j e s r u s h . c o m

CIO.com has a great new article on a recent survey from Panorama Consulting Group about 670 ERP implementations which Panorama studied.  Among the nuggets:

The majority of respondents (77 percent) had chosen a Tier I provider (SAP 35 percent; Oracle 28 percent; and Microsoft: 14 percent). The rest (23 percent) went with the Tier II.

So, what was the total cost of the average EPR implementation? SAP $16.8 million; Oracle $12.6 million; and Microsoft $2.6 million. Tier II average: $3.5 million. (Microsoft’s figure is pretty impressive.)

And how long did it take respondents to fully implement the ERP solution? SAP 20 months; Oracle 18.6 months; and Microsoft 18 months. Tier II: 17.8 months.

Now, the multimillion-dollar question: How satisfied are the executive team and users with the ERP solution? SAP 73 percent (Panorama’s “satisfaction rating”); Oracle 62 percent; and Microsoft 69 percent. Tier II: 70 percent.

Fascinating stuff, especially the low cost of Tier II ERP implementations (NetSuite, etc.) and of Microsoft!  I expect SaaS ERP to really begin taking off this year.  Now that security concerns have been mostly allayed, the value proposition on turnkey, hosted, no-license-fee ERP is just too good.

CIO.com has a good interview with IBM’s CIO Mark Hennessy, “Inside the New Big Blue.” Hennessy talks about global consolidation, virtualization, and web 2.0. However, my favorite part was this tidbit which Hennessy offered when asked how IBM’s new internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration tools:

CIO.com: What are you doing to help optimize the value of the social networking tools you’re using?

HENNESSY: I find it very important to try and understand the value of each of these different tools, and I do that in a number of ways. How many ideas are created by a particular tool? How many get sponsored by somebody that has a budget? How many are collaborated on? How many actually make it to market? What revenue is generated by those ideas? I have a set of tools now that I use to track the ideas and the innovations that come out of the different tools so that I can better align my investments to the tools that are driving the better and more innovative ideas. That’s something that I spend a lot of time with other CIOs around the world talking about — the ROI of social networking.

This is excellent stuff. I love hearing about a CIO who is A) Actively experimenting with edgy social networking tools in a traditional\conservative organization and B) Objectively trying to track the value of these things.

CIO has a good Harvard Business Review article about people transitioning into leadership roles. The most interesting part is Van Buren’s response to the question of, ‘What is the most common mistake new leaders make?’

Almost universally, we saw the one mistake that seems most pernicious is having an excessive focus on details. It’s important for managers to know the ins and outs of the projects they may be managing, but if it becomes excessive, they lose sight of the bigger picture of what’s going on in the organization, and they lose the ability to prioritize. The urgent often outweighs the important. This is often true of IT leaders; heavy emphasis on details can be their greatest weakness. Given the highly detail-oriented nature of IT work, it’s very hard not to be constantly supervising.

How true. I’m regularly amazed by the inappropriately high level of interest which organizational leaders take in operational details. I think much of this stems from simple distrust: Leaders don’t trust their teams to properly execute the work. Occasionally this distrust might be truly justified, but usually it’s just paranoia and micromanagement.

Scott Staples as a nice article over at CIO.com about revisiting outsourcing arrangements to save additional money. My favorite point:

People-based outsourcing contracts are the equivalent of paying rent. The rent is due each month regardless of use. In a “rental agreement” there is no mechanism or incentive to drive productivity improvements, efficiencies, higher-value-add-services, faster time-to-market, and deeper cost cutting efforts.

Amen.