SAP Service Delivery versus Value Delivery

By |April 30th, 2012|

In my review of academic literature around SAP or ERP implementations, I find some thought-provoking items. Recently, I reviewed a study that helped me to form a more complete picture of important issues in IT delivery. Even though I have been writing about it for years, I gained a new clarity around evaluating some of the existing delivery models [FN1]. What it comes down to is this question: Are you looking for service delivery or business results for your SAP project? SAP Service Delivery or [...]

Creating a Knowledge-Centered Learning Organization

By |April 16th, 2012|

This post is a continuation of Business Transformation for IT Leadership and is part of a journey around Organizational Change Management Inside the IT Support Organization. To achieve an active, vibrant, knowledge-sharing learning organization, you need some baseline understanding of what your goals are. You need a culture that produces, organizes, disseminates, applies, and then refines information (see the image to the left). This leads me to the next key point that few people who call thems [...]

SAP Enabled Business Transformation for IT Leadership

By |March 12th, 2012|

Continuing the Journey to the Business-Converged SAP Center of Excellence After many years researching and living through IT and business convergence for IT leadership, I ran into a study that brought more clarity to the key dividing concepts. Some interesting approaches and maturity models are available for senior executives, but little direction for the delivery organization (for detailed development, see 3 Development Phases for SAP Center of Excellence Maturity). CIO magazine established a [...]

Achieving Business Value from SAP Investment

By |February 27th, 2012|

As a follow-up to the previous post on Sustained Business Value from SAP Business Software, I did some research on the study authors and discovered their continued focus on this issue. Recently, Peppard (one of the authors) and a couple of other colleagues provided real business value success findings in an upcoming journal article titled “Factors Affecting the Successful Realization of Benefits from Systems Development Projects: Findings From Three Case Studies” [FN1]. While I read through and [...]

SAP Program Management Requires a Type of CMMI

By |November 7th, 2011|

Many are unaware that SAP provides a broad set of tools and resources for Program Management and the Capability Maturity Model (or CMM). Few are familiar with SAP’s broad set of supports for this purpose, such as the ASAP Methodology Phase 6 “Run” enhancement. This enhancement is loaded with key information that aligns with Program Management responsibilities and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) [FN1]. So, what is CMM (or CMMI as it is more properly referred to)? “CMMI (Capability M [...]

ERP II & ERP III – SAP Business IT Revolution

By |October 31st, 2011|

The day after I released my last post (SAP IT Governance – Achieve Business IT Engagement), techrepublic.com published a review of the CIO future direction. While I do not agree with all of the Gartner conclusions they published, I certainly agree with the “new CIO manifesto” (TechRepublic: Get drastic: 15 IT best practices to kill). Reading through the comments left on the TechRepublic post was enlightening. However, most of the comments focused on the details of one or two points of disagreem [...]