Remember the first time you picked up a cup of coffee and took a sip? It was probably unlike anything you ever tasted before. If you were committed to choking down the whole cup (perhaps to stay awake for a late-night study session) the first thing you probably did was dump a large amount of sugar or cream into that coffee to make it more palatable. Over time, as you became more accustomed to the taste of coffee, you no longer needed cream and sugar. This not only reduced the number of calories in that jolt of caffeine, but allowed you to appreciate the flavor of the beans, the quality of the roast and the subtle aroma.

That first cup of coffee can teach us a valuable lesson when it comes to managing the implementation of an enterprise application.

At first glance, a new enterprise application will seem strange to end-users within your company, and those end users will likely come to you with a laundry list of modifications, often designed to make the application more similar to what they have seen and experienced before. However, while the cream and sugar used to doctor up that first cup of coffee were almost free, modifying enterprise applications can add millions of dollars to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of that application.

Modifications increase TCO in three ways:

• Modifications increase the cost of implementation as custom programming becomes necessary to meet the specific demands.
• Modifications increase the cost of service because a software company’s personnel must get up to speed on and support the idiosyncrasies of the modification as well as the standard software.
• Modifications increase the cost of upgrades, as the modification must in most cases be uplifted each time a new version of the software is implemented. So across the lifecycle of an enterprise software package, modifications increase TCO.

While they can cost millions, many modifications are like the cream and sugar in that after a while they become unnecessary as users become more familiar with the application. We all know there is no caffeine in cream or sugar – and similarly the modifications made to enterprise applications generally do not improve the ability of the software to meet real business needs!

Increased Cost, No Gain
If your company decides to implement an enterprise application, it is to achieve specific, rational goals. You may need to better coordinate projects and processes across departments, or streamline financial reporting and analysis. Or perhaps you want to allow closer collaboration with customers and suppliers, or to enable efficiencies that make your company more competitive. You choose the application and vendor that you feel will do the best job helping you reach your business goals.