Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems.

• Author: Miranda, Rowan
• Position: Review

Davenport, Thomas H.

Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press (335 pp)

Reviewed by Rowan Miranda, Ph.D., Director of Research, GFOA, Chicago, Illinois.

Enterprise Systems (ES), more popularly known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are shaping the future of large organizations. The promise of these systems-seamless integration of diverse business functions and processes-is one of the reasons that such systems are a multi-billion dollar industry. Beginning in the mid 1990s, governments ventured into the ES marketplace seeking to find ways to use such systems to reengineer and automate core processes. Because of the high demand for such systems in the late 1990s, the GFOA developed a consulting practice to help state and local governments in this arena. GFOA's daily work with governments such as Los Angeles Country, State of Oklahoma, and the City of Chicago, as well as industry research conducted by our technology analysts, has led us to conclude that the track record is a mixed one in both the public and private sector. It is not uncommon to hear about organizations that have invested millions only to turn back to using the "old" system. However, it also is commonplace to find organizations that have successfully implemented enterprise systems, which are slowly beginning to reap the benefits of new technology.

For all of the attention and interest enterprise systems have generated, there is very little systematic research on them. Instead, organizations deciding whether to pursue an enterprise system strategy are forced to rely on vendor marketing materials, select disaster stories that may blame the software vendor when a large number of other variables may have led to failure, or shoddy research from IT industry research firms that assert "independence" in vendor evaluations when the software firms being evaluated actually fund the "research." Mission Critical is easily the best resource available to executives today contemplating whether to pursue an ES or ERP strategy. The book covers a broad range of topics and it is impossible to do justice to all of them in a book review. Instead, Davenport's discussion of how to structure an implementation has been specifically chosen as it is of considerable interest to finance officers and it illustrates the value of the book.

Davenport argues that there are two key dimensions in structuring ES projects--speed (fast or slow) and focus (technical or strategic). In the private sector...