With the holidays well over, it’s probably time to blog some again.
I was reading this article about Red Hat at The Register, which linked and quoted from this Forbes article about Salesforce.com, and I’d like to highlight this part:
The theory of enterprise software is that it is cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf solution and configure it to your needs instead of building exactly what you need from scratch. Some companies are great at using off-the-shelf products and others waste a lot of money. But for most companies, the trade-off works. It is cheaper to buy and configure than to build.
What is less widely known is that the range of processes covered by standard software is modest. In his book, Business Process Management: The SAP Roadmap, SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe says, based on research, that standard software covers about 20 percent of the processes in any given business.
I had the sense that moving to PeopleSoft or an equivalent would still leave a need for a lot of local, custom development, but having it meet 20% of the need is much smaller than what I would have guessed.
Interesting. Although the article points out that major ERP platform vendors try to get other developers to write solutions for the other 80% on their platform.
This corresponds well with what I saw when I worked at a corporation that converted to SAP. The cost for contractors to customize and extend it to do everything they had expected it to do, caused the project’s cost to balloon in an astounding manner. Eventually the rollout was halted (but not rolled back) even though not all of the areas originally intended had been converted.
A friend of mine, who worked at the same place, then went on to be a consultant, and heard the same story at 5 other companies. It seems to be part of the business model to overpromise, then once the customer is in too deep to back out the limitations and complexities become apparent.