Once upon a time, ERP implementation projects were single source affairs, in that the buying organization selected a single vendor who assumed responsibility for the whole project, except for the pieces under the direct internal control of the buying organization. “Responsibility” has many aspects, none of them unimportant, but of the first importance here is the matter of liability. Back in that perfect world, not only were we young but we were unimaginably responsible by today’s standards – all of us – for one simple reason: a failed implementation meant personal disaster for us. We were liable if the whole thing “didn’t work”, whatever that meant in any particular case; it said so in the contract – the one contract that defined the entire effort – and nobody was going to let us off the hook.
We were all, buyers and sellers alike, expelled from that Eden in the ‘80s. Today nobody has anything like that kind of responsibility because nobody is expected to deliver anything like the entire project. Nobody’s expected to deliver it because nobody can. It is rare today even to see one party responsible for all the hardware (servers, network, workstations and critical peripherals). It is rare today even to see one party responsible for the application software, all the required modifications to it and all the contracted implementation services. Today it is unthinkable that the same vendor could be responsible for the whole combination of hardware, network, database engine, application software package and implementation, let alone for their coordinated performance.
If nobody is responsible for making it all work (that is, work together), then what are we responsible for?
Today we are all responsible for achieving isolated, individual performance targets; in most cases, we are responsible for living up to our own specs. But the sum of the individual specs is not a unified description of a successful system, let alone of a successful implementation project, and even if it were, which party, other than the buyer, could ever be held responsible for doing the summing up and making it work as a whole?
Is it possible to return to the era of single source responsibility (i.e., of meaningful liability)? No. How could it be, when no single company is responsible for all the pieces?
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an alternative to the usual current practice of holding vendors liable only for meeting local performance targets that are entirely independent of the success of the implementation effort for which their products and services are being acquired. This would require nothing more or less than the contractual linkage of vendor performance to project-specific, project-driven schedules and standards of performance. In fact, this is entirely possible, and in some places and in some kinds of projects it happens every day. It could also happen every day in ERP implementations if a few well-known principles and practices of project management were adapted, as they easily can be, in the acquisition phase of every ERP system.
