The practice of making deals on golf courses seems to be alive and well. And it is IT leaders and their teams that are having to pick up the pieces following the agreed purchase of unsuitable tech after a business chief is showered with corporate hospitality.
There is nothing wrong with corporate hospitality. Tech firms can spend as much as they like trying to entice new and existing customers. Good luck to them. But which business leader would admit their decisions are swayed by such enticement?
Yet a recent report from analyst Gartner has highlighted this may well be happening. Buying an ERP is not only a business decision; getting it wrong can very well break the business or, at the very least, cause an untold level of disruption and additional cost.
Gartner’s research found that SAP customers are often told by SAP that their systems are decades old, overly customised and neglected, which, SAP then claims means that they are missing innovation it can deliver.
But, IT leaders tend to rate their existing ERP systems as highly mature and stable. They would counter SAP’s arguments by saying that they have been working on business transformations and optimisation for years and they have been keeping their business applications up to date.
So there is a disconnect, between the reality of the corporate IT system and the “grass is greener” myth peddled by the IT salesperson trying to land a new contract.
The fact that these people are circumventing corporate IT decision-makers and going directly to the top is something that seems particularly disrespectful. The long-term success of that contract relies 100% on a commitment from IT. There are countless war stories of projects failing due to disenfranchised IT teams, where the corporate executive backing the deal has failed to appreciate the technical challenges.
The Gartner report highlights a number of major issues with SAP Rise, that do need full consideration and can impact how successful the implementation will be. For instance, one component, SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP), which is used to transfer data in and out of the SAP cloud ERP system, is, according to Gartner, not available in every geographical region. The analyst firm also warns that an organisation using Rise is likely to incur data ingress costs when moving data out of Rise. This may be a requirement if the business wants to use the data in SAP to drive other processes outside of the Rise system.
No one is saying that business leaders need to understand the tech: their job is running the business, but they really should entrust decisions relating to IT to people who really do know what they are talking about.