Till Death do us part!

This can't be about ERP can it? 

Isn't this part of a marriage vow?  Well, yes and no.  When you implemented your current business system, you did in fact "marry" your business to that package. 

I've been busy working on a series of Webinars with one of our business partners, Trilogy Solutions.  They asked us to address the most common obstacles to IT success.  It got me thinking about my Information Gridlock concept.   This is the situation that most small enterprises find themselves in, locked in by a bunch of disparate systems, all designed with a specific purpose in mind, aside from the main purpose, which is to work well together to support a streamlined and efficient mode of doing business.

They end up spending all the their precious IT resources on manual work-arounds, sneaker-net integration and Excel reporting.   But they're proud of their hard work and the neat tricks that make it all work - sort of. 

When this happens it's time for a divorce from your current IT and Business Applications environment.  Staying in gridlock hell can mean Death  -  maybe not put you out of business, but certainly put a big dent in your competitiveness and ability to offer what your competitors may offer.   

Like a lot of changes made over time, they sort of creep up on you.  You add something here, add something there - bolt on a contact manager, get a standalone production system or a little kitting application, and before you know it you're spending all of your time fiddling and tweaking, and not recognizing that something is fundamentally wrong here.    You're in Information Gridlock, and you need to take the offensive.   

So, till Death do us part - and if you're saddled with a gridlocked IT environment, it's time to kill the old system before it kills you and start anew - this time Getting IT Right, starting with that integrated foundation that is the key to long term success.