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The complex issues that drive business change - merger, acquisition, compliance, and new business opportunity, as well as customer and partner demands - have always had a direct impact on corporate IT management. As businesses evolve, one of the CFO's tasks is to ensure that the enterprise's investments in technology and business applications enable those assets to remain a key enabler of change and new opportunity, instead of a barrier. A well-managed convergence of business requirements and IT functionality is today's hallmark of a successful enterprise. The CFO who understands this convergence reaps its rewards.
SAP customers, who count among their numbers leading companies in every vertical industry on the planet, have a particular need to ensure that business requirements and IT functionality remain closely synchronized. For most SAP customers, their R/3 and mySAP Business Suite systems function at the very heart of the enterprise, and any disruption to their IT operations can have a direct and potentially negative impact across the enterprise.
This renders certain key IT events - upgrades and instance consolidations, for example - and key business requirements - compliance and auditability - particularly sensitive to error. A failure to anticipate the impact of an upgrade or instance consolidation, or the inability to accurately monitor and report on key business processes for audit and compliance purposes, can have profoundly harmful effects. The result, depending on the business, can reach directly into the CFO's office, negatively impacting income, profit, and market capitalization, and resulting in fiscal and legal sanction.
Against this backdrop of unwanted adversity, Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC) has been asked to review a software solution from IntelliCorp designed specifically to ensure that SAP customers are able to proactively prevent these key business and IT events from disrupting operations and impacting the bottom line. EAC's review of this offering - Assessor for SAP -and EAC's interviews with joint SAP and IntelliCorp customers, shows a well-designed and successful solution that can not only help mitigate the impact of dynamic business and IT change but does so in a way that can lower overall upgrade costs while preventing upgrade and implementation failure.
The Business Case for Risk-Free Change
The synergy between IT and business makes change in either dimension a potentially risky endeavor. The annals of business failure are replete with examples of companies that have failed to successfully synchronize business and IT change, and paid an enormous price in terms of lost revenues, diminished market capitalization, lost customers, and lost opportunity.
The growth of increased regulatory and compliance requirements - Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA in healthcare, the FDA's 21 CFR 11 regime for electronic records and signatures, among others -has exacerbated the sensitivity of this synergy between business and IT. Compliance has to be executed not only efficiently, but in a way that is both auditable and reliable. Failure to do so can expose a company to legal penalties, unwanted publicity, and financial uncertainty.
Compliance thus becomes a special case in the checkered history of software implementation: not only are many IT-related activities now subject to compliance, thereby presenting potential problems if poorly understood and monitored, but compliance solutions are also often part of an upgrade or IT change process, and therefore susceptible to the standard issues that arise from upgrade and implementation problems.
The sensitivity of the interactions of IT and business to change can be seen in Enterprise Applications Consulting's review of implementation and operational failure in IT projects. EAC's data, covering over ten years of research and over 120 individual projects and implementations, show a well-established pattern of failure that is as predictable as it is avoidable. These problems bedevil a host of IT projects - from "simple" upgrades to large-scale "big bang" implementations - and can strike regardless of the scope of change or the relative experience of the business implementing the change.
It is important to bear in mind that, while the burden of success is typically the purview of the CIO, the burden of mitigating failure rest largely in the hands of the CFO, particularly at publicly-traded companies. The damage that comes from these failures is most directly felt on the balance sheet and in the stock price of the affected company, and the CFO typically bears a significant part of the burden of damage control.
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