Cynthia Rettig, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, goes around the world with Tom Friedman and back a few years of research in to basically conclude payback from ERP sucks. Dennis Howlett laments the lack of solutions to the "ERP mess." But the mess has been going on for a while. Chris Koch of CIO Magazine, who Cynthia quotes, first interviewed me about ERP complexity in 1995.
The good news is Cynthia's article is in a publication which will get executive attention. Not that they do not know. I recently met an executive at a client about to start an ERP implementation. He sounded like a man headed to the gallows. Nervous, not excited about the project. (That afternoon, I felt really embarrassed for our industry that after 100K+ ERP projects, we still cannot make it a no-brainer)
But it is way past talking about messes. Companies are in various stages of ERP hangover management. Not always looking at SaaS, as those vendors would have you believe. Not that easy to rip and replace a backbone ERP solution. But SaCS. And aggressive re-negotiation of ERP maintenance contracts, or moving to third party maintenance.
The only ones who do not seem to realize the party is over are the vendors, who are using SOA, compliance and more low payback justifiers to extend the run - and some of their implementation partners.
