There has been a bit of a squall blowing through the IT blogosphere about the complexity of ERP systems and their value to the business.
This debate reignited following an article by Cynthia Rettig entitled The Trouble with Enterprise Software, in which she questioned the effectiveness of ERP.
Andrew McAfee subsequently suggested that more research is required in order to come to a definitive conclusion about the value of ERP, although he believes that corporations wouldn’t continue to invest if it wasn’t providing some sort of benefit.
Thomas Otter of SAP says ERP is complex but manageable and “this stuff works”. Vinnie Mirchandani thinks that all too often ERP forces the business to depend on expensive consultants and that only in the manufacturing sector has ERP had much of an impact.
The emergence of Workday providing On-demand Business Services over Web 2.0 has made Nick Carr think that we might be about to enter a “post-ERP era”. Personally, I don’t see this happening. It’s like saying that mySQL will create a post-Oracle era. Workday may be great for some implementations, but the big spending multi-nationals are never going take the chance with their core strategic data. It’s easier to sue SAP if it all goes wrong.
What may cause ripples in the ERP pool are systems such as thingumy, which manipulates data using completely new techniques.
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