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During the 90's we were holed up at a consulting engagement for 30
months. This was one of those ERP implementations were blood was spilled, early,
often and ongoing. It was an interesting time, looking back.
I remember that there was a very nice lady named Maria who sat adjacent to
me. She was quiet as a church mouse, as they say, but always with a smile. She
was not part of the ERP implementation, but she was a consultant. Finally, one
Friday afternoon I noticed that she was working late, too, and I started a
off-hand conversation. She must have had a lot on her mind because she opened up
and talked for a good half hour.
She was brought in to help resolve issues with the Accounts Receivable
system. This was one of those custom built applications that had been around
since 'the war' (yeah, that war). It had had thousands of changes,
additions and deletions over the years. The company could never close their
books because they could never tie out the A/R balances to the G/L, or to Cash
for that matter.
But before Maria could write a single line of code, she had to spend the
better part of two months trying to just unravel the spaghetti. She showed me
some of the diagrams that she had done which depicted the various files,
processes and reports that comprised the system. Wow, I thought ERP was complex
but this was a whole other level of madness. After the system had been charted
she spent another 6 months trying to figure out the details of the code. After 8
months she started to resolve the issues with the system. She was still there
when I left.
Every month the manager of the A/R group would show up about the 10th or
so with the news of this month's irreconcilable difference. The whole group
would work studiously and piece by piece they would figure out what had happened
to 14 million bucks. There were always strange, interesting tales to be told
during this time. Lost files, wrong timestamp, I never understood a jot of it.
For the A/R folks these were heady days when one proved their worth to the
group. You could see the excitement and hear it in their voices. It was fun
to find 3.3 million buried in the system somewhere.
Lessons? Well, we should probably start a list.
- If your company is not actually in the Information Technology business, and
you are doing custom development, beware: There is probably no documentation to
speak of, anywhere.
- The answer to why #1 happens is that you are not in the IT business. You are
not concerned about solving IT problems but about solving business problems. As
a result you dump new high priorities on the IT group daily and they simply code
until their fingers are nubs and the business problem is resolved. Tomorrow's
issues are someone else's problem.
- You will see significant turnover in IT, especially if your company is not
in the IT business, per se. You don't pay enough to keep people around, and the
work is stifling after a while. People need to solve new problems to stop the
slow descent into the IT stupor.
- The best efforts of good people will not good systems create. If these good
people are sitting in the business and working for the business it is almost
certain that a good system will not be created. Why? Because, again, the system
becomes a way to solve a lot of short term issues. IT bends to the will of the
business. As they must.
- You are under an illusion that you have business processes. I have seen
Maria's diagrams and believe me if this is a business process then I'll eat my
shoe. At some low level of activity in the organization you probably have a
business process, but once the transaction leaves the source all hell breaks
loose and anything can happen, and does.
There has been a lot of talk lately about business processes here
and here. Some
say that we need to constantly start over again and reinvent business processes
and others maintain that we are nearing the end of the usefulness of business
processes. But from my experience with Maria we probably have less business
process than we would like to pretend we do. And it is barely a process at all,
because over time we have had to deal with a thousand business problems,
otherwise known as process exceptions. The software reflects this scattered
solution.
Business process is a great thing and it can deliver great results at the
source of transactions. As far as the rest of the company goes it may have
little if any bearing. Once you get into the departments there is a whole new
calculus that takes over, and it has nothing to do with process. More about this
next time. |
