ERP Is Divided And Needs An Overhaul to Move Forward

There have recently been some big changes to enterprise software, cloud-related and otherwise, and some of that was touched upon last week at SAP’s TechEd 09 conference in Phoenix. SAP’s CTO, Vishal Sikka, noted that new technologies (including social networking sites) require ERP vendors to process new kinds of information—much of it unsorted data—and in that regard rethink their systems.

Former Accenture partner Brian Sommers had some interesting things to say about these new demands being made of ERP on his ZDNet blog. While this first tidbit isn’t especially enlightening, he did draw attention to the fact that most ERP vendors ignore these emerging information sources, as they are not obviously correlated to the information that ends up on the general ledger. Sommers also commented on three areas in particular that ERP is faltering:
• Event data. Most ERP systems don’t monitor and assess the changing market share and business fortunes of competitors.
• The context behind data. Few systems understand structured accounting data, and even fewer can deal with data from less structured or external sources.
• Data from non-traditional users. Sommers thinks limiting ERP usage to traditional users will be detrimental in the future, and access needs to be opened to board members, shareholders, customers, etc.

The general theme emerging from Sikka’s talk was that SAP was looking to harness these new fonts of data. Sommers thinks that perhaps SAP is not looking far enough outside the traditional ERP box—he believes ERP vendors need to go beyond peripheral developments and re-envision the product altogether. Naturally, ERP will have to change at some point, but it will be interesting to see if after 15 years of (mostly) the same, whether that overhaul will come sooner or later.

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