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Should ERP teams reside on the IT or Business side?
Should ERP teams be more focused on the IT or business side of things?
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5 Answers
Successful ERP implementations (and yes, Virginia, there are some out there!) unquestionably need to include IT and business participants. In the early stages, it can be helpful for the cross-departmental team to sit outside of the day-to-day hierarchy. For example, having a team, led by a high-level project manager, who reports into the C-level. This ensures continued exposure of the project at the highest levels.
ERP can be bitten off in chunks (although many vendors may not like to sell it that way), allowing for analysis and change to move in a more thoughtful manner. An incremental approach can still reap lots of benefits, and tends to keep teams more focused since there should naturally be more milestones.
Greg, not sure what you mean by "ERP Team" but regardless of where it lives, the team must have both IT and business representatives.
Wish the question had a bit more detail. Is this an ongoing internal team, a vendor implementation/migration team or the customer champion team?
Regardless, I don't believe this is an either/or question. Ideally, strong teams will have members from both business & IT focus. Optimally, the team will have at least one member who is fluent in both and can act as both liason & negotiator when required.
Greg,
If you still have a choice on the composition of ERP teams you might have an opportunity to save your company: ERP is poison. No matter who leads the team your company is going to suffer.
You aren't buying an ERP because you have want more broken processes, budget busting expenses and a failure rate that would make a weather forecaster blush. You are buying one because you think it will make your company more efficient, better able to serve your customer and finally getting everyone working toward one goal. It won't. That's a fantasy that thousands of customers before you have bought into only to discover it became a nightmare. One from which you don't wake up.
Your company may have poor information, manual processes and feel like it is in the stone age but history teaches that moving to an ERP is nearly fatal. You can incrementally improve your current company performance without jumping off the ERP cliff. But if everyone is ready to jump off the cliff, let Operations lead the charge. At least they will be honest enough to tell you how far the fall is going to be and how many casualites you can expect. If IT leads the charge you will be told you aren't falling, that with a little more time and a lot more money they can reverse the effects of gravity and return everyone to the exact cliff you just jumped from only millions of dollars and months and months of time depleted. In other words, you will be begging to get back to where you were....just to make the pain stop.
I do not think they point is whether an ERP implementation or support team reside with IT or business. The key, in my experience, is to get the right team in place (people) and the right management (leadership), who understand that IT IS business. In my view, when talking about ERP, an IT team must always align its objectives with the objectives of the business unless these cannot be achieved for technical reasons (very rare).
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