New ERP will make us more effective and efficient than old one. CIO, how to not disappoint your boss

Today, it’s a perfect time to look at the promises we’re making for the business expectations and how they’re likely to disappoint the CEOs who CIOs need on their side.

When it comes to setting IT’s priorities they’re more rearview mirror than windshield. The CIO’s priorities are the steps you can take to prevent the disappointments.

The new ERP system will make us more effective and efficient than the supposedly obsolete one that the business decided to replace.

During the lifecycle of the old ERP system, IT deeply and extensively customized the old system, and the business processes it supported are fine-tuned to those customizations. The customizations made business operations highly efficient and they also made the old system very hard to replace without the new customizations in newest ERP.

The executive management agreed IT should implement the new solution to save money and time. Actually, IT is required to do it without the customizations. But that means most parts of the business will have to adapt their processes to how the new system works out of the box.

Only make people hear that new ERP without business adaptations will make IT more effective, at the expense of making the rest of the business less effective.

So, what the CIOs should promise? We will win while we do it together

In the different analyses, you can and should compare the effectiveness and efficiency of the new system’s out-of-the-box business process workflows to those now in use. Where the new system’s processes are as or more effective, the implementation team will create training programs to help everyone adapt. When the new system’s processes are less effective, the implementation team will, using either its built-in configuration tools or custom-built satellite applications, adapt it to the business processes now in place.