2 posts tagged “best of breed”

I’m always wary of writing about experiences I’ve recently had in my business dealings for fear that I may offend someone and that an ongoing piece of work may be compromised.

However, I think on this occasion there is no danger that the person will read this blog, and even if they did, what they read wouldn’t bother them anyway.

I was asked by an old friend to have a meeting with the owner of a small successful company. She had looked at his business systems and suggested that he really needed to get an expert in to give him some advice as to what to do. My default position on business systems is to look at ERP first and then Best of Breed second – you’ll find a white paper about my views on ERP v BOB here.

Anyway, I sat down with the owner of the business and he told me about his current business system – he had developed it himself entirely in Microsoft Access. It soon became clear that he understood his business very well indeed and that the Access ‘business system’ he had written was entirely tailored to his needs. Except that his needs seemed to be changing every day. He is spending hours each day changing and tinkering with his system. He insisted to me that an ‘off the shelf’ package just wouldn’t suit his needs.  

Before I go any further I need to repeat some of the expressions that he used during our meeting;

“I get frustrated because no-one else here knows how to use the system”

“Every time someone needs a report I need to get into the system and write it – no one does it themselves”

It was clear that he didn’t have any user instructions – he didn’t have the time to write them, but it seems unfair to me that he blames other people for this!

His solution is to get a local VB programmer to take his Access application and turn it into ‘A proper system’. Recognising that I was perhaps not ever going to convince him to invest in a packaged solution I tried to give him some good advice (for free) on how best to approach this.

I suggested that rather than just hand over the Access database as it was he might be better to take some time to put together a requirements specification listing the functionality his business needed to run. Then he should consider turning this into a functional specification to give the programmers some insight as to what is required – a good business analyst would be able to help them produce this functional specification and also bring some external knowledge of how a business system generally works. Although this is the type of work that we do as a business I was reaching the conclusion that I wasn’t likely to be doing this with him.

The reason I came to this way of thinking was that he explained to me that he had tried on two previous occasions to have his business system ‘written properly’ and on both occasions (costing a sum of around £30,000) he had halted the project because the programmer ‘just didn’t understand what I needed’. I reiterated the importance of the approach I outlined but he wouldn’t take it on board at all – he insisted that handing over his database was specification enough.

Finally, I suggested that at the very least he should view a couple of packaged solutions – not because he should consider buying them but simply to see what they do, how they do it and why. This would, I suggested, give him some ideas on how his system should perform.

His response to this was that he just couldn’t sit through software demonstrations because he became bored with them and switched off after a few minutes.

So, in summary, he wouldn’t consider a packaged solution. He complained that no-one understood the solution he had written himself. He’d had two previous attempts to write the solution ‘professionally’ but had aborted them. He couldn’t be bothered to write any specifications. He couldn’t be bothered to look ‘for reference’ at any other business packages.

I occasionally you meet people that you just can’t help – this was genuinely one of them. I’d have been better banging my head against a brick wall.

When a business is suffering pain with its current IT systems, or lack of them, then  it is likely there will be a great debate as to which is the best solution going forward.

There will be advocates for the ERP solution –people that are convinced about the benefits of a single system that does ‘everything’ or have actually experienced ERP for themselves in a different organization. There will likely be a group of people that believe that a ‘Best of Breed’ (read ‘Designed for that industry’) will be the correct answer to the businesses needs. They will accept that interfacing multiple systems together is acceptable providing they have a package that is core to their business doing whatever it is they do, in the best way.

The right answer, depending on your industry, the quality and availability of ERP vertical add-ons, the number of Best of Breed offerings, the size of your organization and a number of different other factors, is not obvious.

The first time I was involved in a business system replacement where ERP was an option I was firmly against the concept. Over time I have changed my mind. Though I sometimes will still recommend Best of Breed I think that ERP generally is the best business systems solution and should be discounted first before seeking a BOB alternative.

To understand what helped me changed my mind you can read my paper ‘ERP or best of breed?’

Have you changed your mind? Let me know.