A great post the other day from Michael Krigsman at his blog, Rearranging the Deck Chairs. He excerpts a white paper sponsored by SearchCIO called As the World Turns: CIOs and their ERP Dramas. A particularly insightful bit:

It’s not ERP systems per se that present the stumbling block; the trouble arises from the internal state of the enterprise, the way IT is conducted and how decisions are made. The ERP project ends up being a kind of IT CAT scan, revealing everything that is broken or out of alignment.

So getting full value from an ERP investment requires the organization to examine what’s out of alignment and fundamentally change how it works. The question is one of readiness: Is your company braced for this level of change?

I like the image of big-project-as-CAT-scan. It’s not until times of stress that we usually see what’s really not working in our organizations. I am encouraged, however, that more companies seem to be paying attention to change management before (or at least during) their large-scale software implemementations.