The Cancun conundrum….Are we there yet? - Part 2
Every business' technology landscape have evolved differently adopting different technologies at different points of the technology evolution time horizon. So each business' technology portfolio is in a different stage of technology state (not to mention complexity added by an M&A). So there is no one or finite number of defined paths to migrate to the future state. Picture every individual who wants to head to Cancun living alone in different cities and the airlines industry has the task of transporting them to Cancun. There is absolutely no economy of scale there.
Just like the solution is to have groups of people in a city and provide standardized transportation in and out of the city, organizations will have to migrate to future state standardized platforms. This migration itself could be in baby steps or it could be a "big bang" transformation. While the "how to get there" is a function of the size of the legacy portfolio, size of the organization, mission critical nature of the legacy technology, budgets available for capital expenditure etc.. as long as the "where to get to" is clear and all projects contribute to moving towards the harmonized standardized platform, organizations will eventually get to the standard platform.
Once they are on these standardized platforms there is hope that these standardized platforms will provide logical and natural progression and modernization in the ever changing environment businesses operate and need to adapt to. Implementation today increasingly is through standardized ERP platforms from vendors of the likes of SAP or Oracle. Little wonder these ERP platforms are extremely popular in the market today. Alternatively well orchestrated set of business services enabled through web services is the future. A radical shift by jettisoning existing legacy technology baggage to altogether leapfrog to the future by switching to "Software as a Service" (SaaS) is an alternative solution for this problem. It is little wonder leading global organizations like Microsoft, Infosys and IBM are significantly investing in SaaS as the future computing platform for businesses. Till then you can be assured that the business community will continue to keep asking "are we there yet!?"
Comments
Very interesting article.
I would also mention the BA situation at Terminal 5. I’m not sure how much the systems played a part in this fiasco, but when you look at the issues they had with training etc, any large program, whilst beneficial can have huge catastrophic effects, I believe it will take a lot of time for BA’s already declining reputation to recover.
Also, when you consider that they were moving into a new facility and therefore could do a small bang and phased implementation approach rather than a big bang approach this was a huge disaster which I’m sure will make it much more difficult for us to sell big bang, step change programs.
Also, for the move from legacy to new, I would liken that to taking instead of modernizing an old city, to creating a new city next door and asking people to move to it, whilst the new city has all of the amenities, people are just not going to want to change.
So you have the big issues of, its difficult, very risky to existing business and people don’t want to undergo such a huge change, all of which is a recipe for disaster that your business may never recover from.
So we need an alternative, big question, what’s that alternative ?
Posted by: Gordon Tredgold | April 17, 2008 02:01 AM