ERP Maturation and Implementation Issues Survey

Welcome to the Adaptive Growth Inaugural Winter Survey of ERP Maturation and Implementation Issues.  We’d like to solicit your help in determining how the IT management of manufacturing and distribution companies views maintaining and/or replacing aging ERP software.  We currently have two primary (and, we feel, inadequate) sources of information about this.  The first is the anecdotal scuttlebutt we are all bombarded with every day.  We distrust it deeply.  We think that in business, just as in politics, the answers you get depend on the questions you ask; and we in the ERP business space almost always ask the questions that are of concern to us.  Our second source of information is of course our clients.  We think we understand their concerns quite well, but they are hardly unbiased – after all, they chose to do business with us, at least in part because their own concerns coincide with our own.  We’re not sure how representative they really are.  In fact, we have sound reasons for doubting that they are very representative at all.

In selling our own services, our emphasis is on risk management as it relates to ERP implementations.  Naturally, our client base tends toward companies that rate risk management very highly.  Though you’ll never convince us that risk management shouldn’t rate at the top of everyone’s list of concerns regarding ERP implementations and modifications, it is manifestly clear that it doesn’t.   The statistics for failure amply prove that, but these statistics simply offer no clue about why that is the case.  What are people thinking, when they’re not thinking about what should matter most to them?  In particular, we are interested in the role that the IT function plays in the critical early decisions that (in our view) largely determine the outcome of ERP implementation and modification projects.

Although we’ve been in what is now called the ERP marketplace for decades, we have never been very far from the IT side of the industry.  We’ve worked for software companies, huge and tiny, as salespeople, developers, implementers and project managers.  Our ability to work closely with the IT function has been largely equivalent to our ability to survive.  And we have never seen a time, going back to the early ‘70’s, when the IT function has had less choice in the matter of what systems it will be charged with deploying, and how it is going to deploy them.  (There:  we’ve stated our bias.  Now go ahead and disprove it!)

The survey below is designed to remedy at least some of our own ignorance about the true drivers of companies’ behavior in acquiring, implementing, modifying and, eventually, abandoning ERP software.  We are under no illusion that we will find any kind of pervasive, overall pattern.  We expect we’ll see many contradictory themes emerge, but we can’t even be sure of that.  One thing would surprise us greatly, though: to hear that the IT function is very often the instigator of change (or of inertia!)  Beyond that, we have no more than over-informed speculation to go on in estimating the range of IT’s influence in these projects in industry as a whole.

We hope to have a more coherent picture by the end of February. We'll collate the results, draw what conclusions we can, and distribute the full results to everyone who participates. We're aiming for the end of January but, depending on the response, it could be sooner or later. We're not going to cut this off prematurely while we're still getting good input.

Please note that spread throughout the survey are optional comment blocks.  We don’t expect anyone to use all of them, but we do expect people to straighten us out when we’ve asked a dumb question, failed to ask one that needs asking or have left out the best answer.  We promise, we’ll read everyone and include all the printable comments in the final results.  Please also indicate (near the top of the survey) whether your comments should be attributed to you or anonymous when published.

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