I was at a CEO Roundtable the other day and one of the participants had an interesting premise. He wondered whether the cost, effort and risk of some of the large system packages inhibited their adoption in corporations. He went on to hypothesize that companies may be missing out of potential process improvements because of the risk of failure.

In the 1990's, when I was the Vice-President of IT for a reasonably large corporation, big projects were still the norm. We would develop our project plans, do personnel loadings and cost/benefit analyses for projects that would have timelines in months (if not years!) and six to seven figure costs.

It was important that there was "user" (how I hate that word - it seems so condescending) participation and commitment of multiple full-time-equivalents (FTE's) with little thought to the impact on the operational departments involved.

The questions that never seemed to be asked were "What happens if the project fails?", "How will we know?", "What will we do then?"

Over the years, companies seem to have become more risk-averse. Expense cuts have removed the resources for the large user commitments (and IT staffs) which, in my opinion, increase the risk of a large implementation. Yet many of these sort of solutions continue to be marketed to corporations.

Question of the day: are companies deferring potentially game-changing technologies due to the lack of cost-effective, lower risk alternatives?

Second question: would corporations acquire innovative "cutting-edge" technologies if the downside risk was minimized? Would they be willing to experiment for a potential upside benefit?

Norm Plummer, President - Haeiwacom, Inc.

Haeiwacom provides real-time track and trace solutions for manufacturing and service applications. Consisting of process control, warehouse management and document management modules, the Haeiwacom solutions are delivered as software as a service resulting in cost savings and straightforward, practical implementations.

Web: www.haeiwacom.com