The moderator/consultant of a recent user/vendor roundtable I attended, asked an interesting question: "What would vendors like customers do to differently?"
On thinking about it, I think that what we want to see less feature-driven RFPs, because
1) Feature lists reflect what can be done rather than what the enterprise needs or is using.
2) Feature lists tend to be backward rather than forward looking, and get in the way of identifying new ways of achieving the same or better results.
Feature lists dictate one particular how, rather than the why or the what.
So what we want to see is more business-driven requirement documents, which
1) Identify the business, application and user needs- the why
2) Identify IT operational and technological/architectural needs - the how
3) Identify the most important business results- the what.
Thanks for asking.