You Would Think Stanford, Of All Places, Could Get ERP Right

by | June 10, 2004 | Articles, Finance, Technology strategy

As an alum of its law school, Stanford’s extraordinary difficulties
moving from a 20+-year old mainframe system to Oracle and PeopleSoft,
as recounted in this Baseline article,
give me great pain. Admittedly, Stanford was trying to take products
that live and breathe in the land of public, for-profit companies
and hammer them into place in a private, non-profit multiversity,
with utterly different metrics for performance, evaluation, and decision-making,
but Stanford’s CIO still has the best line:

“Sometimes I look back and wonder whether this wave of ERP software…wasn’t a collective hallucination.”

With all of its insider access to Oracle (three Stanford professors sit on the Oracle board, and Larry Ellison has donated $10-million to Stanford), you would think if any university could get it right, it would be Stanford. The moral of the story? If you’re contemplating, or already in the midst of, a firm-wide “enterprise software” upgrade: 

  • communicate, communicate, communicate;
  • don’t let the software vendor double as a consultant on the
    project;
  • start with a round peg for your round hole.

 

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