Simplifying Enterprise Software

Recently I read a book about "Risk savvy decision making" by Greg Gigerenzer. The author talks about risk taking within organizations being driven by two types of cultures – "positive" and "negative" error cultures, with the negative error culture being less prone to risk taking. Relating this to the enterprise software world, most IT organizations that deal with enterprise software such as SAP, in my experience, tend to be highly risk averse and have a strong negative error culture.   This negative error culture manifests itself in many ways within Enterprise IT organizations: They spend an enormous amount of time (in most cases, years) trying to implement and upgrade software.   They have long bureaucratic processes with multiple layers of approvals for implementing any change. They think defensively when selecting service providers and software solutions, preferring unproven solutions from large vendors to best of breed solutions from smaller sp...

A few months back I wrote an article on LinkedIn about the lack of tools available to support the enterprise software lifecycle. This gives a good overview of the background behind eCogniz's mission to simplify enterprise software through tools and services: Enterprise software has been widely prevalent since the ‘80s. Today, most business processes across the spectrum in large, mid-size and small organizations, are powered by enterprise software. But even after so many decades, why are implementation projects so time consuming, expensive and prone to failures? Why are support organizations still struggling to deliver quality service? Deployment models may be changing with the Cloud but the underlying problems still abound. The cause may lie in the inherent complexity in enterprise software due to the wide variations in business processes across industries, and regional variations across the globe. However, the challenges can be overcome. The proof for this lies in the equally co...