There's an interesting study from SandHill Group/Neochange on the blogosphere that says -- surprise, surprise -- your enterprise software supplier might look at the world differently than you do.  That's no reason to be more or less friendly to the enterprise software sales guy based on the results of the study.  It's just useful to understand how his or her bosses think.

For example,

• A successful implementation is more important to you than it is to the software provider (see Figure 1 after the link above).
• You think Process Automation and Competitive Advantage are about equally important "core business disciplines," but software suppliers think you think Competitive Advantage is 50 percent more important than Process Automation (see Figure 3). That might explain why they are slow to add the process integration features you'd like to see.
• You rank information storage is twice as important as a "core business discipline" than they think you do (also see Figure 3).

There is limited methodology information provided, so I don't know how many of you and how many of your suppliers SandHill and Neochange talked to. The combined total was 159 and the survey was completed online rather than via a phone call (the latter is preferable with such a small sample). Also the research substantially predates the current financial crisis.

Both the technique and the timing make the findings suspect as applicable for today. But it is worth looking at to see what your supplier was thinking at the beginning of 2008.

(Thanks to Read/Write Web for pointing me at the study. Read/Write blogger Jason Rothbart has a different perspective on the study that you might want to read as well.)