ERP Deja Vu

Last week, I get a request to help a client build an ERP business case. Phil Simon also sent me a copy of his new book "Why New Systems Fail" - which is a well written primer on ERP project planning, management etc. (see Brian Sommer's review of the book here)

And I had to rub my eyes. In my first year at Gartner in 1995 I was writing research notes on ERP implementation, TCO, business cases, SI selections.

15 years and a few hundred thousand ERP implementations and upgrades later there are still new ERP projects which need business cases and project primers?

Of course, there are - sometimes us in blog world who have moved on to much more contemporary social networks and SaaS forget that. I am particularly guilty as I catalog over 30 categories of tech innovations from telemetry to green computing on the New Florence blog.  From that lens I must admit I found Phil's book a bit narrow - where's the newer issues with mobile interfaces, where are RSS feeds when he talks about integration, how will clouds affect ERP infrastructure planning?

I just hope the new ERP adopters are getting far better economics than early and middle adopters did. Not just in software - in systems integration, hosting, every aspect of the TCO.  And that they are far less accepting of ERP project failures than the left side and center of the bell curve was, as Phil's book does show.