IT

In just 20 years, Amazon has grown from an online startup focusing on selling books, to a devastating multi-platform, multi-industry technological disruptor, predicted to be worth $3 trillion by 2026.

With the conference season now in full swing, it’s easy to get carried away with latest trend predictions and the hype cycle surrounding new technological achievements. The key is to be able to quickly differentiate between those things that constitute real knowledge and those that are just noise. One of the terms that has caught my eye however is ‘business real-time’.

Last week I made the (very) long return trip to Melbourne, Australia to deliver a keynote presentation at the SMART Supply Chain conference at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. I also had the pleasure of being asked to sit on a panel of experts and senior business leaders discussing the impact of technology in the supply chain.

Back in 2004, a famous, and somewhat confrontational, Harvard Business Review article was published by Nicholas G Carr, called ‘Does IT Matter?’ In this, he suggested that organisations are wrong to continue to make large scale investments in software like ERP, as the availability of this software has resulted in it becoming ubiquitous, something that every organisation can own. He therefore reasons that as every organisation can own these tools, they cannot provide competitive advantage.

As an advisor and consultant to numerous businesses on implementing and maximising the value of their ERP investments, one of the more worrying facets of engagements I’ve witnessed over the last 20 years has been the increasing inability of business people, especially those from the Supply Chain, to engage, affect and influence the utilisation or development of these IT solutions.

Metrics are a funny thing. They are the way we keep score, the way we determine whether we are winning, the way we identify whether we are making progress.