What do you mean by results gap?

Defining the “results gap” is key to understanding how organizations can benefit from focusing on the needs of users and their view of business processes. Medium to large organizations can invest millions of dollars in ERP and other line of business systems and not see the benefits that drove those purchasing decisions: increased productivity, better business insight and improved compliance with corporate policies and procedures.

The first way of looking at the results gap is from a purely financial perspective, i.e. can an investment in a given system provide a positive return on investment (ROI)? That return on investment might represent reduced FTE requirements, business services that are no longer required or the replacement of a more costly system. Some of the difficulties with these financial metrics are that they may not capture the full organizational picture around a given system investment or they rely on future staff reassignments or downsizing that may never actually occur. In addition, ROI calculations that are based on cost to purchase versus cost to implement might be overstating the final return by a factor of two or more due to the cost of customizations and data migration.

The second aspect of the results gap is people oriented and is based on the fact that people and processes work and think differently than systems do, particularly monolithic line of business systems. Symptoms of this disconnect are data reentry from paper or other systems, relying on offline analysis or calculations and “workarounds” to move an item through a system driven process. These factors may not seem significant when taken alone, but across hundreds of users in an organization, they multiply into a huge drag on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Bridging the results gap is only going to occur by applying solutions that improve the “business usability” of line of business systems by being collaborative, easy to use, role based and easily customizable.

I’ll discuss some of the forms that these solutions can take in my next few postings!