You ask some excellent "white elephant in the room" questions. I do like the concrete comment especially. I was part of a big system vendor during the boom period of SAP/ERP/BPR at the turn of 2000 and was stunned by the desperate rush to throw cash at IT software vendors in order to make the customers company run the same as the software told them it should. The consultants advising made massive fees as well as the product vendors. They were even told they would have reduced operational efficiency for 1-3 years during adoption.

I would like to add one more sacrifice on the bonfire, outsourcing. Tightly connected to the deployment of these juggernauts was outsourcing and if you want to ask a certain large grocery provider about their experience I would be stunned if you can get anyone to go on record. The famous no-milk/bread moment was down to a complete FUBAR between so called enterprise applications with the added piquant flavour of outsourcing.

I still fail to understand how passing the operational control of a live, constantly changing business through a legal contract to an outsourced for-profit company can benefit operational flexibility and continual process improvement. If the market changes and you want to move first/fast show me a benefit of outsourcing other than sacking people to reduce costs and capability.

ERP is an excellent concept and having watched the degree of detail and engineering SAP placed into their product I can only say I am stunned by the quality. Outsourcing of some functions makes solid sense, static, repetitive, non-critical, non-secure but your entire business process engine ?

I guess a thousand IT consultants will flame me to hell. I guess I must just be to cynical.

I don't t think this problem is unique to the kind of business management software that you are referring to. I think it's a problem with software as a whole.

If you look back at what was going on the 70's, stuff was being created that was routinely and genuinely unique and innovative.

What's happened since? Our OS's are basically the same as they were back then (only slower, less reliable, and HUGE). Applications have gone the same way - WHY does my word processor require half a GB of code when all I want to do is write a letter? It's ridiculous. Same goes for all the other usual suspects - spreadsheets, databases, etc etc.

Your average ERP package has faired no better. They are generally enormous, hugely complex, and cost a fortune. Most people who work with this stuff have a few horror stories to tell and pretty much everyone who uses one will have a good list of daily complaints and groans ("Why does it work like bla - that's silly!").

While hardware speeds and capacities have raced ahead over the last 20 years or so, software in general seems to have grown in size but little else. It's certainly not "better". It might be bigger and it might be able to handle more data in more complex ways, but that's mostly just making use of the hardware that's available. It's not easier. It certainly isn't simpler. And (as you point out) is still often very inflexible (or any flexibility comes at an often large premium).

So no, we have not progressed. In fact, I think we've been going backwards for a long time.

Very interesting perspective. I think that part of the problem is that business and the technology needs of business have gotten much more specialized during the last decade. This has put a whole new level of stress on "tool" vendors because they often find that their tool does not come with everything the client needs.

One indication of this is the incredibly high percentage of solutions which are still home grown. If ERP and BPM solutions are so comprehensive, then why are so many CEOs/CIOs taking decisions to build their own applications? Are they just getting poor advice? Or are there too many confusing options to choose from? I don't think so.

I think it is because they are looking at the tool sets from their vendors and then saying, well, if I need to pay XYZ vendor $1 million to adapt the solution to my business, then why don't I just build something that is designed for my business from the ground up. After all, most of the money I am going to be spending will be spent on teaching the vendor about my business.

This is one of the great ironies. The tools have gotten better and better, and the tool vendors (my company included!) want to sell to more and more customers in order to keep growing the tool, but the business scenarios are growing at a faster rate and with more specialization.

Our answer to this is to keep the tool open. ProcessMaker is open source because we realize that BPM vendors just aren't meeting enough of the challenges out of the box. We believe that it is better to let those customers that really need something different to have access to the code so they can take the software in the direction they want to go. In this scenario, if a customer needs something truly different and they don't want consultants learning their business in order to create what they need, they can start with ProcessMaker and build an entirely new application if they want.

-Brian Reale

http://www.processmaker.com

The person who orders stuff for my department can do the following (I'm not omitting any steps):

1. Receive a part number for an item from CDW from me.

2. Login to our in-house purchasing website (running Oracle apps).

3. Select CDW.

4. Paste in the part number.

5. Select one of our department's accounts from a list with only our department's accounts.

5. Click the "purchase button".

The item arrives in under 48 hours, often under 24 hours. We don't have to do anymore accounting for this purchase - its tacked onto the right account, the money is deducted immediately. Later, he can easily create a report of everything that was purchased for that account, or when the purchase was made, etc. But in reality, once the "purchase" button is pressed, that's the end of it. For stuff that we can buy from one of our partners, there's no paper work when we get audited. There are no errors (we still check though.) We always get a price equal to or less than the one listed on CDW, and never pay shipping.

That's a small example, but it is fantastic for the end users. (Not all facets of the system work this nicely, but its indistinguishable from magic when things go right.) This might involve us paying with money that we haven't received yet, but the financing for all of this wrapped up nicely and we can shift the money around later if necessary. The Budget and Controller's office is happy, we're happy, the vendor is (presumably) happy.

Bottom line, we really do to do quite a bit without paper, without tedium. I don't think this could work without well tuned processing, well tightened plumbing, and top to bottom integration. People talk like we've been running on a treadmill for thirty years, but it may be they take for granted how smoothly things are capable of working.