City of London Corporation explores options to escape Oracle's clutches The City of London Corporation is dipping its toe in the market for a new ERP provider as it approaches the end of support for the Oracle E-Business Suite that is currently running its main financial systems. In a pre-tender notice published this week, the municipal governing authority, which received its first recorded Royal …
SAP - very funny.
Why not pick best of breed SaaS offerings for each of the functions then integrate. That's one thing SaaS services make very easy, either through custom integrations directly via their APIs or more likely pre-built integrations via the likes of Mulesoft of Zapier. The added advantage is that you're not over the contractual barrel for a decade with a single supplier.
The days of the monolithic ERP are surely over, along with the near business death catastrophes that were so often associated with their implementation.
Welcome to the Hotel California
And she said: "We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device"
And in the master's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man
"We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!"
You are right.
There are a few certanties that they should factor in from Day 1.
- It will take at least twice as long as the vendor says
- It will cost at least three times the initial budget
- It will perform like a two legged dog
- It won't work as expected.
I wish the City lots of luck with this project. I hope that all of the above points are wrong but I doubt it.
"- It will cost at least three times the initial budget".
And the sun will rise in the east, and the budget was too optimistic, and every time the fault will be somebody else's fault but those who decided about time and budget.
This with 35 years of experience delivering the software and I am hardly alone with this experience.
It's fairly simple really, there is always two good buddies, the customer who want it quick and cheap and the salesman who also would like that to happen in order to get the order.
When you put a user committee in charge of writing requirements with no representation from IT to tell them what it actually takes to accomplish them;
Send the requirements to a salesmen who will write a proposal claiming their product can do it all;
Have the proposal reviewed by accountants;
Then you end up with the same luck you had with the old product.
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