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The technology component for this initiative was a single countrywide ERPERP platform based on SAPSAP. From a commercial perspective, we thought of information within the system as currency that we put in the hands of key business decision makers. Today, the same system is used to procure new goods and services. It has enabled executives to understand the company‘s spending in detail, to leverage economies of scale and to improve cash flow management. Alles zu ERP auf CIO.de Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de

Rethinking Risk

To achieve a better commercial orientation, I had to start by understanding more about risk. If you want to bring in more revenue or reduce the cost basis of operations, and if you want to be a profit center, you have to understand enterprise risk management. I see a lot of risk-averse behavior in IT leaders. This attitude can stifle creative thinking and the ability to gain advantage over your competition.

For example, we overhauled the legacy IT infrastructure at FirstGroup. This effort was initially seen as a risky technology project, and many questioned whether it needed to be done at all. But the implementation of this global infrastructure model was a key component of the five-year IT strategic business plan. Commercially speaking, it was a foundation layer upon which to rationalize about 300 different and redundant business systems to a core set of applications based on a common architecture. Championing changes of such size and complexity means you must be prepared to educate your business on the risk of doing nothing versus the risk of doing something. In this case, doing nothing would not only have perpetuated escalating development and maintenance costs; the outdated infrastructure would have limited our ability to create new commercial applications.

I have also come to learn that many commercial innovations may not necessarily satisfy the internal financial criteria that we often associate with the business case for change. Some of the most innovative ideas I have seen would never get off the page if they were decided solely on financial criteria like payback period. For example, we initiated a centralized Program Services Office to manage how we did projects across the company. We knew we would need to demonstrate to the business that the disciplines of project management would enable the business to achieve better commercial results. But if we had to use normal business case metrics to justify it, it might never have gotten off the ground.

This is not to say that such well-tested approaches are not necessary, but that you (and your company) should be open to the notion that some of the best commercial ideas may fall outside the criteria you use to assess business-as-usual activities.