Ensuring e-business success by learning from ERP failures

Although enterprise resource planning may be the toughest project you've ever attempted, doing it right will be the key to implementing a successful e-business. Based on his own experiences with ERP projects in the 1990s, the author found that for your project to succeed, you must prevent problems in the following high-priority areas: e-business strategy; project management approaches; complex technology and systems; and end-user resistance. A small investment in understanding, analyzing, tracking, and preventing these major problems should pay off well, given that most such problems are common, expected, avoidable, and detectable early. One viable approach to reducing the likelihood of failure is to identify the crucial risks at each point of the project life cycle, then build plans to address them before they become real problems. The author found this technique useful in evaluating ERP projects and fully expect it to be useful for evaluating e-business system projects as well.