Date: 14th April, 2008
Week 2
Q.4 Stuff-Up.Org (fictitious organization at the time or writing) has an ailing set of in-house developed legacy systems (if you don’t know what a legacy system is – look up the term on the web). It has been decided that the IT department will be tasked to investigate the possibility of adopting an ES. If they recommend ES adoption, then it has also been decided that they will be tasked with evaluating products and recommending a product to the CEO. What might be wrong with this situation? What problems do you see arising?
My response:
An “in-house” developed legacy system does not allow the business to perform a re-engineering of the business process and can not take the competitive benefits of data integration and standardization. However, a business having a legacy system can decide to adopt an Enterprise System (ES), but it will entail many stakeholders ranging from top executives to data entry operators. In a situation like this Stuff-Up.org has decided its IT desk to investigate the possibilities of adopting an ES. However there are a few things which can go wrong in this particular case.
Firstly, the personnel of the IT department will be the only people doing the investigation on the feasibility of adopting an ES and it is quite impossible for the IT department to understand the operation of the business in detail when all the working processes of other departments as administration, human resources, accounting etc are concerned. On the other hand, the possible perspective that will be resulting from the investigation of the IT department being working as an individual group will be more technology focused and might loose the touch of actual real life scenario and complications involved with various departments’ working process and their expectations.
Secondly, without taking opinions of other departments of the business and having them involved in the investigation will leave a big gap between what is going to be done and what is actually required by the end users. So, once the new ES has been designed and it is ready to be implemented, there will be problems. So, if it becomes difficult to implement the ES, it might need to be re-designed or discarded then it will cost money to Stuff-Up.org in will be proven as a business loss.
Finally, the stakeholders typically have multiple and often conflicting objectives and priorities and rarely agree on a set of common aims. Even if the IT department recommends the adoption, there are a few things yet to be considered before the adoption of ES. Such as the new ES proposal may include an upgrade of the company’s existing computer hardware and the stakeholders may disagree with that thinking that it will to expensive to buy new computer hardware for the system. Last but not the least; the new ES might require employee training to use a new system and the employees who will be operating the system might come up with a denial of going under the training process.
