E-Business
Issue No. 18 - August/September 2004
Tale of Two Cities
by David Twiss
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . .”
When Charles Dickens wrote those now famous words nearly 150 years ago he was not thinking of any cities around here, yet those words are as applicable now as they were in 1859.
Today, those two cities are both right here. The first is the city of companies which have embraced information technology. They continue to spend generously on innovation generally and on information technology in particular. IT spend dominates their capital expenditure. They have identified and acquired leading software business systems, and have re-engineered their business practices to adopt the ‘out of the box’ software based business processes.
The second city comprises companies that still don’t get IT. Some of these companies may have several PCs networked, but their network is so slow that their employees store corporate data on the local hard disks of their individual PCs. These companies have most of their data stored in Word documents, or in Excel spreadsheets, or even on paper, and they hardly bother with backups, or virus protection, or system updating.
In the first city, companies large and small use an integrated set of computer-based applications for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources (HR), Financials and Supply Chain Management (SCM). These are often sold as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. The research and advisory firm Gartner first coined the term ERP around 1990. Today ERP implies coverage of the entire range of a company’s operating activities. The big names in ERP include companies like SAP, Oracle, Bann, and JD Edwards.
Some companies have sought out the ‘best of breed’, of individual systems for particular functional areas of their business. This approach results in either disconnected silos of bits of corporate...
