Michael MaozI heard Andy Brown, the director and head of strategy, architecture and optimization at Bank of America / Merrill Lynch say the above, and it gave me a bit of hope that we may see some positive developments accelerated by the economic situation we are in. That’s good, because I have also seen CIOs tell me that they were going to pass on high value projects, and instead focus on their big ERP upgrade. The first time I heard this I didn’t know how to understand the logic. The situation was around a field technician optimization program that I had suggested.
What happened? The CIO said it was too tactical. My response was that it may be tactical, but it would lead to significant cost cutting and show a good ROI within 12 months. His response was that the big ERP upgrade was strategic and had to come first. We talked about the necessity of going forward with the upgrade at this exact moment. My question was around the specific cost/benefit associated with the upgrade. After much back and forth, the bottom line became clear: it takes a lot of IT resources to upgrade this ERP system. Though there was little economic improvement expected, or competitive advantage, or a gain of much-needed functionality, it would keep a bunch of resources busy, perhaps even busy enough long enough to weather the round of cutbacks that were expected in the months ahead.
I understand that expediency can sometimes fall on the side of ‘live to fight another day.’ At the same time, there are big shifts happening in the world of software as a service, Cloud Computing, online marketing, new, community-based product support and product development techniques, and entirely new customer-centric architectures evolving and business processes underway.
Someone recently wrote that you often only know that a tipping point has occurred three years after it has happened. I think the items I just mentioned will be seen three years from now as the critical projects that leading CIOs and line-of-business owners will have been working on 2009-2011 that brought them their biggest successes. And these leaders will say that they embarked on innovative projects in the teeth of the crisis because they saw they had no other choice!
Comments Off
Category: Innovation and Customer Experience Tags: Add new tag
