As a provider of sourcing and spend management solutions into big businesses, we see our fair share of major ERP implementations and integrating with them – whether that be with a single version of SAP or half a dozen different systems across a group – is a critical part of every project.

What we see is that, almost without exception, major organisations have spent more time and money installing these systems than was originally planned. The stories are long and familiar and most of the users of these systems are still reeling from false promises, over engineered applications, lack of suitable functionality and late delivery.

So what are solution providers like us and the IT departments we work with doing to recover from this situation?

Well, it’s no magic bullet, but the still recent phenomena of the service oriented architecture (SOA - take a look at http://www.soa-consortium.org/ for more details) really could represent a brave new world for IT and Business Process Management (BPM).

The principals of SOA are based around close collaboration between IT and business user, designed ultimately to give business users what they really want, and are now backed by just about every major IT vendor in the world.

Just compare some of the reasons we have failed in the past with ERP and match these up against the main characteristics for SOA and some of the answers become apparent.

»       ERP – large, one size fits all

»       SOA – small, agile fit for purpose

»       ERP -  over engineered, ‘one size fits all’, lots of redundant functionality

»       SOA – designed to fit, easy to use

»       ERP – Expensive, large commitment

»       SOA – as required, bite size chunks

»       ERP – No user input – ‘That’s how it works’

»       SOA – engineered jointly (IT and User)- exact fit usage

»       ERP – Changes are expensive and not encouraged

»       SOA – built to change, cost effective

Another key value driver is that SOA can be used as a wrapper around unusable, badly implemented functions, maintaining the link with the ERP (ERP will see no difference) but giving the user extended easy to use functionality. So extending this to a whole organisation you can, in 'lego brick' style, build fit for purpose functionality around the ERP without having to go through all that pain again.

Which is where we sit as an eProcurement and spend management provider, delivering rapid deployment and high value returns by seamlessly extending the reach of the installed ERP system(s).

The benefits of this kind of approach are pretty clear:

»       Implementation at the speed you can afford

»       High ROI can be attacked first

»       Easy to justify smaller amounts of work

»       New functionality can be bolted on

»       Existing investment not compromised

»       Business user have a say and get what they want

»       Can be implemented with web services – talk to anything!

»       Short implementation timescales – quick results!

Most of this can be summed up in the following associated article http://www.mcsolutions.co.uk/article/10191/SOAs-apprentice.aspx which looks at this issue in much greater detail.

In summary, SOA means the IT community is in real danger of giving the users what they want. How’s that for a thought!