The Third Wave

Recently, I spent quite a bit of time with IT professionals who had come

visiting the PCQuest Enterprise Solutions Showcase. And if the questions they

were asking during that showcase were any indication, then Indian organizations

are into the third wave of IT enablement.

The first wave was getting the basic infrastructure, particularly the

hardware in place. Basic software was part of this first wave. The most

significant milestone for many in the second wave was the implementation of the

basic elements of an ERP system. Why was this a significant milestone? Because

of the simple reason that an ERP system signaled the move away from isolated

islands of computation within the organization to a more integrated way of

planning and operations.

Like the infrastructure wave, the ERP wave also did not hit all organizations

at the same time. In fact, both happened over time with the waves hitting

different verticals and different organizations over different time spans. And

often the same organization has had to go through multiple cycles or wave hits,

as I would like to call them.

Krishna Kumar, Editor

And like I said, we are now on to the third wave. You could call this the

second phase of ERP or the phase of collaborative applications. Because those

were what most of the questions were about. Number one and two on the interest

list at the ESS was CRM and SCM solutions, fairly closely followed by

collaboration apps. The questions at the ESS were no flash in the pan. As I

speak to more and more IT professionals, the same pattern is coming through. In

short, we are on to the third wave.

And as we enter the third wave, it would be useful if we could learn from the

mistakes we did during the earlier cycles and avoid those and similar ones this

time. A big mistake of the ERP wave was the extended implementation cycles,

which often saw the business objectives going out of sync with what was

originally planned and was being implemented. This had led to many projects

requiring costly reworks along with time and cost overruns. An even bigger one

was, the unrealistic expectation that was created, particularly during the

earlier stages of the cycle.

Potential buyers were virtually sold the moon in many a case, and to be fair

to the vendors and consultants on the other side of the table, many an

enterprise was only too eager to believe in the promised utopia. The ERP wave

has now run for almost a decade and the collaborative apps phase can be expected

to be as long if not longer lasting. As we embark on this new wave, a healthy

dose of realism, if not positive cynicism is what is perhaps required to make it

a success.