"There was talk in the past that ERP systems were legacy, lacked the agility and flexibility, and did not support interoperability. Those days are over," says Ray Wang, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. "ERP systems are more important than ever."

In fact, IT leaders are entwined in this marriage for the long haul. When asked if their company would be able to live without its ERP systems within the next five years, more than 80 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. For better or worse, it seems, ERP systems are here to stay.

The Big Picture

So how are you using ERP? CIOs told us that their core ERP modules were used chiefly for accounting and financial applications (96%); procurement, order processing and supplier management (78%); inventory management (64%); and HR management and payroll functions (55%). (Multiple answers were allowed to the question.)

When asked in which areas of their business ERP worked best, respondents overwhelmingly cited the financial side of the house (70%). Next were procurement, order processing, supplier management (42%), inventory management (33%), and HR management or payroll (26%).

The vendors supporting the respondents' companies were, not surprisingly, a who's who among enterprise software providers. Nearly 20 percent of those surveyed cited Oracle as their organization's ERP provider, followed by SAP (14%); PeopleSoft (14%), which is owned by Oracle; Microsoft (11%); Infor (10%); JD Edwards (8%), also owned by Oracle; Lawson (6%); Sage Group (5%) and QAD (2%).

In an age where all business technology applications should provide some competitive advantage, 76 percent of IT chiefs said operational efficiency was the goal of their organization's ERP investment, followed by support of global business (12%), growth (5%) and IT cost reduction (4%). The survey results did not surprise Forrester's Wang. "If you look at the [ERP] decision makers," he says, "you often find CFOs, CIOs and other operational leaders."

Interestingly, just 4 percent of IT leaders said their ERP system offered their companies competitive differentiation or advantage. However, Wang says that among SMB IT leaders, his research shows that vertically focused solutions (meaning those specific to an industry or business) are the most important attribute for an ERP system, and make it more likely to provide a competitive differentiator.

To CIOs like Doherty, competitive advantage is just that: being able to leverage her JD Edwards real estate applications as much as she can for her business peers. However, "there are some industry differences as to when you can have competitive advantage with ERP," she says. For example, within the financial services industry, where Doherty worked on ERP systems for seven years before joining her current company, "everyone's got it, so there's not really competitive advantage." But in the real estate industry, a robust ERP package that is embraced by users can be more of a differentiator because they aren't as common in this sector as they are in industries such as financial services and manufacturing. "Then it becomes how efficient you are at using your ERP systems," she says.