It’s well worth a read; I’m working on my comments and will share them with you in a post later. In the meantime, I believe it’s available free-to-air for the rest of this month, so do try and take a look, you can find the article here.
I just can’t resist one comment though. Take a look at the table below.
Andrew makes one very very important point. Not that the others aren’t important, but one of them really stands out for me.
In the table above, he defines Enterprise IT as “IT that specifies business processes“.
He does not say “IT that is specified by random and ever-changing and poorly articulated and inconsistent and sometimes even nonexistent business processes.”
IT that specifies business processes.
By this I don’t mean that the IT department has to specify all the business processes, that’s just plain stupid. What I mean is that enterprise systems work well only when there are rigorous standardised processes; they work well when these rigorous standardised processes are industrial strength, with external frames of reference; they work well when the number of processes is kept to an absolute minimum, and where process divergence and diversity is avoided. The “system” consists of people, processes and technology, working to common goals and held together by a common culture. Too often it’s the process piece that goes AWOL, aided and abetted by avaricious consultants, accepted and nourished by inertial inhouse staff.
IT that specifies business processes.
If only that were true. If only I had a dollar for every time “respectable” consultants plundered the heart of an organisation by mangling an enterprise resource planning system until it was as unfit for purpose as humanly possible. If only I had a dollar for every time “responsible” business users lapped up all this attention and “blamed” the internal IT department for rampant project failure, because they believed the lie. The lie that an ERP system was meant to mirror their existing processes. because they wanted to believe the lie. If only I had a dollar for every time the internal IT department quietly acquiesced and said it was all their fault, fired a few innocents, promoted a few bystanders, whatever. If only.
