Extreme ERP Makeover

Essentially, single instance and Web services are two ways to get to the same place, and CIOs will need to choose which path to lead their company down.

"There's no right answer," says Shutzberg. "Every situation is different. You have to follow your specific business drivers until you find a compelling reason to do it one way or the other."

Haven't We Heard All This Before?

Does McDermott's pitch sound familiar? It should. After all, ERP vendors today are singing the same song that got them through the corporate door in the first place: one system for everything. But as almost everyone who tried to do an ERP project in the mid- and late'90s learned firsthand, the melody was off-key.

There are a couple of reasons single instance was almost impossible to achieve. For starters, databases large enough to serve entire enterprises just didn't exist - at least not at prices most could afford. On top of that, connecting to that single database from faraway locations was almost impossible. It was a simple matter of physics, says Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Chief Technologist for the Americas John Parkinson. There wasn't enough bandwidth to get to the data. "The result was a bottleneck," he says, which forced geographically dispersed companies to install regional ERP systems.

Those ur-ERP projects weren't just victims of immature or inadequate technology; they were also sabotaged by bad timing. The primary driver for the ERP projects of the '90s was Y2K. Companies rushed into the projects so that they could remediate old systems before the date change reduced them to rubble. But as the millennial deadline approached, CIOs had to reduce the scope of their projects to get them done on time. What suffered was process change - getting everyone to work the same way.