Why Produce a System Implementation infoKit?
'System implementation efforts offer extraordinary challenges to information technology professionals and the organizations impacted by the implementations. A successful implementation can reap vast rewards in organizational strengths and efficiencies. A failure can drain an organization of people, funds and vitality. Consequently, many people have puzzled over the reasons for the successes and failures experienced with these implementations.'
Vaughan, Paula J. (University of Colorado at Boulder), 2001 - 'System Implementation Success Factors; It's not just the Technology' - http://www.educause.edu/asp/doclib/abstract.asp?ID=CMR0122
'Universities often spend in excess of $20 million each to implement modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects that can take two, three, or more years to implement. The early report cards coming in from across the country on ERP projects in higher education show mixed results.'
Swartz, Dave (George Washington University) and Orgill, Ken (West Virginia University), 2001 - 'Higher Education ERP: Lessons Learned' - http://www.educause.edu/asp/doclib/abstract.asp?ID=EQM0121
Implementing systems in large and complex organisations is notoriously difficult and risk prone. They require resources, technical expertise, project management, organisational reengineering and change management to be fused into a harmonious whole. Even with total organisational commitment and using best practice this is not always achievable and, unfortunately, system implementation failures are all too common within further and higher education, consuming vast amounts of time, draining budgets and exhausting the personnel involved. Given the difficult and far-reaching nature of system implementation projects, there is great potential for misconceptions, misunderstandings, errors of judgment and oversights that can cause serious problems and lead the project to failure. Many mistakes have been made and it is, sadly, more common for institutions to report that their projects have suffered from problems than their outright success. This is disappointing because, in hindsight, many mistakes are clearly visible.
This infoKit draws together the wealth of 'lessons learned' that can be pooled from the further and higher education sectors. It is intended to bring your attention to many of the mistakes made and lessons learned from those implementations that have failed and highlight advice and best practice for system implementations so that more may be rated as successes.
Some of the material contained in this infoKit has its origins in an article that was written with similar aims in 1999 published in Volume 22 Number 4 1999 of the CAUSE/EFFECT journal:
McCredie, Jack (Associate Vice-Chancellor, Information Systems and Technology, University of California, Berkeley) and Updegrove, Dan (University Director, Information Technology Services, Yale University, 1999 - 'Enterprise System Implementations: Lessons from the Trenches' - http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cem9943.html
Other material has its origins in an article that was also written in 1999 and presented to CUMREC 2000 - the Higher Education Administrative Technology Conference:
Wilder, John D. (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY), 1999 - 'Implementation Projects: Land Mines and Other Lessons' - http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CMR0017.pdf
(The intellectual property of this article belongs to the author).
