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E N T E R P R I S E C H A N G E M A N A G E M E N T
ERP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): 10 reasons why ERP change management has outgrown helpdesk software.
Advances in ERP applications combined with complex implementations are challenging ERP specialists to manage change faster with fewer errors. As business-driven changes come faster, many ERP managers are struggling to break the ROI barrier for their ERP applications. Helpdesk-centric CM strategies do little to address the needs of complex ERP support and upgrade tasks, and increase the organization’s exposure to unmanaged and unauthorized ERP changes. Now, process-based CM/ALM capabilities are providing the ability to bridge an ERP from the implementation project to Level 2 production support with much less risk, while reducing ERP ownership costs (TCO).
Introduction
The best Enterprise Software for your company, the best consulting effort to help configure workflows to match your needs, and a serious investment in the future. Every business has its own way of dealing with change. How you respond can mean the critical difference between paying for it - or profiting from it.
ERP Applications are driving Enterprise Architecture Change Companies using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are making
large investments in the future. It is said that implementing an ERP application
can be compared to “re-wiring the Enterprise Central Nervous System”. These
Enterprise Applications carry a hefty price tag and require months of preparation
prior to final testing and rollout. Enterprise IT architects plan the enterprise data
architectures using key ERP data stores, including Oracle’s Trade Community
Architecture (TCA). Next generation ERP apps will introduce new technology--
Web services, integrated analytics, business-activity monitoring, portals, data
hubs, and repositories--all of which must be mastered to be used effectively.
At the heart of the primary ERP vendors’ redevelopment efforts is the adoption of
service-oriented architectures, Web services standards, and business process
management technology. SOA and BPM, the vendors say, are critical to making
their applications more modular and easier to adapt as needed.
Why do so Many ERP Implementations Fall Short of Expectations? Since ERP projects were monitored to evaluate their success rate and resultant
business impact, the majority of these implementations since 1995 (65%-75%)
missed original expectations, coming in late and over the initial budget. Most
companies simply underestimate the amount of change associated with deploying
and operating Enterprise Applications. Once in operation, there is a constant
stream of changes driven by the business, numerous patches from the application
vendor, and literally hundreds of minor and maintenance changes each year.
The cost for this underestimate can be significant, and can often exceed the cost
of the Enterprise/ERP Application software. Change Management (CM) errors
cost time and money, result in miscommunication, and erode user confidence.
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Redefining IT Change Management to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
This article explores CM/ALM (Change Management/Application Lifecycle Management) for
Enterprise Applications throughout the Application Lifecycle, highlights common mistakes made,
provides an understanding of the magnitude of the challenge, and shares some lessons learned. It is
surprising that the complexity of the average applications environment does not compare favorably
with the typical level of CM/ALM automation used to manage changes in these environments.
Companies invest heavily in Enterprise Applications, employ experts for several months to configure
the application, and then typically use inadequate software that is not Sarbanes-Oxley compliant for
Change Management. This is often an expensive mistake that can easily be avoided.
Business-oriented Change Management has become the preferred approach for ERP projects to
address the widespread business process impact. As such, there has been a certain amount of
confusion between Organizational Change Management and that in the IT lexicon, where Change
Management is discipline associated Application Software and Configuration Changes (along with
software configuration management, issue & defect management, release management, etc.). Rather
than approach application change as separate events, these events are in fact part of a series of
processes. To address the full scope of IT change management activities and IT Governance,
Enterprise Software Management vendors are delivering the next wave of process-based solutions for
managing change to Enterprise Applications, now referred to as Application Lifecycle Management
(or simply ALM).
The ALM Mandate: Application Management & Change infrastructure should mirror processes defined not simply to monitor change, but to facilitate change.
ALM solutions target embedded productivity and compliance through change governance for Oracle
E-Business Suite (EBS). As such, integrating the Source Version Control with Issue/SCR
Management and Release management are key distinguishing characteristics to more traditional CM
solutions. These solutions are aimed at easing compliance and change governance challenges,
including change auditing and security, and application enhancements. ALM delivers the simple,
powerful and persuasive answer for change theorists: foundational controls. That is, enforceable
processes that clearly governed how change would be defined, monitored and thus implemented.
Top-tier performers are not merely change embracers or early adopters; they identified and enforced
“process commandments” that constrained wasteful behaviors while reinforcing productive
discipline.
Identifying Core CM/ALM Disciplines
One example of a core process discipline in the organizations that consistently outperform when it
comes to change is effective integration of the Issue/SCR Management, Version Management and
Release Management processes. Maintaining version control for all custom objects in the production
database, or implementing version control software is an example of a high-impact control—call
them process enforcement controls—that gives IT leaders greater leverage over their process
investments. The bottom line is that these process tools make good developers better and faster at
doing what they do best. For example, when developers have ready access to earlier versions of
custom objects, using intelligent compare utilities to identify changes across revisions, they are much
more likely to perform more accurate impact analysis. When you provide these process enforcement
tools across development teams, you then create a more fluid transition process that significantly
reduces the propagation of errors.
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Understand the Objective of ERP Applications
For a large percentage of ERP customers, an ERP implementation has been the most complicated and
costly software project they have undertaken. Companies have made big investments in ERP
software, and leading CEO’s now want to see IT contributing more to the bottom line – producing
higher value at lower cost. Notwithstanding, patches and new releases create ongoing support and
business adaptation challenges that can chip away from the returns on ERP investments. Unmanaged
changes to ERP applications have generated some of the most recounted project horror stories.
Consequently, ERP Change Management is becoming the focus of attention in many IT
organizations.
Enterprise applications are intended to:
• Standardize individual, workgroup, and corporate
Business Processes throughout the enterprise.
• Leverage corporate data from “End-to-end”.
• Make changes in Business Processes easier and give the
company a “competitive edge”.
• Increase employee interaction and reduce duplication of
effort
A key variable in
determining the Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO)
for your ERP application
is to manage and control
the cost of incremental
changes.
Changes are inevitable. Most companies adapt their business processes for their ERP, but initially
find it easier to reduce the impact of the organizational change by customizing and extending the
ERP functionality to provide legacy system capabilities that are considered to be business critical.
The magnitude of these collective changes is more than most companies can effectively manage.
Staffing levels required for steady-state support operations quickly become overwhelmed because the
roles they have traditionally played must take on significantly more responsibilities, and the roles in
the ERP environment are very different from legacy system administration functions.
ERP Application Lifecycle Management: Level 2 vs. Level 1 Support
Until recently, IT Change Management had traditionally fallen within the domain of a helpdesk or
service desk-based operation. Largely due to the widespread install base of helpdesk software, it
became a de facto standard for Level 2 ERP support specialists. Unfortunately, most helpdesk
software does not address the wide variety of issues that are encountered, nor does it facilitate the
interaction between the business user and Application support specialists. Experience shows that this
issue would pose a critical shortcoming to implementing workflow-based processes with the key
decision-makers and subject matter experts in the business community.
Level 2 Support: Processes defined for ERP Application Specialists
ERP specialists, including business analysts, application administrators and technical application
specialists manage and perform the various level 2 Functional and Technical ERP support functions.
Many of these level 2 support processes, issue and defect tracking, actually begin during the ERP
implementation project when the ERP application is being configured, customized, etc., and must be
rigorously tested before it can deployed into production. In order to fully understand the difference
between the typical Level 1 service desk and Level 2 Application support, it is necessary to
understand the functional and technical scope of the various Level 2 ERP Support and Application
Management activities.
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There are a number of CM-related challenges that can present obstacles to realizing the full business
value of a company’s ERP Application investment. Unless you anticipate and prepare for change,
the impact of change and related services issues is often more painful than expected:
• The underlying benefit of the ERP architecture, a common data and application architecture,
also presents one of the biggest challenges. Since the various modules are tightly integrated,
patches can affect modules which were not the original target of the patch.
• Involvement and the level of commitment required of key business personnel during all
aspects of business process and application functionality discussions. CM errors will result
in miscommunication, delays, and more time required from your key business personnel.
• The number of patches, revisions to the ERP applications, and the modifications needed to
the basic ERP software to accommodate the newly revised business process.
• For hosted ERP users, the responsibility for defining change requirements, authorizing,
testing, scheduling, coordinating user notifications and procedural updates for ERP changes,
as well as developing detailed installation scripts and cutover/release plans are the
responsibility of the ERP user, and their Level 2 support staff.
• Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and significant changes in audit methodology.
• The impact to the organization and the related stress for company personnel during the high
rate of change during the implementation.
• Expert consultants are frequently used to perform the discovery of key business processes
and to estimate the magnitude of modifications to the ERP applications necessary to
implement them. Many of these consultants usually end up staying well beyond their
original project end date.
Typical ERP Level 2 Support & Implementation Project Activities
ERP Application specialists are the
frontline forces that facilitate
enterprise change via ERP
Applications. These ERP specialists
must continue to simultaneously
provide expert support for power
users under existing business and
ERP apps, while preparing for newly
deployed ERP updates. Both Level
2 (L2) support personnel and the
power users in the business are
crucial to ERP project success, as
well as the transition to steady-state
support operations.
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ERP Support and Project Activities/Controls:
1. Resolving Complex Application Issues and Defects/bugs that require evidencing of approval & testing.
2. Software change & enhancement requests.
3. Project Controls for both Issue Management and Project Change Coordination & Approval.
4. Changing application setups (Organization, GL Account Codes, Cross Validation rules, etc.).
5. Creating or changing custom code/application extensions.
6. Application Configuration Management across multi-tiered architectures.
7. Applying Vendor patches and upgrades.
8. Application Testing Activities.
9. Database and Application Performance issues.
10. Release Management-planning and coordinating complex changes/ releases.
Reason 1: Resolving Complex Application Issues and Defects/bugs that require SOX evidencing of Approval and Testing.
This is one of the most common functions performed by ERP specialists
and typically requires a very fast response in order to meet service level
expectations. The key to success is providing ability to capture adequate
information about the issue to determine if it needs to be addressed by a
functional or technical resource, or a combination thereof. Moreover, the
issue resolution process requires close coordination between the technical
and functional users that can verify the resolution. In many cases, these
ERP issues require research be done with the Application Vendor. At the
same time, the more you understand about the various application issues,
by capturing them in a centralized knowledge base, the easier it becomes
to perform root cause analysis.
ERP managers are required to spend a large percentage of their time verifying with developers that
pending changes and patches have been tested by the appropriate users, have been approved by both
IT and business management, and are included on a planned release schedule. In addition, there is
an ongoing need to research the status of individual Change Requests (SCR’s), and report back to the
IT management and business representatives, who will then provide the individual update to the
requesting stakeholder. For many ERP managers, these activities will consume a large portion of
their time and energy. In most organizations, this area proves to be the acid test for how effectively
IT and the Business are aligned when it comes to managing their ERP investment.
Reason 2: Software Change & Enhancement Requests
The process for capturing and tracking software change requests is an
integral part of managing a support and development team’s workload.
Software change requests can in fact become mini-projects within a support
and development organization, which need to follow a defined development
and testing process. They can be managed with the other work backlog and
tracked for progress, traceability and subsequent change control/release
management purposes.
Without exception the best way to reduce
cycle times of CM requests and facilitate
user and approver acceptance is to ensure
that communications are structured,
predictable, and efficient. Simplifying the
challenge further, automated notifications
are needed between the IT management
and business stakeholders who are key to
the approval process for implementing
application changes.
Approval
to Proceed
CM Request
Impact & Budget
AssessmentProject
Planning Resource Assignments
Testing Complete
Approval to
Promote
to Production
CM
Request Closed
Source Code Management
Cross Cross –– FunctionalFunctional
CommunicationCommunication
Reduced Cycle Time Reduced Cycle Time
with Compliant Audit with Compliant Audit
TrailTrail
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A common solution to issue management is a combination of email and spreadsheets. On ERP
projects, this approach rarely does justice to the magnitude of the coordination problems, and the
importance of tracking and managing issues & defects during the pre-production phases.
Unmanaged change and miscommunication can cause the even the best project plans to unravel. The
best defense against this project variable is an effective CM strategy.
Common mistakes made in Enterprise CM/ALM
• CM functions implemented only around source code promotion processes;
• Overloading Spreadsheets & email-based processes;
• Not providing/including the ability to manage change across multiple environments;
• Building out a CM strategy around “home-grown” utilities (Level 1).
• Level 2 application specialists using Level 1 toolkits
• Problems associated with release inconsistencies across development, testing and production
environments.
Reason 3: Project Controls for both Issue Management and Project Change Coordination and Approvals
Both new implementation and ERP upgrade projects require a high
level of interaction between the functional experts configuring the
application, technical users developing extensions and new reports,
and business testers. Issue management is a critical project control
function, especially in conjunction with testing activities, to ensure
that issues are addressed prior to production releases.
Linking issues directly to related source code revisions (for both
fixes and enhancements) is a fundamental capability supporting the
release management process.
Managing Project Change during Peak Project Spending
Another common misconception about
ERP Change Management controls
center around when these controls
should be introduced in the Application
Lifecycle. As you can see from the
opposite image, peak spending occurs
well before the production release or
cutover. Thus, managing change
effectively during peak project spending
ensures that the right resources are
focused on issues that need to be addressed before releasing an ERP application to the business
community. A customized Oracle Financials 11.5.10 upgrade project can expect to encounter in
excess of 300 issues that need to be resolved by a combination of the business, and ERP functional &
technical specialists. A new Oracle 11i Financials and HRMS implementation can encounter 600-700
issues, or more, of varying complexity. Allowing these issues to go unresolved until after production
release may result in a loss, or limited use, of key business functionality.
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An Organizational View of an ERP project in Distress.
As the rate of change
accelerates during an ERP
implementation or upgrade,
traditional communication
channels can quickly break
down from the volume demands
and delays on issues that require
business involvement. Ad hoc
communications invariably
result in key stakeholders being
left out of the loop.
Miscommunications and
inadvertent omissions lead to
misunderstandings, missed
expectations, and prolonged
change and issue resolutions.
Shifting priorities and scope
creep become unmanageable
when business process owners,
functional leads, and super users
are not “in-sync” with technical
teams and testing groups.
Implement ERP Application Change Governance using Process-based ALM
Understanding the CM/ALM Challenge of ERP/Enterprise Applications
According to the Yankee Group, “75 percent of application downtime is caused by ‘self inflicted’
errors”. In today's world, IT spending is under the value microscope as never before, 80 percent of
IT budgets are used just to maintain the status quo. CEOs and CFOs want to see more return on their
ERP investments. In addition to spending wisely on self-funding, higher performance IT
investments, IT executives must provide Enterprise application change controls on business critical
applications that support collaboration, visibility, speed and audit-ability.
Dev DBA Sys Admin
IT Project Mgrs
IT Ops Mgr
IT Senior Mgmt
CXO/ Finance/ Controller
Business Area Owners
SME / Super Users
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Change and adaptability have become the central tenets to surviving in a new and unforgiving business landscape. IT strategies must mirror these new adaptive demands on the business or risk becoming another victim to outsourcing. As ERP applications reach further out into the organization and impact the operations across so many departmental boundaries, the ability to implement ERP Application change efficiently with minimal errors has become a key IT performance measurement.
ERP Applications have established their place as the enterprise cornerstone
for future enterprise architectures (which is also underscored by Oracle’s
new Fusion architecture). What we have learned from countless studies and
hard won experience is that implementing an ERP is highly demanding for
both the business and IT. The ERP project statistics have reflected this
challenge, and interestingly enough one of the common complaints is
missed expectations. Controlling change, whether from application setup
activity or custom development, is one of the biggest factors in determining
whether your ERP project will become another statistic. A successful
organizational change strategy will not overcome the problems you can
encounter by missed expectations and Application service issues caused by
inadequate Application Change Management processes.
Increasing the Stakes for Aligning the Business & IT
In almost all cases, ERP implementations stretch the organization by
imposing a greater level of collaboration between the Business community
and the IT community, beyond the level of business involvement in earlier
IT projects. Without exception, the ERP Application Change Management
processes that effectively include the business stakeholders and decision
makers in the process result in consistently higher levels of satisfaction.
An effective Enterprise Application Change Management strategy
simplifies and automates the processes that support and development teams
use to manage and migrate Application changes.
The ALM Objective: Business-oriented Change Governance
As Change Governance becomes an imperative, the ITIL foundation is a significant underlying
factor. Managing ERP issues resolution, ensuring Change and Release processes are strictly
followed, and fully understanding complete Configuration information and impact prior to approving
and implementing changes is key to ensure that critical systems are not negatively impacted. The
way to reduce cycle times of CM requests and facilitate user and approver acceptance is to ensure
that communications are structured, predictable, and efficient. Simplifying the challenge further,
interactive communications between the stakeholders is the key to solving the most common failures
of CM.
In many cases, Enterprise Application support organizations rely on inadequate Level 1 helpdesk
products, overloaded spreadsheets, or homegrown solutions that result in unstructured
communications. At the same time, complex ERP implementations and SOX audit demands require
a process-based approach that can enforce mandated approval requirements and engage approvers
from the business community.
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Reason 4: Changing ERP Application Setups Reason 5: Creating and changing custom code/application extensions
ERP Application Setup values control the behavior of the ERP application,
and personalize the Application for each business. Business Analysts and
System Administrators can take painstaking efforts to correctly configure
an ERP for transaction processing via controls such as check formatting
and programs, receiving options and cross-validation rules. Setups, initially
entered during implementation, are modified and maintained during
upgrades and on-going maintenance. Changes impact business operations
and must be tightly managed and controlled, and meet SOX audit
requirements.
An ERP Application technology stack is extremely complex with extensive
interdependencies. Any RICE development (Reports, Interfaces,
Conversions, and Extensions), patches or upgrade can have far-reaching
impact and must be tightly managed and controlled to ensure there are no
undesirable effects on other ERP modules. Impact Analysis and Source
Code Version Control tools provide critical versioning and impact analysis
capabilities that can dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to
process source code changes.
Reason 4 and Reason 5 highlight specific examples of how ERP applications require a combination
of Technical and Business Analyst (or Application Functional) skills to understand that business
impact of a given issue or change. This collaboration also means that Application Support
Specialists are more likely to focus on ERP changes and enhancements that return value to the
business.
Building a Framework for Aligning the Business & IT
As the earlier image of
unstructured/informal change
channels depicts, the process
of coordinating ERP changes
across multiple departmental
boundaries can quickly break
down into separate functional
and organizational silos.
By implementing a structured
CM/ALM infrastructure, IT
applications support
specialists have the foundation
for implementing SDLC
processes, ITIL, CMMI, as
well as internal IT controls.
Managing the ERP Application Change Lifecycle
Inadequate Enterprise Application Change Management poses the greatest risk for errors and
miscommunication in an Enterprise Application environment. Each error and miscommunication
costs money to resolve. CM/ALM tools provide the centralized infrastructure for stakeholders to
communicate and interact during the implementation and steady-state support operations of
Application Change Management Layer
Dev DBA Sys Admin
IT Project Mgrs
IT Ops Mgr
IT Senior Mgmt
Audit Compliance
CXO/ Finance/ Controller
Business Area Owners
SME / Super Users
Issue Management Defect Tracking
Release Management Change Tracking
Process Management
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Enterprise Applications. Using a closed-loop workflow approach enables Business and IT to
collaborate in a meaningful to solve problems, and provide a SOX-compliant audit trail for each
change processed.
Reason 6: Application Configuration Management across multi-tiered architectures. Reason 7: Applying Vendor patches and upgrades
Making changes to the applications that are the business’ lifeblood has
always been a high stakes game, but never more than now, when those
changes have to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel
II. The concept of Configuration Management for ERP applications in
particular represents the future in systems management, enabling
organizations to baseline configurations, audit user activity, institute
change management processes, institute security controls, and automate
validation.
One of the most important and time-consuming Oracle Applications DBA
job is applying patches to the E-Business Suite. Patches may be required to
resolve problems with the application code, to fix production issues, to
install new features, or to upgrade components of the technology stack.
Patching is not a simple one-step process, but rather requires careful
research in order to determine all of the prerequisite steps, patching steps,
and post-patching steps required. Many times, testing is required to
determine any unintended changes that may be included with larger
patches.
Preparing for the changes involved in migrating to Oracle Release 11.5.10, and beyond…
For Oracle ERP users, the migration from release
11.5.8 to 11.5.10 can represent daunting release
management challenge. Close coordination is
required across the functional, technical and
DBA teams. The cutover process must be
planned in painstaking detail to ensure no steps
are missed.
Even without upgrading database releases, this
Apps upgrade requires up to 90,000 processes to
execute, and can take 4 days to complete
(depending on the size of your ERP database).
Reason 8: Application Testing Activities.
Regression Testing can strike fear into the hearts of any seasoned ERP
specialists. Testing activities can absorb an excessive amount of time from
some of the key business users and subject matter experts (SME’s). Their
valuable time must be used judiciously. The last thing they want to do is
retest an application function only to encounter problems that have been
identified and reported already. Many people do not realize that this is both
an area where tremendous savings can be realized (by reducing unnecessary
retesting activity), and where the confidence of key business users can be
either won or lost.
Application and Database performance have become a key factor in
ERP
Environments
* Apps Upgrade
Test Environment.
Dev
Test Prod
Upgd*New
Release
/ Patch
Dev
Test Prod
Upgd*New
Release
/ PatchNew Release /
Patch implementation
New Release /
Patch implementation
New Release /VersionNew Release /VersionLocal
Application
Customizations
Local
Application
Customizations
Vendor
Software
Updates
Vendor
Software
Updates
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Reason 9: Database and Application Performance Issues.
measuring overall user satisfaction. A poorly performing ERP application
is commonly viewed as a broken application by most application users.
ERP customizations and extensions can be prone to performance issues,
especially when user loads and data volumes/database size increase. More
often than not, performance issues are not easy to predict until the system
reaches a threshold load factor. These performance issues require close
coordination between the Level 2 technical and DBA staff to analyze
performance statistics to determine the root cause.
Reason 10: Release Management-planning and coordinating complex changes/ releases.
In general, release management is about controlling the flow of changes
into a production environment. In order to control, one needs to know what
is being controlled and how it is being controlled, so a plan is a requisite
part of the release process. ERP Release Management can involve a
complex series of orchestrated activities, both functional and technical, that
leaves very little room for error.
As depicted in the diagram below, Change Management is fundamentally a
sequence of interconnected processes. Release Management represents the
final stage of the change cycle. For ERP applications especially, the
Release Management discipline through consistent execution release plans
minimizes the risk that changes in the system will disrupt a company's
business.
Managing the Transition from ERP Implementation to Level 2 Support
If your organization has outsourced your ERP implementation project (or even a significant new
release or upgrade), then you probably have encountered the challenge of transitioning ERP support
tasks to an in-house support organization. Implementing an ERP support structure poses a key
challenge for all new ERP users. Support processes must be well defined to quickly triage issues that
need to be routed to functional analysts, technical analysts or referred to Oracle to identify corrective
patches that may be required. Overloaded spreadsheets and ad-hoc email communications are
the single largest contributor to the inadvertent creation of both functional and organizational
silos in an IT organization. Homegrown solutions are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of
changes in a typical ERP environment. ERP managers must have control, insight and predictability
into the Enterprise Software Development Lifecycle, and effectively manage the Level 2 Support
Processes performed by ERP specialists.
E R P A P P L I C A T I O N L I F E C Y C L E M A N A G E M E N T ( A L M ) : 1 0 R E A S O N S W H Y E R P
C H A N G E M A N A G E M E N T H A S O U T G R O W N H E L P D E S K S O F T W A R E .
C O P Y R I G H T © 2 0 0 6 I N T E R N E X T G R O U P , L L C 1 2 O F 1 2
In order to fully understand the business value of effective CM/ALM practices, you need to consider
how your ERP application management and change processes directly impact the TCO (Total Cost of
Ownership) for ERP Applications. The general consensus from those that have adopted CM/ALM
are tangible improvements in quality, service levels and financial metrics, directly resulting from:
• Higher Software Quality
• Improved time to market
• Less rework required
• Improvements in financial metrics (ROI & TCO)
• More predictability and better understanding of Project Status
• Better Compliance with IT and SOX controls
Companies make serious investments in ERP and infrastructure to run their business, and employ the
services of expensive ERP consulting experts to assist with the ERP implementation. The best
approach to manage these business critical applications throughout their lifecycle is to use workflow-
driven applications to both enforce process controls and manage the many changes, scope expansion
requests, and stakeholder approvals.
Summary
IT's accelerated innovation rate has generated an enormous body of
change management material for CIO’s. Almost all of it addresses how to
turn change management into a reliable, robust and cost-effective process.
Change is not an event. Change management—like Application Lifecycle
Management—is really process management, and change leadership is
really process leadership. That's true for organizations, systems and ERP
applications. At the same time, that is where the business can finally
realize the promised Return on Investment (ROI) from their ERP
investment, by reducing CM cycle times, and getting changes driven by
the business into production faster and more reliably.
Visualize, Orchestrate and Enforce
Top performers really don’t view these controls as behavioral constraints,
rather as infrastructure for innovation. Controls aren't shackles; they can
be change cycle accelerators. By embracing controls, developers have
greater flexibility in process management because disciplined design and
testing has proven more agile, robust and predictable than unauthorized
change, with much less risk. Most recognized high-performance
organizations are high-controls cultures, where Best Practices are
synonymous with best controls.
ERP applications are being put to the test in the harshest business climate that most have witnessed in their careers. IT managers are now looking to ALM to solve change-related problems, and also prepare for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance.
Allan B Hooks
832.814.8100
InterNext Group, LLC 12777 Jones Rd, Ste. 297 Houston, TX 77070