Gartner has at least one thing down that I believe is “the way” - they call it “postmodern ERP”. [0]
In a postmodern ERP there is no ERP.
It’s a strategy where you accept that different domains and companies know their business and processes best and you integrate best of breed systems & services with homegrown solutions.
You trade the convenience of letting SAP or Salesforce own your processes against flexibility and actual agility.
The cost is competence - you’ll need developers working in stable, dedicated domain teams, even within the administrative/cost-center areas such as HR & Finance. But there is a massive potential in this approach. It forces ownership of processes and allows for rapid changes of digitized processes, integrations and technology.
I must stress stability of the teams: agility comes from building domain knowledge and continually working on contracts between organizational units over time. This is the complete opposite to classic project management.
SAP caters to non-tech savvy businesses people striving for control, which is something they think is achieved through “one system”. I personally call it the “one system trap”.
In the end what matters is data, and that data do not have to reside in one database. In fact, it’s better for everyone if it doesn’t - this is what ELT is for.
Well, this is possibly the only one thing they have down, IMO.
It’s a strategy. No products. No quadrants. Just a more reasonable way of looking at business IT and enterprise development.
It happens to mesh well with my experiences and it’s sometimes nice to be able to whack “Gartner” about in certain settings - especially when someone’s trying to get traction for a magic quadrant product! :)
And to be fair - this is a thread about SAP and ERP…
It's a standard publication read by upper management at tons of large companies. Being in a quadrant is basically marketing to exactly the people you want to reach.
Because there are many large companies who's entire purchasing procedure seems to be to select whoever's furthest in the top right of Gartner's quadrants
What's the problem with Gartner? According to them we would be out of work and biz peps high on milky-way charts can accomplish anything with mouse clicks.
In a postmodern ERP there is no ERP.
It’s a strategy where you accept that different domains and companies know their business and processes best and you integrate best of breed systems & services with homegrown solutions.
You trade the convenience of letting SAP or Salesforce own your processes against flexibility and actual agility.
The cost is competence - you’ll need developers working in stable, dedicated domain teams, even within the administrative/cost-center areas such as HR & Finance. But there is a massive potential in this approach. It forces ownership of processes and allows for rapid changes of digitized processes, integrations and technology.
I must stress stability of the teams: agility comes from building domain knowledge and continually working on contracts between organizational units over time. This is the complete opposite to classic project management.
SAP caters to non-tech savvy businesses people striving for control, which is something they think is achieved through “one system”. I personally call it the “one system trap”.
In the end what matters is data, and that data do not have to reside in one database. In fact, it’s better for everyone if it doesn’t - this is what ELT is for.
[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/p...