Here is an interesting report. In December 2010, inlevel conducted a research on “Middle Management as Business Software Influencer.”  They start with an interesting point. Software tended to be sold to senior business management and CIOs. However, because of increased access to the Web, greater use of cloud applications and simpler applications, a growing number of software purchases do not require senior level support nor need to involve IT.  So this study looked at the current role of middle managers in software purchases. They gathered responses from 210 middle managers across a variety of industries in the US.

The research found that 42% of middle managers surveyed said they are actively engaged in the enterprise software selection process and 41% said no one a cared about their views.  They want to talk with vendors about their offerings.  Asked to list obstacles to their involvement, 24% expect that IT people will be against their software ideas, 23% expect senior management to oppose them, 22% said they need a sold business case and 14% said it is hard find information about the software. Only 21% did not see any obstacles and expect that their software suggestions will be accepted.

Their advice to vendors is enhance the role that middle managers play in the selection process by providing clear descriptions of the functions of their products, more training materials directed at business professional and make the relationship the software and their more explicit.

How do they get information on software now? The respondents said that 24% comes from industry news, 20% from their IT department, 12% from friends, 2% from social media. They largest category of responses came from the 38% who said they did not have such information.

In a related but different question, when asked about where they go to get software information, 52% said they search on the Web, 33% said they talk to their IT department, 16% said they talk directly to vendors, and 21% said they were not interested.

In another related question about their preferred ways to gather information from vendors, the largest category was the 38% who said they do not bother because they do not have purchasing authority. The next in line at about 20% each was phone, email and reading web sites. Only 4% said that never ask vendors because they do not trust them.

This tells me that that middle mangers are somewhat involved in software decisions.  Without a baseline from prior years, it is hard to tell if this role is increasing due to the changing market factors.  I do know that many enterprise 2.0 software firms are trying the “seed and expand” strategy. They make a very low entry point and then hope to grow the numbers. A future study would benefit from also looking at the price of software purchases as a variable.  I do think they are asking an interesting question and would like to see more work here.