CIOs' next nightmare: legacy ERP
For more than two decades, large-scale and highly customized ERP implementations were as routine as they were expensive and cumbersome. In the end – if they were lucky – enterprises managed to use Oracle or SAP to keep tabs on internal transactions and maybe facilities reporting and that was about it.
Anything more exciting and useful often required more and more customization, which cost more money and complicated more employees' lives as overlapping applications and business units were marched – often at gunpoint – into the fray. It was good business for the vendors and ERP integrators, but implementation failures – or disappointments – were rampant and the rise of cloud-based apps and services forever changed the game.
So much so, in fact, that Gartner's latest report on the subject predicts that by 2016, heavily customized ERP implementations will forever more be referred to as "legacy ERP" and any CIO will tell you that "legacy" anything is shorthand for an expensive, time-consuming pain in the neck.