the system to miss its performance targets.
Addressing performance in the SOR can help mitigate many of the risks.
