The Results Gap
If you have invested millions of dollars in ERP and other LOB systems, but still do not see returns in terms of user productivity and ability to make timely decisions and take actions in your organizations, read on!
I believe there is a huge gap between the expectations CIOs and business owners have with the investments they have made in transactional systems and the results they have seen. Do you know that 40% of ERP implementations experience adoption issues, 57% of SAP customers don't believe they have achieved positive ROI, 42% of CRM licenses purchased are never implemented!!
We call this the "Result Gap" and believe that it is fundamentally caused due to the gap between how 'people' work and the way 'systems' work. Systems are monlithic, one-size-fits-all, transactional, clunky, difficult to customize, hard to use. People work collaboratively, they want to analyze information and make decisions. They live in the real world, where stuff happens, exceptions are the norm. While the systems take a happy path, People need to deal with all the mess that happens around the fixed processes. I believe 80% of the activity around a business process, happens outside of the systems that encode it. For example, a procurement manager finalizing sourcing contracts spends a lot of time researching the price, pulling data from various marketplaces into spreadsheets, and analyzing customer demographics. Then they interact with their preferred suppliers, share forecasts, commit to order splits and pull rates, and then finalize the procurement. Most of this activity happens outside of enterprise systems. Only after they have successfully finalized the details, they go to their ERP or purchasing systems and generate a sourcing contract.
How do you fill this Result Gap? I believe a new breed of solutions are needed that extend the ERP and LOB systems and are inherently Collaborative, Easy to use, Role based, highly customizable and very contextual.
What are these new breed of applications and how can you build them? stay tuned for my next post!
