How do you select an e-learning system vendor?

Vendor selection is akin to a virtual minefield: One wrong step and you are a goner. Nevertheless, an organized, comprehensive selection process is exactly what is required. You can do this best if you develop a checklist so that you are certain that you have asked each potential vendor the same questions and are comparing oranges to oranges.

In any vendor selection process there are generally a number of important criteria, such as pricing, technology, quality, service and so on. Many professional procurement personnel use a checklist to develop a comparative rating for each of the considered suppliers.

Using the checklist, each major category is assigned a weighting that is a percentage of a total that adds up to 100. The categories contain a subset of questions, the answers to which are rated for each potential vendor, typically on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. Thus price may be equal to 40% of the total, allocating its subsets a portion of the 40% and then scoring the answers to each of the subset questions. For example, under Technology we may want to rate Web 2.0 capability. We assign a 5% value to it, remembering that the total of all the subset percentages must add up to the overall percentage assigned to that category. If a potential vendor is fully Web 2.0 implemented we would assign a score of 5 (on a 1-5 scale); if not at all we would assign a score of 1.
 

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